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Leitura de 23 min

How Can You Prepare for High-Impact Unknown Events?

Summary

The episode opens with the host sharing a personal story about his father’s cardiac event and emergency triple bypass surgery. This experience of an unexpected, high-impact event serves as the backdrop for a discussion on how to prepare for the unknown. The host emphasizes that while we cannot predict everything, we can shift our focus from prediction to preparation.

The first technique introduced is an inversion of the “miracle question” from positive psychology. Instead of imagining a miracle, listeners are asked to imagine a “curse”—an overnight negative event—and identify the first signs they would notice. This exercise helps uncover potential threats and areas of fragility in one’s projects, company, or personal life. The host explains that once these threats are listed, one can work on strategies to reduce their likelihood or mitigate their impact, moving from fragility to resilience or even anti-fragility, where systems can benefit from shocks.

The second exercise is called an “assumption audit.” Listeners are instructed to list their fundamental assumptions about a project or endeavor, rate their confidence in each assumption on a scale of 1 to 10, and then assess the impact if that assumption were wrong. The focus should be on assumptions with medium confidence (around 4-7) and high impact, as these are the areas where we are most vulnerable to being surprised. By identifying and preparing for the failure of these key assumptions, one can build contingency plans and reduce risk.

The host concludes by tying both exercises back to the core theme: we cannot prevent all unexpected events, but we can use structured thinking to identify vulnerabilities, shift the odds in our favor, and build systems that are not just robust but can potentially thrive under stress.

Recommendations

Books

  • Reset by Dan Heath — Mentioned as the source where the host first heard about the ‘miracle question’ concept.
  • Upstream by Dan Heath — Referenced as a previous book by Dan Heath, who was a guest on the podcast a couple of years prior.

Concepts

  • Black Swan events — Referenced as Nassim Taleb’s term for unpredictable, high-impact events that can change the course of everything.
  • Anti-fragility — A concept from Nassim Taleb describing systems that gain from disorder, shocks, and volatility, as opposed to merely being robust or resilient.
  • The Miracle Question — A therapeutic technique from positive psychology, inverted in the episode to imagine a ‘curse’ instead of a miracle to identify threats.

Tools

  • Wix Studio — Sponsored segment promoting Wix Studio as a node-based website builder that allows adding full-stack JavaScript, with a VS Code-based IDE, GitHub integration, and an AI code assistant.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Personal story of a family health crisis — The host shares that his father had a cardiac event requiring a triple bypass surgery. He uses this personal experience of an unexpected event as the inspiration for the episode’s topic: how to prepare for the unknown. He acknowledges that everyone will face surprising events in life.
  • 00:02:29 — Introducing the problem of preparing for the unknown — The host asks how we can prepare for unpredictable, high-impact events, referencing Nassim Taleb’s concept of ‘black swans.’ He states that some things are totally unpredictable and we must accept them, but Taleb suggests preparing for catastrophic events is a better use of energy than trying to predict them.
  • 00:03:31 — The inverted miracle question exercise — The host introduces the first exercise: inverting the ‘miracle question’ from therapy. Instead of a miracle, imagine a ‘curse’ has befallen your project, company, or personal life overnight. Your task is to identify the first signs you would see that indicate the curse has happened. This helps list potential threats.
  • 00:06:57 — From threats to anti-fragility — After listing threats from the ‘curse’ exercise, the host explains you can decide what to do about them. Strategies include investing to make the event less likely (shifting odds) or creating contingency plans. He introduces Taleb’s framework: moving from fragility (avoiding the event) to resilience (withstanding it) to anti-fragility (benefiting from it), using an employee mobility program as an example.
  • 00:12:49 — The assumption audit exercise — The host introduces the second exercise: the assumption audit. List your fundamental assumptions about a project or endeavor, rate your confidence in each (1-10), and assess the impact if the assumption is wrong. Focus on assumptions with medium confidence (4-7) and high impact, as we tend to treat these as certainties, leaving us vulnerable.
  • 00:17:38 — Rating impact and considering counterfactuals — The host suggests adding a third column to the assumption audit to rate the impact if the assumption is wrong. He uses the example of an iOS app developer assuming Apple’s App Store policies remain stable. He discusses how multiple counterfactuals (e.g., Apple changing its fee structure) could challenge the assumption, and preparation involves de-risking these vulnerabilities.
  • 00:23:48 — Conclusion: finding opportunities in risk — The host summarizes that both exercises—the curse question (mining for problems) and the assumption audit (mining for surprises)—are about looking for opportunities to prepare for risk. They help identify vulnerabilities so you can build resiliency or anti-fragility, shifting your odds against unexpected events.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2025-02-08T08:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:25:26

