O que é a verdade e lidar com as surpresas inevitáveis

Ao digitar o marcador "o que é a verdade" acedo a uma série de postais escritos sobre o falar verdade sobre a coisa pública.
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Peter Schwartz no livro "Inevitable Surprises" escreve:
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"When an inevitable surprise confront us, there are two different types of natural reactions. Both of them can lead to poor decision making.
The first is denial - the refusal to believe that the inevitabilities exist.
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When in denial about an inevitability, people tend to blithely act as if it didn't exist, and as if there were no need to break from routine and prepare for it. The losses that result can be immense.
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Denial is perhaps the most dangerous response one can make when evidence of an inevitable surprise presents itself.
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The second natural reaction to any turbulent crisis is defensiveness. This is a kind of opposite to denial. People take the inevitable surprise to seriously that they freeze; in their minds there is no visible way to act except to find a safe place, hunker down, and wait for it to all blow over. They reduce their investments and activities, focus on their immediate and narrow self-interest, and wait for another stretch of relative calm to set in before they are ready to take risks again. If they are corporate leaders, they cut costs and innovation. If they are political leaders, they look for short-term gains.
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This book is for people who want to get past denial and defensiveness, to be the masters of their own fate in a world full of surprises. The first step in making that transition is to pay attention to the inevitable surprises of the future, and to develop strategies for dealing with them.