Testing for the Avalanche

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously explained in The Black Swan, it is the unexpected that is most unexpected. For compliance professionals, testing is one of the tools that tries to expose the unexpected.

I was thinking about testing as I was out in the snowpack in my front yard. I tried out some of the avalanche tests I remembered from my mountaineering days.  As you can see from the cracks above, the snow failed the test and had a slab release. Fortunately, it was only my snowblower that fell victim to the unstable snow.

The six feet of snow in the last 30 days is pushing the infrastructure limits in Greater Boston. The subway system is failing, the roads are clogged with snow, nearly every roof has ice dams.

Perhaps the avalanche of snow is not a true Black Swan event. Huge amounts of snow are not unprecedented. Boston was subject to five feet snow in 30 days in 1978. (Of course, that event crippled Greater Boston for weeks.) It is more of a statistical anomaly than an unexpected and unforeseeable event.

How robust, or Antifragile, do you design the infrastructure to deal with an event that only happens every 30 years? How do you test your systems for an event that only happens once every few decades?

I’m not sure I have an answer. I’m sure that I have a sore back from shoveling so much snow.