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] I was sitting in the emergency room last week with my family.

[00:00:17] When a doctor told me that my father needed to be taken by ambulance from

[00:00:24] that emergency room to another hospital that he had had some kind of cardiac

[00:00:31] event. Now I’ll ruin the rest of the story for you my father’s doing pretty

[00:00:36] well but he did indeed have a cardiac event that ended up leading to a triple

[00:00:42] bypass surgery. Fortunately for him there was no damage done to his heart.

[00:00:47] Of course we are incredibly grateful for this outcome and I look forward to his

[00:00:53] recovery and I’m learning lessons through this process. Of course you know

[00:01:02] not every personal story is worth talking about on a podcast but having

[00:01:07] done this podcast for over a decade I feel like these lessons are worthwhile

[00:01:13] to share. The truth is everyone listening to this podcast will have some kind of

[00:01:19] surprising event in their lives. You might have a surprising event this week

[00:01:23] whether good or bad. We can’t really predict everything that’s the nature of

[00:01:30] life. I want to talk to you a little bit about preparing for the unknown. Now to

[00:01:37] be clear the rest of this episode is not going to be commentary on my father’s

[00:01:41] situation but rather using that as as that backdrop and an inspiration for

[00:01:49] this thinking. Unexpected things are by nature unexpected. We can’t predict that

[00:01:56] they’re going to happen. We could predict some level of potential that they would

[00:02:02] happen. Some kind of calculation and expected rate for example but no matter

[00:02:09] what we do those unpredictable or unlikely events what Nassim Taleb calls

[00:02:16] black swans they still happen and the impact of these kinds of events can

[00:02:23] totally change the course of everything else that’s going on. So what do we do?

[00:02:29] How can we prepare for this kind of thing? Some things frankly you just can’t

[00:02:35] prepare for. Some things are totally unpredictable and when they occur there’s

[00:02:42] not really much that you could have done and not really much that you can do

[00:02:46] about them. This is more of an acceptance opportunity. In other words we just kind

[00:02:53] of have to deal with it. Once again Taleb says instead of predicting these events

[00:03:00] instead of trying to spend our energy predicting them we should prepare for

[00:03:04] them in some way. So being prepared for a catastrophic event might be a better

[00:03:11] use of our time and our energy. But how do you prepare for the unknown? We’re

[00:03:19] going to talk about a couple of different ways in today’s episode and the

[00:03:23] first way is an inverse to a positive psychology technique called the miracle

[00:03:31] Miracle question goes something like this. Tomorrow you wake up and overnight

[00:03:39] while you were unconscious while you were sleeping a miracle has occurred. You

[00:03:44] don’t know that the miracle has occurred yet. What are the first signs that you

[00:03:50] see that lets you know that the miracle has occurred? I should give credit where

[00:03:56] credit is due. I first heard about this concept the miracle question concept

[00:04:03] recently while listening to Dan Heath’s book reset. Dan was on developer tee a

[00:04:10] couple years back to talk about his previous book upstream. But the miracle

[00:04:16] question is often used in primarily in therapy contexts. For example in a in

[00:04:25] family therapy or some other kind of interventional therapy. What I’d like to

[00:04:30] do is flip this question or invert this question such that instead of a miracle

[00:04:37] you’ve experienced a curse. Overnight while you were sleeping a curse has

[00:04:43] befallen your situation. You could say that’s you personally. You could say it’s

[00:04:48] a project that you’re working on. You could say that it’s you know a company.

