The Hunt for Grey Swans — Top 15 Methods & Frameworks — #7 Swan Sourcing

Chasing Possibilities, Wild Cards and Extremes by Playing with the Roots of Discord

Author: Sean Moffitt, Grey Swan Guild Founder and CEO, Cygnus Ventures

“Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left.” Arianna Huffington

I know many of my colleagues have an awkward relationship with the world of the crowds — mainstream institutions, the conventional media, the middle and late majority customers, mass market brands, incumbent politics and orthodoxy business culture. The mere mention of them can see their blood boil, eyes dilate inhospitably and temple veins pulsate. Perhaps it’s how I’m wired, I don’t have the same antipathy.

In my mind, mainstream thinking is simply early nascent thinking that found a following, got some traction and replaced the thing before it. So I don’t seem to nearly reach the anger and outrage that brews up in my more activist peer networks (yes, once a year I go off the handle with how the world’s operating system conducts itself but the bar is set pretty high).

The “however” in all of this is that if you are in the game of hunting for Grey Swans — those extremes, wild cards and lesser possibilities that will shape tomorrow’s world — well the crowd is of much lesser help. In this time void of predictions about events and phenomena that are certainly not yet prime time, obstinate rejections from the majority of the crowd is a frequent reaction. You simply aren’t going to find Grey Swan thinking while grazing with the establishment. You are going to have paddle higher and travel upstream from the world, away from the allure of the accepted, the comfortable norms and convenient half-truths.

Most of our series of fifteen Grey Swans methods and frameworks I’ve presented deal with processing the future but much of this heavy lifting exposed is ONLY AFTER you have gathered your source material and answering questions like:

• How will you sift through the good stuff?
• How will you process what you have learned?
• How will you catalyze that learning into action?
• How will have feedback applied back to the systems that initially produced this thinking?

But what about the original stimuli themselves? Who is thinking deeply about your source code for the future? Not many.

Very few futurist, strategy management or executive leadership schools, deal with the seeds of inspiration. The starting leg of that process from going from healthy open-minded ignorance to then suddenly novel and astoundingly fresh understanding of a previously incomprehensible problem, concept or manifestation of the future. In this post, we’re talking about the playground where we find the first roots of discord.

The Blank Page Full of Potential

Frequently at the start of any research and intelligence work I conduct, one of my most motivating periods of time is the blank page. That dream-like phase where the empty page stares back at you full of potential. What shall we create today Sean?

I won’t go deep on the idiosyncratic vagaries of my own creative process. Everybody has their own rituals and there’s no need to force mine on them. Suffice it to say, I find an inordinate power in mapping my learnings and insights on real paper, big manilla sheets of it.

As a Gen X-er, I have yet to find a strong digital replacement for being able to mind map the first chapter of discovery on any new subject matter more than parchment. Some software tools come close but few have the tactile power for creating a-has, eureka moments and innovations than those rapid fire brush strokes, short codings, direction arrows and dot connections on an oversized canvas of a notebook, or when given sufficient space of my environment, a half human sized sheet full of synaptic drippings.

The moment intelligence comes to life is in the form of ink patterns, where new ideas leak out of my head to become tangible— where expert observation plus imagination turns into something very real — new intelligence on paper. This period of alchemy is almost magical, and for those that do it well, they can have a tough time describing to others what neuroplasticity steps are taking place.

Swan Sourcing — The Roots of Discord

I’ve created a new framework Swan Sourcing to bring to life the earliest blank page of hunting for Grey Swans. It’s perhaps an attempt to get some of that divergent thinking process into a construct, and share with others where the best Grey Swan thinkers travel to the river Styx of insight. After all what are future-savvy humans but “rivers of intelligence, energy and information that are constantly flowing in every second of their existence.”

