ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how to assess and manage concept of black swans. A number of management strategies are used for meeting surprises and black swans including adaptive risk analysis, robustness and resilience-based approaches. A key task of the risk assessment is to challenge more or less clear assumptions, hypotheses and explanations. An essential challenge for managing the risk of the events thus lies in overcoming a mindset of complacency and inattention, where assumptions are not questioned, sources of errors and failures are not detected, and, if they are, efforts for correcting them are not implemented. The tradeoff involves the level of concern about risk as it influences the degree of investment in systems and actions for managing risk. The perception of risk influences which threats receive attention within an organization and which are deemed unproblematic.
