At the moment I'm reading “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT)*.  He describes a Black Swan as a highly unpredictable event that has a massive effect.  To make sense of it, we are programmed to rationalize it as being far more predictable than it was.  From the moment we are born, we develop rules to guide us.  Once we develop those rules, we hang on to them viciously, only seeking to confirm our view of the world, rather than keep an open mind.  Even when staring at evidence to the contrary, we figure out a way to make the rule stand, more inclined to rewrite our memory of things past than to adjust the way we think in the present.  But once in a while, a seemingly random Black Swan event will come along that forces us to rethink our rules, and when we do, our typical response is, “I should have seen it coming.”  We then rewrite how we thought we thought to reinforce our (slightly adjusted) rule-bound worldview.  In a sense, we're like turkeys.

Borrowing from NNT (who in turn adapted from Bertrand Russell): “Consider a turkey that is fed every day.  Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for their best interests,' as a politician would
say.  On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey.  It will incur a revision of belief.” p. 40

As you can see from the graph adapted from NTT, day 1001 is dramatically different from all the days preceding it.  If the turkey could, would he have adjusted his thinking to “I should have seen it coming?”  How often do we extrapolate the future from the trends of the past, assuming no Black Swans will appear?

“But in all my experience, I have never been in an accident ... of any sort worth speaking about.  I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea.  I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.”
                E.J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic (p. 42, NTT)

Now, to my own field.  The learning field, like many others, is full of rules that are self-reinforced by an industry filled with consultants, vendors, professional societies, and technology products that build their products and services in support of those rules.  Should a disruptive technology or way of thinking come along, of course the industry itself would be inclined to reject it should that disruption require an alteration of all the products and services sold in the marketplace.  Incremental adjustments would be fine, but disruption would be too threatening to this $100 billion dollar industry**.  Here are some widely accepted, but not formalized coda:

For every hour of instructor-led training, it takes 40 hours of design and development to create it.  Computer-based training (deliberately using an old-fashioned term) takes 5X as long but pays out in the long run for large audience size.

People need to interact when learning “soft skills” and that can only be done in live face-to-face sessions.
Executives learn differently than everyone else.
The job of the trainer is to control the learning environment so that learners can learn.
The process of learning is as important as the results from learning.
Learning is an event.
And so on ...

Here in Sun Learning Services (SLS), we are experimenting, we think successfully so far, with breaking all of these paradigms.  We've presented some of our thinking at ASTD, a CLO webinar, and at a few other symposia.  We think the world is changing dramatically, and as learning practitioners, we must change with it.  I'll describe some of these changes in an upcoming blog, and how we are using Web 2.0 tools to create Learning 2.0.  For a sneak preview, go to our new hire site.  If you're an employee, log in and participate.  If you're external to Sun, you'll be able to see about 60% of the site, but enough to get a sense for how we believe the world of learning is changing.  (You won't see the cloud tags, be able join the community of new hires, visit certain confidential sites, or get a leader board score for playing “Rise of the Shadow Specters.”)

Citing the SLS vision statement, “Learn to be open ...”

*Note: I think it dangerous to supercondense the views of an author, especially NTT, as he carefully and logically builds a compelling, well-researched argument that takes 300 pages.  If you disagree with his views represented here, consider them my poor interpretation and kindly read for yourself before passing judgment.
** Including educational spending.  Exact numbers are hard to verify, but GE claims to spend $1B a year in training and development.