Building Moonshots

WAY 8Collect a Menagerie: Hunting for rhinos, swans, and horses provides a quick start for your opportunity searches.

About the Way

To feed your team's curiosity and go beyond trend finding, you should build your own menagerie of opportunities that are considered high‐potential market changers. Similar to a real menagerie—a collection of often wild and exotic animals—your collection will cultivate and feature a set of core opportunities known by their animal names, namely gray rhinos, green swans, and dark horses. (And we are not even discussing the other possible metaphorical animals—such as the elephant in the room!)

Gray rhinos and green swans are high‐impact opportunities that you can see coming, unlike their proverbial cousin of black swans—which are rare, highly improbable, and unpredictable events (that are often seen as unavoidable and catastrophic, such as the housing market crash of 2008). Black swans cannot be predicted, so little can be done to prepare for them. By contrast, a gray rhino event is highly probable with enormous impact, yet often ignored or minimized by decision makers. Coined by policy strategist Michele Wucker, a gray rhino event is meant to describe a danger that is obvious, visible, and charging straight at us like an angry rhinoceros.¹ Gray rhinos are not random surprises because they emerge after multiple warnings and visible evidence—a matter of when, not if. The COVID‐19 global pandemic is a gray rhino because various governments had repeatedly ...