Unprecedented, Again
In 2020 one word was everywhere: unprecedented. Prime ministers used it, CEOs used it, and the email from your gym about reduced class numbers used it. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, apparently.
Except we had, plenty of times.
There was influenza in 1918, again in 1957 and again in 1968. Swine flu arrived in 2009, then COVID-19 in 2020. That’s five pandemics in about a hundred years, roughly one every generation, and each time the response has been the same expression of total astonishment.
“Unprecedented” is meant to be a description. In practice it’s often an alibi. If nothing like this has ever happened, nobody could have planned for it. And if nobody could have planned for it, nobody is to blame. The word quietly changes a failure of preparation into an act of God.
It has a cousin, too: the black swan. Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularised the term for events that are rare, can’t be predicted and only seem obvious in hindsight. Leaders love calling their crises black swans, because it makes them sound unlucky rather than unready. But a pandemic is not a black swan. Epidemiologists had been warning about the next one for decades. Taleb himself said COVID didn’t qualify. A better image is the grey rhino, a term coined by the policy writer Michele Wucker. It’s a large, obvious, highly probable threat, charging straight at you, that everyone has decided to ignore.
Most organisations don’t get flattened by black swans. They get flattened by grey rhinos they’ve been watching for years.
Why? Partly because we’ve built systems to run at full capacity. Hospitals, supply chains and staffing models are all tuned for an average Tuesday. Spare beds, spare stock and spare people look like waste on a spreadsheet, right up to the day they’re the only thing that matters. Efficiency and resilience pull in opposite directions, and for decades we’ve rewarded only one of them.
None of that is a law of nature. Health systems, budgets and business continuity plans are human inventions, designed by people making choices. The plan that left no room for a surge was also a choice. It could be made differently.
The first step is a language step. Stop calling predictable things unprecedented. If something has happened before and will clearly happen again, call it expected. “Expected” puts the problem back on someone’s desk. It invites a question that “unprecedented” was designed to avoid: you knew this was coming, so what did you do about it?
There will be another pandemic. When it arrives, someone will stand at a lectern and call it unprecedented. It would help if more of us knew to object.
