Presentation Training: White Crow, Black Swan

On our honeymoon in Nova Scotia more than 25 years ago, my wife and I were amazed to see an albino crow rubbing shoulders with his black brothers, who showed not a shred of colorism.  I’ve never seen another.

Now along comes a book called The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  It takes its title from Karl Popper’s observation that only a single black swan is required to falsify the theory that “all swans are white” even when thousands of white swans are in evidence.

Mr. Taleb takes pains to inform us that all is not as it seems.  While we may think, for instance, that almost all phenomena follow the law of the bell curve, he points out that if 100 people are gathered in a room when Bill Gates walks in, the average net worth rises dramatically, and plotted out, the curve is not bell-shaped.

Instead, it follows an asymmetric, L-shaped pattern known as a “power law,” where most values are below average and a few far above.

I believe this is increasingly true in the hedge fund industry, where the lure of big money has enticed many people away from their steady jobs on Wall Street to start their own funds, only to find that a disproportionate amount of the money flowing into this alternative investment strategy goes to mega-funds, while the average start-up struggles to survive.

It’s probably also true in publishing, where most books fail to earn back the author’s advance, and a few are blockbusters.

Mr. Taleb points out that we like the bell curve–it seems democratic and sensible.  It’s comforting to think that most of us are in the middle, and only the very lucky and unlucky are out there on the edges.

But the bell curve is often a convenient fiction.  He cites Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), an early hedge fund that blew up after its Nobel laureate founders “allowed themselves to take a monstrous amount of risk” because “their models ruled out the possibility of large deviations.”

We believe in the power of proof and reasoning, but we are ruled by something much less rational.  I just came back from the WHCC (the World Health Care Conference) where I heard a fascinating presentation on the national effort to measure the quality of health care.

We all would agree, I think, that measuring is a good idea because it will enable us to choose the best doctor and the best hospital when we get sick.  But it turns out that when data is available, people ignore it and instead make their decisions based on the stories their friends and families tell them–even if the stories contradict the data.

Mr. Taleb goes on to entertain us with other examples of our non-rational decision making.  For instance, there is the confirmation bias, which is our tendency to reject information that contradicts our beliefs and accept information that confirms what we already believe.

As John Kenneth Galbraith said, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind or proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”

There is the narrative fallacy, which is our weakness for compelling stories; the problem of silent evidence, which is our failure to account for what we don’t see; the ludic fallacy (don’t you love these fancy terms??) which is our willingness to oversimplify and take games and models (remember LTCM?) too seriously.

And finally, there is epistemic arrogance, which I am pleased to learn is our habit of overestimating our knowledge and underestimating our ignorance.

What does this have to do with speaking?

Speaking is about influence.  We speak because we want to move others to think or do something.  If we are going to be good at it, we need to take into account the human tendencies that Mr. Taleb so effectively points out.

And as listeners, we need to be aware that clever speakers can mislead us.  It only takes one Hitler–one black swan or white crow–to falsify the theory that the judgment of the average man is the deep keel of a nation.