[00:04:53] Whatever your kind of context is you could imagine this applying. Now you

[00:05:00] don’t know the curse has been applied and your job is to determine what signs

[00:05:07] you would see. What kinds of you know what is true? What are you experiencing

[00:05:13] that first tips you off that a curse has befallen you? It’s important to note that

[00:05:21] these curses are you know you shouldn’t think about these as magical effects or

[00:05:26] unrealistic or impossible effects. Otherwise you know that those are not

[00:05:32] only are would that simulate an unexpected event it would simulate an

[00:05:37] impossible event. Okay so imagine that you know the curse is kind of restricted

[00:05:42] to only possible things. So let’s say you run a you know an engineering department.

[00:05:49] Perhaps the first signs of the curse could be that your engineers start

[00:05:54] resigning. Or maybe all of your engineers start releasing code that brings down

[00:06:01] your production servers. Or maybe all of the providers that you use start

[00:06:07] immediately increasing their prices. You could list five or ten of these things

[00:06:14] and what you’ve just done unknowingly is you’ve listed threats. You’ve listed

[00:06:21] threats that you’ve not yet experienced. Now these might seem outlandish if you

[00:06:26] look at this list but they are directionally instructive. What’s that mean?

[00:06:32] It means you’ve identified potential threats. Things that if they were to

[00:06:38] happen or if that was to come to pass your company your endeavor whatever it

[00:06:44] is that has received these you know curse events would be threatened. You’d

[00:06:50] be in trouble. So now you can take this list and decide what to do about it. This

[00:06:57] is kind of the the initial starting point and we’re not going to get into

[00:07:00] necessarily you know how do you dissect this list and what do you do about it

[00:07:04] necessarily. One thing for example that we mentioned was your engineers

[00:07:09] start you know resigning. What would you do about that? What can you do?

[00:07:15] Maybe you should look into how you can protect retention. Is retention

[00:07:20] something that you’re investing in? If not then that unlikely event is a little

[00:07:27] more likely. A lot of these strategies, a lot of these kinds of

[00:07:33] approaches that we’re gonna talk about in this episode are about shifting your

[00:07:39] odds. Shifting your odds that means you’re taking action to make what is

[00:07:46] already an unexpected event even more unlikely. You’re moving away from

[00:07:55] a risk profile. You’re trying to reduce and in some rare cases totally eliminate

[00:08:01] the risk that something may happen. Leaning once again on language that

[00:08:07] Taleb uses, you are looking at areas where you may be fragile. This is

[00:08:14] what this curse question might expose is areas of fragility. Where are you

[00:08:21] vulnerable to problems? There’s multiple ways you could think about this. You

[00:08:26] could invest directly in retention which would avoid the potential incidence

[00:08:31] of the event itself. Or you could think about planning for what happens if the

[00:08:39] event occurs. In other words maybe having a strong recruiting pipeline of

[00:08:45] interested engineers who might be available in the future. This amounts to

[00:08:51] some kind of contingency plan to deal with the incidents if it does actually

[00:08:57] happen. Leaning on Taleb once again an even better strategy in his kind of

[00:09:05] framework of thinking would be to invest in anti fragility. So the the

[00:09:10] contingency plan kind of gives you a robust or what Taleb might call a

[00:09:16] resilient structure. But an anti-fragile structure takes what would otherwise be

[00:09:22] considered an incidence of an unexpected event or a black swan event

[00:09:27] and turns it into a potentially beneficial event. So for example you may

[00:09:35] have an employee mobility program that encourages employees to develop

[00:09:42] skill sets that they can use elsewhere in the company. Now what this does

[00:09:47] overall a systemic effect that this might have is improved skill sets across

[00:09:54] your entire workforce. In the short run you might see an engineer leave a given

