No one can say they weren’t warned about the likelihood of a global pandemic or a war in Ukraine. And, in the light of President Xi Jinping’s recent comments at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, where he reaffirmed his government’s commitment to take control of Taiwan one day, no one can say that companies should not think about what comes next.

Indeed, most of the risks that a company will face do not fall into the category of what the mathematician and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb termed “black swan” events: random, highly improbable events that have enormous impact. A trade dispute, a viral epidemic, a product failure, a cybersecurity breach, a tsunami — these are not “black swans” but, as the business writer Michele Wucker memorably puts it, “gray rhinos”: highly probable, highly predictable, high impact, but neglected threats that are charging toward the company like a crash of rhinos (who show visible signs of aggression and whose attacks can thus be predicted nearly 100% of the time).

Read more at Harvard Business Review here.