Some of Swan Sourcing’s twelve key approaches of how to chase down the future may delight the counter-intelligence subversive. I tackle research topics akin to the determination of a behavioral analysis unit of a Hollywood detective show. Problem solving is hunting. It is savage pleasure and we are born to it states Thomas Harris author of Silence of the Lambs. This work is 24/7 and all-in. If you are good at this work, you will attack it with your own sense of vigor and the spirit of the hunt.

I guarantee you some of what I mention in Swan Sourcing will also face immediate critique. Warning — it may also offend. I don’t mean to demean the industry that has built itself on understanding the future, but with over two decades plying my trade in this space, much of the work I’ve experienced and seen in this trends/futures/strategy/planning space is drivel. As a former client, I wouldn’t pay for it. As a four-time startup and venture advisor, I wouldn’t invest in it. And as founder of a Guild dedicated to the craft, I wouldn’t cast a spotlight on it.

A lot of what I have witnessed in this kitchen industry of the future are people who want to be seen as remarkably clairvoyant or omniscient without putting in the real grind of the work. The result? Countless examples of intelligence by generating quippy droplets of observations from the wrong people and wayward sources. Numerous nonsensicals from futurists making false connections with academic detachment and a dearth of evidence. And quasi-foundational and forward-leaning research that operate in servitude of their policy masters and brand cheerleaders, brandishing wishful propaganda and unhinged statements of directed optimism.

Sorry to be blunt. We can do better. We need to to do better. We need to invest in this work like any other leading profession wanting to change the world. If you don’t want to up your game, then simply your conclusions become your observations against the world not prepared for what’s next. In these cases, the world usually wins. If you don’t want to up your game, the slow afoot and 80th percentile performers-and-below will be put in the crosshairs of ChatGPT and its other AI cousins that produce more, demand less and surface equally adequate representations of the future.

Swan Sourcing is the start of a better effort. Let’s make your blank page sing. Let’s create the best first step to open the door to better revelations about the future. upstream from where the ducks and gulls feed. We want to go where the Grey Swans go.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Albert Einstein

A reminder of the area our continuing Grey Swan series is covering:

Reminder — Grey Swan Definition: Unlikely but knowable key factors, events and developments, capable of being evaluated and validated in advance, with impacts that could positively and/or negatively shake up the world.

The Full Collection of Grey Swan Methods & Frameworks

Method #7 Swan Sourcing — Playing with the Roots of Discord

Swan Sourcing identifies twelve lead early stage methods to make sure your first gambit at Grey Swan intelligence are the right ones.

The common enemy of Swan Sourcing is conventional, established or status quo thinking. These are commodity elements — they can be found everywhere and lack considerably less value in a changing world. They act as brick walls to understanding the unhinged potential events of the future.

Instead, we are looking for catapults to jump over those conventional walls. We are looking for battering rams to take down the fortified walls of the present. We are panning for those rare gems and precious metals of new and early breaking developments.

Etymology: The term Swan Sourcing is a portmanteau between the chase for Grey Swans and sourcing — the act of getting something, especially products or materials, from a particular place. The -sourcing suffix has been used to talk about popular concepts of outsourcing and crowdsourcing in recent years. We are using it for our selfish purposes here.

The place where these Swans come about can be sourced from within your own head, your interaction with the external world, or help from other people, and frequently a combination of all three.

Branches: The twelve routes into this effort are broken down into four categories (see visual above): 1) better taps or sources, 2) better eyes or observation lenses, 3) better tuning or manipulations, and 4) better framings or inquiries.

To use a canoeing metaphor, you can improve this sourcing of new thinking by paddling in better waters, having a better map, using a better compass or taking a different path.

Invented by: Sean Moffitt in 2024, adapted from his innovation concept development work in Futureproofing and repurposed for chasing Grey Swans at the stage where you are staring at a blank page.

Category: Strategic planning, front-end intelligence and concept development approaches that identify new patterns, novel connections, important quirks and early anomalies.

Why we Love It as a Grey Swan Tool: So few frameworks and tools deal with the starting point of chasing important wild cards; an appreciation for a wider array of early stage tactics to build better Grey Swan intelligence.

