Taming Black Swans: Challenges for Sustainable Strategic Crisis Management: Plenary Session

International audienceBlack swans are a metaphor for extremely rare situations that have never been encountered before (Taleb, 2007). Indeed, “black swans” are low-probability and high-impact events that are unpredictable and could hardly be anticipated. Therefore, these outlier events of extreme consequences tend to shape history and they underpin important changes at individual and collective levels. Black swans are marked by the collapse of representations of the reality, leading to emotional, cognitive and behavioral breakdowns in human beings. These collective upheavals, such as major natural and man-made disasters, financial breakdowns, terrorist attacks or global pandemics that defy any expert prediction, represent important challenges for crisis management effectiveness. Specifically, strategic crisis management that provides strategic response to an emergency allows to limit the impact of the extreme situation. Further, strategic crisis management aims to navigate in the “fog of war-like times” on the basis of strategic thinking and strategic planning. Although, strategic crisis management encounters numerous misleading patterns and systemic failures that might lead to an undercurrent accumulation (Roux‐Dufort, 2009). Therefore, an effective strategic crisis management should deploy strategic innovation that allows the capitalization of experiences for future unique extreme situation. Strategic innovation is irrevocably bound up with the human capital that is at the heart of sustainable strategic crisis management. Thus, psychology as a research field that focuses on human beings’ emotional, cognitive and behavioral processes presents a vital resource for taming future black swans