Grenfell Tower, predictable surprises and slow violence

This is a post about black elephants: events widely predicted by those in a position to know, but found totally surprising when they actually happen, or elephants in the room retrospectively declared to be black swans. The Grenfell Tower fire was surprising and shocking – and at the same time, predictable. That puts it in a category of things which human institutions seem particularly bad at dealing with, where a problem builds up slowly and almost asymptomatically until suddenly a tipping point is reached, by which time addressing it has become massively more difficult. At one level, the solution to that is obvious – but that doesn’t seem to make it any easier to do in practice.

And it’s perhaps worth saying that this quite abstract way of thinking about disasters is not an attempt to distract from the human tragedy, but on the contrary is a way of recognising and understanding that we need to deal with structural as well as particular issues if we are to see fewer black elephants in future.

Andrew Curry – thenextwave

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.