Overcomes the sin of: Reconstituting mainstream thinking — reminding us that the secrets of the future are always away from the herd, semi-hidden and near the edges; project kickoff paralysis or stasis — not knowing how to start intelligence projects well, or going with intelligence of what you currently know, or using heuristics of judgement that you have practiced in the past.

Work preceded by:

• Permasources of Early Intelligence — have a stable of great early data sources, websites, blogs, magazines, thought leaders, substacks, Mediums, podcasts and other important sentries to the future, stream them though your Flipboards, Google alerts or something else, so you don’t have to start afresh with each new intelligence venture.
• The People— having a network of people who delight in the unusual and avant-garde, make connections easily across domains, and can readily turn these inputs into outcomes. They are rarer than you think (many will even doubt whether they qualify given their ability to question their own beliefs and convictions; others will claim they are these people but really a ren’t — see Dunning-Kruger effects).

Work followed by:

• Visualization — how to bring these Swan Sources to life, create a sense of wonderment, overcome the allure of the now, and manifest them in understandable ways given that they don’t exist currently in the world out there.
• Objective Proofs — finding additional impartial evidence, supporting signals or iterative experiments for your outputted Grey Swan thinking.

Facets of the Swan Sourcing:

We’ve mentioned 12 approaches to getting past conventional thinking in Swan Sourcing. Let’s go through them:

The SOURCES:

#1 Scouts —crowdsourcing, early, heavily-involved or edge stakeholders

• Myth: Representative sample populations and experts are the key to research with validity — the average person and established subject matter authorities are essential to understanding the future.
• Truth: More than 90% of people have little value in pointing you to the future. Based on their conditioning and investment in the current state, they simply can’t or won’t tell you the future. They either have too much invested with how things work now or have a limited capacity to describe a future that has not yet arrived.
• Action: Regularly leverage a network of people who embrace the edge and can provide signs to the future. There is no magical recruiting criteria here, however these scouts tend to be: well-read, early adopters, lateral thinkers, natural hackers and curious tinkerers, and have wide experience.
• Some scouts are general in scope (deriving a strength of mindset and process to discover new spaces), others are more category-specific (deriving a strength of understanding leading edge subject matter and neck deep experimentation with it).
• Provide open-ended challenges with smart constraints to these people, and see what they come up with. Amy Darokakis is one of my recent gems in my network of a culture nerd who personifies this playful range.

“Let’s stop asking the average person what they think. Do you know how f — — - stupid the average person is?” Ricky Gervais

#2 Wellsprings — canvassing lead media, prophetic platforms and sharpest pioneers

• Myth: What is on the front page of a newspaper, the opening segment of TV nightly news, or what currently trending on Tik Tok is what we will be talking about three months from now, and driving what happens in the mainstream three years from now.
• Truth: The half life of an article, clip or post in the mainstream is infinitesimally small. If you really want to tap the future zeitgeist, generate a collection of the “freaks and geeks” of the media and thought leadership worlds. These content portals and people have a track record of surfacing in-advance and niche headlines that become future realities.
• Action: Create a news feed, alert and monitoring system of your top 150 wellspring sources of authentic Grey Swan interest. Track, aggregate and cluster their offerings to create tomorrow’s headlines. Note their new ideas and lexicon, early market observations, cross industry competitor and startup activities, and discoveries from leading edge industry events. Morning Brew is one of my five-minute-per-day destination wellspring faves.

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”― Haruki Murakami

#3 Patterns — spotting shifts, inflections and data shapes

• Myth: Trends are a straight line extrapolation of the past. The gravitational force of the past brings some assurances about the future.
• Truth: There is more variability and erraticness in key societal systems than there ever has been. Sometimes new developments happen out of thin air. Fortune rewards the whisperers who can spot these new patterns as they are just breaking.
• Action: Build a real-time dashboard of variables you are sensitized to and tracking. Review regularly for changes in the shape of their progress. Look for distinct breaks and anomalies from the past. Scott Galloway is an exceptional good miner of data to support some of his advancing views.