[00:09:59] team and join another one. But in the process that engineer has chosen not to

[00:10:06] leave the company but instead to invest in the overall learning and kind of

[00:10:12] knowledge equity that the company holds. So resourcing this program or making

[00:10:19] this program possible would mean that you’re creating that resilient structure

[00:10:26] first so that any one engineer is not necessarily a bottleneck or holding all

[00:10:32] of the information and losing one engineer doesn’t cripple the rest of the

[00:10:38] team. So this kind of progression from fragility where you’re wanting to avoid

[00:10:46] the event altogether to anti-fragility can help give you a roadmap for what

[00:10:53] kinds of preparation you can do to be ready for an unexpected kind of black

[00:11:02] swan type event. We’re gonna take a quick sponsor break and then we’re gonna come

[00:11:07] back and give you one more exercise for preparing and thinking through unknown

[00:11:12] events.

[00:11:22] One of the unknown events that has occurred in the past let’s say 10 years

[00:11:27] or so is that website builders have gone from antiquated tool of the past that

[00:11:34] produces terrible code and limited control to Wix Studio. Wix Studio is a

[00:11:42] node-based builder that lets you add full stack JavaScript to any site. With

[00:11:47] Wix Studio you can spend less time on UI coding hosting and security more on

[00:11:51] custom logic and functionalities that truly matter. This is a good unknown

[00:11:56] that has occurred. Developing your preferred coding environment online in

[00:12:02] or locally through a github integration either way with Wix Studio you’re

[00:12:07] deploying in a click. Extend and replace hundreds of powerful business solutions

[00:12:11] and custom-built features with API’s and integrations and when you need to speed

[00:12:14] things up Wix Studio’s AI assistant is on hand to generate tailored code

[00:12:18] snippets troubleshoot your bugs and retrieve product answers in just a few

[00:12:23] seconds. All of that is neatly wrapped up in an automatically maintained

[00:12:27] infrastructure for total peace of mind. You can work on a developer first

[00:12:30] ecosystem at wixstudio.com. That’s w-i-x studio.com. Thanks again to Wix Studio

[00:12:37] for sponsoring today’s episode of developer team.

[00:12:49] The next exercise that I want you to go through I’m going to call the

[00:12:54] assumption audit. What you’re going to do is write down a list of your

[00:13:01] fundamental assumptions. Now it’s important to understand that you make

[00:13:06] tons of assumptions every single day. There are assumptions that are relevant

[00:13:11] to this exercise and assumptions that are not. Assumptions that are not

[00:13:15] relevant for example might be you assume that the Sun is going to rise. This is

[00:13:21] not relevant because if the Sun doesn’t rise then you have much bigger problems

[00:13:25] than whatever you’re trying to evaluate your assumptions in order to achieve.

[00:13:30] Right? So try to limit this list to things that are germane to the problem

[00:13:36] at hand. For example if you are developing an iOS application one of

[00:13:43] your assumptions might be that the Apple App Store will remain stable and that

[00:13:49] the you know the the contract maybe the sales contract or the in-app purchases

[00:13:55] contract that Apple has established will remain stable as well. Those

[00:14:01] might be assumptions that you have. Other assumptions might be that you know

[00:14:06] the app you’re working on that your solution is novel. That there’s not a

[00:14:11] competitor out there that’s getting ready to release a similar solution. This is

[00:14:16] an assumption about the marketplace that you’re entering. Another good example

[00:14:21] of this let’s say you’re searching for a job you may assume that all of the

[00:14:27] applications that you submit will actually get reviewed. Right? This is a

[00:14:32] this is kind of our default assumption and it’s probably almost certainly true

[00:14:39] that your application is not getting reviewed every single time. So you can

[00:14:43] probably see where this is headed. What I want you to do for each of these

[00:14:48] assumptions I want you to rate your confidence that the assumption is solid.

