Those who know me know I am a Tom Peters fan. From time to time, he conducts interviews with really outstanding people and posts them on his website. One of the newest interviews is with Eamonn Kelly, author of the book, Powerful Times. I came away from this interview deeply impressed by Eamonn’s astutely imagined scenarios and the perceptiveness of his thinking. For instance:
Our perception is largely based on our past experience, and it’s always hard to anticipate discontinuity. Even when you anticipate it, it’s still hard to really believe it. Herman Kahn wrote On Thermonuclear War: Thinking the Unthinkable about 40 years ago. I know we’ve gotten much better since then at thinking the unthinkable, but what we have to do now is get better at believing the unbelievable, because it’s going to happen. In New Orleans, for example, people had thought the unthinkable. The scenarios of a category 4 or 5 hurricane coming in and the levees being breached had been considered. It wasn’t that this was completely unforeseen; we had thought the unthinkable, but we hadn’t believed the unbelievable.