“When truth is buried underground it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.”
― Émile Zola

The LENSES:

#4 Radar — noticing early, unexpected occurrences, incongruities and anomalies up close

• Myth: Forget about studying the future, focus the majority of attention on creating it. The majority of creating the future is inside you.
• Truth: Not so fast. Although it’s a convenient and inspirational way to think about a self-determined future, there are plenty of signals and bread crumbs all around you that point you to expected future developments and trends. Even the water-walking innovators we lionize operate in a universe of future influences.
• Action: I regularly perform walk abouts in real life and online to stay in touch with what’s going on around me and get outside my own head. Six suggested radar approaches: 1) take time out and notice changes in retail windows and shoppers of local and international top shopping districts, 2) consult and go down the information rabbit holes of platforms like Google Trends and Exploding Topics for fast moving online trends 3) review real world performance versus publicly shared trend radars and cycle charts (e.g. Gartner Hype Cycle), 4) engage in regular coffee exchanges with people outside your regular disciplines and geographies for what’s really changing, 5) read articles from ten smart publications you’ve never read before and 6) attend startup pitches and funder events to generate an understanding of what is supporting their lead thinking.

“I remained too much in my head and ended up losing my mind.” — Edgar Allan Poe

#5 Enablers — leveraging new enabling breakthroughs or capacities

• Myth: Future events and phenomena are usually slow, gradual progressions of change.
• Truth: Frequently, new scientific breakthroughs, scaled up emerging technologies or culture acceptances in one particular area, unlock and ignite progress overnight in other areas.
• Action: Create a fundamental understanding of the timing of developments in key leading areas: science, positive news, core technologies, space, culture, and startups.
• Overlay how core breakthroughs in these areas might affect the trajectories of least five other verticals (see these 50+ vertical options): accounting, airlines, agriculture, arts, advertising, automotive, banking, chemicals, construction, consumer goods, design, defence, energy, education, ecommerce, entertainment, environment, engineering, fashion, food, government, health care, hospitality, hotels, infrastructure, insurance, IT, legal, life sciences, logistics, luxury, manufacturing, mental health, mining, non-profits, professional services, publishing, real estate, retail, recruitment, SaaS, science, social innovation, space, sports, textiles, technology, telecommunications, tourism, transportation, utilities, video games, waste management or wealth management.
• Look for and track how upstream development work and gaps where early science and venture inventions are applying breakthrough enables to other industries.

“The universe doesn’t like the secrets. It conspires to reveal the truth to lead you to it.” — Lisa Unger

#6 Empathy — diagnosing unique citizen, customer and/or user customer problems, needs or pain points (with a caveat)

• Myth: Solutions to your future should always be customer-led (or citizens, stakeholders or users depending on your domain). Empathy is a founding principle of design thinking. You should pay attention and guve credence to all their statements, and you shouldn’t cherry pick which customers you ask.
• Truth #1: Customers (or citizens, stakeholders, users — we’ll use them interchangably here) have the best vantage point about telling you about their current lives, they are typically horrible in telling you how the future may unfold. In general, most people can tell you what’s currently worse or better, rank things between options, or tell you what they miss, the majority are incapable of producing the imagination you need to deliver for future intelligence or innovation.
• Turth #2 — Occasionally things that customers say provide telling insight. The sharpest observers however learn a lot more from what they don’t say, what their non-verbal cures reveal, or what their in-purchases, in-actions and in-real-life usage reveals.
• Action#1: Find new genius — yes, understand the basic beliefs from the crowd but more importantly, investigate deeply with the top 10% of forward-thinking citizens, users, customers or stakeholders or employ fundamentally different and fresh enlightened minds to new situations.
• Action #2 — Don’t ask for the answer — find the gaps and biases in value judgements, world assumptions, aggravating conditions and processes, financial challenges, product/experience or relationship/support issues that customers can express or feel. Inquire on their pain points, problems and needs/aspirations they feel, explore some of their passionately felt and expressed niches.
• Action #3 — Look for the hidden unstated patterns — beyond expressed claims and feelings, connect to the data of what they complain about, what they advocate for, where they spend time, online heat maps of how they search and what they click on. Map out the universe of use cases of facets on a topic, go beyond the top 10 use cases, and map out empty blue ocean and unknown/unknown spaces for discovery.

