ANSIE RAMALHO: Of boards and black swans
Could boards of directors have foreseen Covid-19? Maybe. But contrary to what some say, you can prepare for a black swan
By now, we’ve all been through the emotional stages of the corona-virus crisis: denial, anger, bargaining (and all the messiness in between) to reluctant acceptance. It is time to figure it out — particularly in the boardroom, where dealing with this new reality and its implied disastrous possibilities will weigh heavily on SA’s directors.
It was statistician Nassim Taleb who popularised the term "black swan" in his bestselling book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. He explained that black swan events share three characteristics: they are improbable and rare; they have extreme consequences; and third, with the benefit of hindsight, they appear to have been entirely predictable...
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