[00:14:55] That the assumption holds true. That it is essentially a fact. Right? Where 10 is

[00:15:03] you’d have it would be extremely difficult to convince you that that

[00:15:08] assumption is threatened. That it may be it’s not true. Right? 10 would be

[00:15:16] you’re extremely convinced. One would be you know a breeze out of the window you

[00:15:24] know a note passed to you by a stranger could convince you otherwise. Right? It’d

[00:15:28] be very easy for you to change your mind about the assumption. And what I want you

[00:15:33] to focus on is the things that are in the about the four to six four to seven

[00:15:40] range. Okay? Maybe the five to eight range. These are things that because we are you

[00:15:50] know our tendency as humans is to try to categorize things to create binary

[00:15:57] categories and as in as many options as possible where we say something either

[00:16:03] is or is not. Right? We believe that something either is true or is not true

[00:16:08] for example. The assumptions that are in the four to six five to seven five to

[00:16:15] eight range in terms of confidence. You’re more likely to treat them as if

[00:16:23] they are 10s. Think about this. Right? These are assumptions that you are

[00:16:29] making decisions based on that even though you know you have a general

[00:16:37] belief that it’s more likely that it’s true than not you are not preparing for

[00:16:44] if that assumption fails. Because your brain is is kind of rounding up. Right?

[00:16:53] Your brain is treating something that has only some certainty. Right? Only some

[00:16:59] confidence. It’s treating it as if it has full confidence. And especially for the

[00:17:04] things that you rated as 50 or 60 percent or 5 out of 10, 6 out of 10. These

[00:17:10] are things that now in your kind of slow thinking. Right? If you’re using the

[00:17:16] Danny Kahneman’s language is slow thinking. You are able to evaluate that

[00:17:22] there might be a problem with that assumption. Something may be threatening

[00:17:27] that assumption. Right? Now you can also if you want to create a third column if

[00:17:32] you’re doing this in a spreadsheet for example you may want to rate the impact

[00:17:38] of if I’m wrong. If this assumption does not hold true and something else some

[00:17:47] other counterfactual is actually the case is actually true then what impact

[00:17:53] does it have on what I care about? If you know let’s say if Apple’s in-app

[00:18:00] purchases you know contract if they change to require that people pay them

[00:18:09] half of all in-app purchases for example. I don’t know anything about these

[00:18:12] contracts by the way so I could be totally wrong about these numbers. But

[00:18:17] let’s imagine that Apple demands that everybody pays them half of all in-app

[00:18:21] purchases. What level of impact does that have on your business model?

[00:18:26] Presumably if Apple was previously only giving or taking let’s say 10 percent of

[00:18:31] that then a lot of your assumptions about what would be required for market

[00:18:37] viability might change. Your pricing model might change. Your marketing model

[00:18:42] might change. Your product may change fundamentally. You might even abandon the

[00:18:46] project altogether. But if you had already kind of planned for you know

[00:18:53] potentially Apple could change this then you may not necessarily have a

[00:18:58] vulnerability to that right. You may have like we said before contingency plans in

[00:19:04] place. You know trying to move towards anti-fragility but at the very least

[00:19:11] having resiliency in these categories having some way of responding to them so

[00:19:17] that you’re not exposed and you’re not in that fragile category this this is how

[00:19:24] you can address these these problems. So again going back to that list you’re

[00:19:29] looking at your list of assumptions. Assumptions are kind of the the the kind

[00:19:37] of the raw material right for finding where might something unexpected occur

[00:19:43] because assumptions are really laying out what you expect to be true. You’re

[00:19:49] laying out what you expect to either happen or not happen in the future. So by

[00:19:55] auditing your assumptions and especially focusing on the ones that you have you

[00:19:59] know some mid-level medium-level confidence in when you do this audit and

[00:20:03] especially the ones kind of even even more narrow the ones that you have medium

[00:20:09] level confidence and they would have a high impact. Let’s say you’re rating at

[00:20:14] low medium high. Look at the ones that have medium confidence and high impact.