“Empathy is the antidote for the simplified, abstract information that often carries authority inside organizations. Empathy helps people see the world as it really is, not how it looks on a map.” — Dev Paitnaik

The TUNERS:

#7 Fusions — connecting trends and foresights in different ways and combinations

• Myth: There is usually one defining and dominant trend or convention that spurs on progress, innovation and trends.
• Truth: In simpler times, this dominant trend theory may have been true. In more complex uncertain times (like what we are in now), configuring and combining driving factors is what truly generates progress and new thinking. Fusing related and seemingly paradoxical meta and microtrends, areas of interest and/or types of change may reflect better Grey Swan thinking.
• Action: Before investigating the Grey Swan potentialities of a subject area, create activity cards (real life or digital) that contain three areas:
• Metatrends (10–20 relevant, long standing, pervasive and persistent shifts)
• Microtrends (25–50 relevant but shorter term trends more specific to your situation) and
• Metamorphoses (10–20 ways the interplay of these things could change from options: amplify, bias, catalyze, chaos, challenge, climax, collapse, combine, conceal, cycle, disrupt, diverge, echo, expand, extinguish, flatten out, harmonize, inflect, inhibit, insurrect, leap frog, maximize, minimize, overcome, paradigm shift, peak, pioneer, puzzle, resonate, resurge, reveal, reverse, ripple, rogue, serendipity, shake up, shrink, surprise, trigger, uncharted, zig zag).
• Mix and match — one Metatrend, two Microtrends and one Metapmorphosis into a headline, story, collage or scenario.
• For eeach output, assess the probability, impact, valence and actions to effect/defend.

“Truly innovative solutions to problems come primarily from the cross-pollination of disciplines.”— Neil deGrasse Tyson

#8 Matching — making random associations — ideas, words or visuals

• Myth: Focusing the elements of future wild cards requires pain staking choreography.
• Truth: Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Sometimes the world’s biggest developments can be gathered up by serendipity. Seeing what people have seen before, and piecing together what nobody has pieced together before. Back in the year 2000, the writers of the Simpsons could have thrown out Trump + Election + Shift on an idea board, well sixteen years later it happened.
• Action: Understand the arena of Grey Swans and trends you are looking to consider.
• Get teams to write a headline and paragraph that considers the challenge presented by including a set of five random words (two nounds, two verbs, one adjective) and one visual.
• Either pre-populate the words and images used if you want a tighter output or completely randomize them through random word generators and/or random image generators. Various AI tools can also increase the specificity of these inputs.
• Discuss the real takeaways and implications and . Dramatize each production esepcically for those stakeholders that weren’t part of the initla sessions.

#9 Cross Fertilizing — reapplying cross industry, institutional norms or constraints

• Myth: The majority of wild cards are stuff we have never ever seen before.
• Truth: The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. William Gibson was probably talking about Grey Swans when he uttered this quotable. Every single day there are actions that are going on in one workplace, marketplace, industry or microculture waiting to jump over like ticks to another. Great rewards accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.
• Action: Consider dynamics of six different industries (two similar, two related and two completely dissimilar to yours).
• Have dedicated teams gather and synthesize various cross-industry sources of information (e.g. industry reports, market research, customer feedback, blogs, podcasts, or newsletters).
• Look at the relevant dynamics, best practices and success stories of other sectors.
• Find the wild card challenges, implications and solutions that might be similar to yours.
• Tweak them to be relevant for the future of your industry.
• Investigate further by hosting interviews or collaborations with people and experts from those industries that can transfer intelligence about: future citizen/customer segments, needs, preferences, and behaviors; environment, marketplace, workplace and technosphere implications; value propositions, value creations or value deliveries; and potential actions wirth respect to resources, time, cost, risks, watchouts and alignment with these new developments.

