PROJECT 38: How the way you think creates risk

Steve Kelman, who led the Office of Federal Procurement Policy during the Clinton Administration and is a current professor at the Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has a reputation as a big thinker about management and government and why things work the way they do.

In this conversation with Editor Nick Wakeman, Kelman shares his thoughts about Black Swans and Gray Rhinos -- those often traumatic events that we either didn’t see coming or we knew could happen but we failed to prepare for.

Critical to that preparation is cultivating the ability to break away from your standard ways of thinking and not falling into the trap of doing things in certain ways because that is how they have always been done. Status quo thinking is often what leaves us vulnerable when disaster inevitably strikes.