[00:20:20] These are the ones that you should focus on preparing creating resiliency

[00:20:25] hopefully moving towards anti-fragility to to deal with if this assumption is

[00:20:32] wrong. Now it’s also important to understand that assumptions might be a

[00:20:36] singular statement but there may be multiple counterfactuals that challenge

[00:20:43] the assumption. What does that mean? It means that let’s say for example that

[00:20:47] your assumption going back to the Apple contract example is that Apple will

[00:20:52] continue you know taking only a certain percentage of your in-app purchases.

[00:20:58] Well the counterfactual could be that Apple disallows you know purchases

[00:21:05] altogether right that they’re not gonna take they’re not gonna allow you to do

[00:21:09] in-app purchases at all that they’re only going to allow you know certain

[00:21:13] companies or something like that right that’s one counterfactual. Another

[00:21:17] counterfactual might be that Apple actually decides to take none they take

[00:21:22] 0% of your sales right that’s that actually challenges your assumptions

[00:21:28] but perhaps the impact of that counterfactual is is positive right and

[00:21:37] then of course there’s probably a hundred other ways that could go. Maybe

[00:21:41] the Apple Store shuts down altogether right and so not only is your assumption

[00:21:46] wrong about Apple but it’s challenged at its core because Apple no longer exists.

[00:21:54] Now again think about the confidence of that right your assumption that Apple

[00:21:59] will exist you probably have a fairly high confidence that Apple will continue

[00:22:03] existing for the duration of you know the app that you’re building the life

[00:22:08] cycle of that application. That confidence let’s say is eight or nine

[00:22:13] right fairly confident but your confidence in Apple’s you know

[00:22:20] maintenance of the current contract that you have perhaps that’s a little

[00:22:25] lower and so your strategy may not be wrapped around the potential for Apple

[00:22:32] to be wiped off the face of the planet but instead your strategy might be

[00:22:36] wrapped around you know de-risking your online your your in-app purchases in some

[00:22:45] way right. So all of this is about risk we’ve already said said this it’s about

[00:22:52] trying to identify you know these these black swan events these are things that

[00:22:56] we don’t think are necessarily likely otherwise they wouldn’t be expected

[00:23:02] right these those two things basically go hand-in-hand you know there’s some

[00:23:07] percentage of likelihood that would identify something as expected or

[00:23:13] unexpected if you have a point zero zero zero zero one percent chance of

[00:23:18] winning the lottery it would be unexpected there’s some percentage chance

[00:23:25] where you could reasonably say it was expected right it’s not necessarily a

[00:23:30] binary chance but you know if you had a 20% chance then you might say well it

[00:23:37] was kind of expected that I could win and it’s not surprising that I that I

[00:23:43] won so with both of these exercises what we’re really trying to do is look

[00:23:48] for the opportunities okay look for the opportunities both in the curse exercise

[00:23:55] which is kind of mining for problems as well as the assumptions exercise which

[00:24:04] is mining for areas where you might be surprised both of these can yield

[00:24:10] opportunities for preparing for risk thank you so much for listening to

[00:24:16] today’s episode of developer tea I hope this was an enlightening episode

[00:24:20] hopefully you can think about risk and the unexpected events a little bit

[00:24:26] differently thank you to the folks who listen to this who have already talked

[00:24:30] to me about our family situation our family health situation with my father

[00:24:36] fortunately I expect a positive outlook for him in the coming weeks so thank

[00:24:42] you to those of you who have reached out thanks so much for listening and a quick

[00:24:46] thank you to today’s sponsor WIC studio WIC studio has a developer first

[00:24:52] ecosystem you spend less time on tedious tasks more on functionality that matters

[00:24:56] to you and your customers by working in a VS code based IDE locally via github

[00:25:01] you can extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions and ship

[00:25:05] faster with WIC studios AI code assistant all inside of an automatically

[00:25:09] maintained infra for total peace of mind head over to WIC studio comm to get

[00:25:13] started that’s WIX studio comm thanks so much for listening and until next time

[00:25:19] enjoy your tea

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