The FRAMINGS:

#10 Landscaping — mind mapping and system modelling key factors and causes

• Myth: Like most anything in professional, trend work is focus work.
• Truth: Generalists tends to to better in the Grey Swan game. The labs in which scientists have more diverse professional backgrounds are the ones where more and more varied analogies are offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose. People that go wide before honing in have a better understanding of current and future spaces, others may be more shwllow or expedient. Mapping out the expansive list of related influences and factors ensures a greater lens on your Grey Swan related-challenge.
• Action: Define the central event or development for consideration.
• Similar to our Futures Wheel, create branches of sub-influence areas and factor groupings.
• Tease out an expansive list of supporting forces and trends to each grouping and categorize as established (already true), trend (greater than 25% of being true in a time-bound future), possibility (less than 25%), wild card (less than 5%) and extremes (less than 1%).
• Ensure each strata of possibility is considered. Unlike Futures Wheels, these don’t have to all connect to each other.
• Dramatize headlines and track keywords.
• Illuminate expected impacts and actions from each spider path direction.

“A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.” ― Reif Larsen

#11 Monitoring — addressing emerging sources of uncertainty

• Myth: Spotting the patterns is a core principle of discovering the future.
• Truth: Judgment is not a synonym for thinking — too frequently we feel certain and overconfident in our algorithms and success practices that have got us to where we were today. In uncertain and noisy worlds, sometimes regular patterns don’t exist and we have to leave ourselves open to sporadic and unforeseen developments. Knowing what they are and how they can impact you carries immense weight.
• Action: Create a moving monitor of indices that has quantitive and qualitative aspects to it.
• Track leading indicators of the eleven drivers of uncertainty: complexity, ambiguity, faster (acceleration), fragmentation, eraaticness (colatility + irregularity), interconnectedness, needs+ (wicked challenges), anxiety, tech-enablement, exponentiality, disruption.
• Host a quarterly review of tracking and inputs culled from search term frequency and articles, new data, interviews and commentary.
• Develop summary headlines for uncertainty being felt by your environment and assign likelihood and impact green, yellow and red flags for each.
• Create four options for potential reactions: how you can think differently, how you can act differently, how you can react and respond differently if further uncertainty comes about; and how you can be inspired to apply efforts and talents differently.

“Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to struggle against entropy.” — Vaclav Havel

#12 Reframing — altering existing challenges, views or adding new knowledge

• Myth: There is a book of standard operating questions that when asked repeatedly will provide windows to answering your questions about the future.
• Truth: Millions saw the Apple fall but only Newton asked why. We know that a major factor in startups winning, is finding and addressing challenges that are seen differently than the incumbents. In a rush to solutions, 85% of companies admit they are not very good at diagnosing their key current challenges and future problems (Source: HBR). People and organizations are constantly acting on what they believe they can or can’t do without any real thought about the truth and consequences of these self-imposed limitations. Periodically providing a new context or focus for your thoughts, feelings and actions is what positive reframing can do.
• Action: Consider some of the leading assumptions, beliefs and sacred cows about your operating environment, industry and organization (perhaps team and yourself depending on how narrow a scope you want to reframe).
• Ask the ten reframing questions:
• a) overcome the handcuffs — have we defined this environment too narrowly or broadly? is there a different trajectory that will happen here?
• b) walk in other shoes — would our customers see this future differently? would a disruptor/competitive threat see this situation differently?
• c) find the positive — what’s potentially good about this situation? is there a doorway or another context to a deeper understanding or progress?
• d) ensure accuracy and Grey Swan potential — is our thinking about this situation 100% accurate? how do we know for sure, and what are the lesser but important possibilities ignored here?
• e) get resourceful and bolder — is this thought making me more or less resourceful? am I reducing potential capacity by having this thought?
• f) think productively — how could I use this situation more productively? how could we spark more productive ideas?
• g) make use of resources: what resources do I have now that could help me in this situation? what current resources could I redeploy?
• h) exercise control — what is actually within my control right now? how can we empower ourselves to act now on this?
• i) seek assistance and partners — who else could help or partner with me? what actor could amplify or mitigate the effects of this Grey Swan?
• k) discover lessons and value — what can I learn or take from this situation? how can we repeat/avoid repeating this moment in the future?
• Address your conclusions in restatements or new contexts to your problem, Grey Swan possibilities and solution spaces.

