A collective failure of judgment is not the same thing as a freak accident.
If the market crisis had a symbol, it was the Black Swan, Nassim Taleb’s label for rare events that couldn’t be predicted (although, as he notes, the fact that black swans will happen is on itself to be expected). Nonetheless, the crisis wasn’t caused by anything stranger than a failure of already high real state prices to keep rising, and the financial arrangements by which this initial tremor became an earthquake had been (poorly) designed and (over-enthusiastically) put into place by no mysterious or unexpected force.
This is not to say that everybody knew what was going to happen. But just because something is unknown to someone, it doesn’t mean that it’s unknowable. In many cases, ignorance is just a side effect of a resource allocation strategy that chooses to ignore certain sources of information. Technological change that “nobody could have predicted” is discussed in scientific journals for years before commercialization. Warnings about ecological disruptions get routinely ignored until ‘suddenly’ a natural resource becomes too scarce to support an industry. By the time a new pattern of consumer behavior hits a business with full force, there’s already a website, magazine, or hobbyist group for whom it’s nothing but the already old status quo.
No organization has an infinite research budget to keep up with all topics at all times. But that doesn’t mean that only paying attention to things in the immediate area of interest is necessarily the best option either. We live in an information-rich world. Even government intelligence agencies are deploying resources to deal with Open Source intelligence, the expert mining of the information that is freely available for strategically and tactically useful insight (even in the years before the internet, an organized person with a few newspaper subscriptions and an analytical mind could build surprisingly useful bodies of information).
Keeping abreast of incoming black swans often requires nothing more than the multipurpose tool of the contemporary economy, the imaginative knowledge worker with a good internet connection.
There is, of course, such a thing as the truly unexpected. Trying to predict all possible disruptions is a futile enterprise and, what is worse, can create the lethal illusion of safety. But being aware of likely threats and opportunities before they have fully manifested — specially the ones that fall outside the usual range of vigilance of an economic sector until their impact becomes obvious — not only provides a useful forewarning. It also helps an organization become more flexible, and thus more resilient against the unavoidable visit of the black swan.
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