A friend of mine recently gave me a fantastic gift: a larger-than-life-sized, cast-iron black swan. You’ve almost certainly never seen a black swan, as they are indigenous to only a few specific regions of Australia. Their rarity makes them a fitting metaphor for highly improbable events, a concept Nassim Taleb explored in his 2007 groundbreaking book, “The Black Swan.” Taleb argues that people tend to focus on things they have experienced and spend almost no time contemplating the unexpected. It is this lack of creativity that causes us to expect history (especially recent history) to repeat itself, leaving us unprepared for random, unpredictable occurrences – so-called “black swan events.”

The events that will pose the greatest risks in 2025 aren’t likely to stem from issues everyone widely expects. Major disasters often seem to “come out of nowhere,” blindsiding even the most informed observers. Even among expert predictions, the same pattern emerges: most forecasts aren’t groundbreaking insights, but rather disguised extrapolations of recent trends, erroneously assuming history moves in a straight line.

Think back to late 2023. What worried people most about 2024? Their concerns were likely tied to recent events, such as inflation, geopolitical tensions, or domestic politics. If asked today about risks for 2025, most would again anchor their predictions in the headlines dominating the moment: the U.S. presidential election or the war in Ukraine. Even professional risk accessors are prone to this backward-looking bias.

Psychologist Phil Tetlock shed light on this issue by analyzing 28,000 forecasts made by 284 political and economic experts between 1984 and 2003. Despite their credentials, the experts’ predictions were only slightly better than random guessing – and frequently worse than basic algorithms that merely extrapolated past trends. Tetlock’s findings reveal an uncomfortable truth: even experts struggle in predicting an uncertain future.

I reviewed financial publications from December 2023 to see what risks concerned the experts in 2024. Common predictions included a U.S. recession in 2024 (wrong), Fed interest rate increases (wrong), geopolitical supply chain disruptions (wrong), slowdown of consumer spending (wrong), widespread electoral violence (wrong), and new military conflicts (mostly wrong).

A January 2024 World Economic Forum (WEF) risk report was simply a list of things that had already unfolded: misinformation, inflation, an economic downturn, pollution and societal polarization.

Talk about closing the barn door a tad late.

It’s so much easier to prepare for a “risk” that has already occurred or one that is almost certain to occur than it is to prepare for something unknown. That’s why so many experts specialize in the equivalent of fighting the last war. Preparing for the unknowable requires a combination of a well-defined risk philosophy and a creative mindset open to the prospect that black swans actually exist.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.