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”— Max Planck

Additional Commentary on Swan Sourcing:

“It’s painful to see the lack of preparation researchers and planners make in tackling their new frontiers. When confronted with new challenges, frequently the pace is slow, the confidence is low and the array of knowledge brought to bear is so-so. Swan Sourcing creates a solid foundation for anybody who needs to track shifting environments by getting the right building blocks in place. Some of these principles swim against conventional thinking in research circles. Chance favours the prepared mind willing to explore the edges. It’s about time.” Sean Moffitt

Grey Swans — A Month of Specialty Posts:

This is number seven of a set of fifteen posts on different methods and frameworks for chasing Grey Swans. but we have so much other commentary on this valuable but often overlooked chase for the non-obvious:

• I — Grey Swan Week and defining Grey Swans
• II — Our 2023 Report Card of Grey Swans (last year’s review and performance)
• III — Fifteen Ways to Hunt for Grey Swans (methods and frameworks) — #1 CIPHER,
• #2 SCAMPER
• #3 SUPERCAFFEINATED U
• #4 FUTURES WHEEL
• #5 CONE OF POSSIBILITIES
• #6 WEAK SIGNALS
• #7 SWAN SOURCING
• #8 SCENARIO ARCHETYPES
• #9 OUTSIDE-IN COLLISIONS #10 POSSIBILITY PREMORTEMS #11 RED TEAMING #12 WHAT IF … EXPLORATION #13 ADOR EDGES #14 CRITICAL UNCERTAINTIES #15 MULTI-VIEW SCENARIOS
• IV — Fifty Grey Swan Wild Card Influences in 2024 (ranking the categories)
• V — Twelve Grey Swans Revealed (<25%) — Cloudy Swans
• VI — Twelve Grey Swans Revealed (<5%) — Stormy Swans
• VII — Twelve Grey Swans Revealed (<1%) — Shadow Swans

Stay tuned with us here, as well as on our website for all the rundowns.

Participate in our Hunt for Grey Swans

Don’t worry it’s a humane hunt. We have already invited some of our regular contributors to provide us the seeds of what will be our authoritative list of one hundred 2024 Grey Swans.

These are the improbable, disruptive and remote developments that decision makers better keep at least one eye peeled open for so they don’t blindside them. Perhaps you have some you’ve considered yourself.

Be among the most talented and wide-eyed observers. Let us know your Grey Swan additions and we will add them to our annual collection with our 2024 Grey Swan Guild Subnmission Form. Other benefits and collabroations may follow.

Grey Swan Submission Form: https://bit.ly/2024greyswan

Grey Swan Guild — Making Sense of the World and Next Grey Swans

We are the Guild whose mission it is to make sense of the world and next Grey Swans (wild cards, scenarios, early signals).

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We bring this to life through six facets of our world-leading Guild experience:

• Intelligence and Foresight
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Here’s what you can do in the Guild:

Learn about the Guild: https://www.greyswanguild.org/
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To get directly involved in any one of our Cygnus Ventures , including two venture efforts focused on research and intelligence efforts called Weathervanes (current focused) and The Radar Collection (future-focused).

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To get directly involved in any one of our twelve (12) Cygnus Ventures including click here. To hire our ventures group for any of your own wicked challenges or Grey Swans, let’s have a discussion.

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