The basis of that statement, in my opinion, is human bias. Experts protect their reputation to the external and internal (psychological) world by saying that n

The basis of that statement, in my opinion, is human bias. Experts protect their reputation to the external and internal (psychological) world by saying that nobody could have predict the specifics that led to that event. Nicholas Nassim Taleb, as much as people here seem to dislike his personal style, has written extensively on these types of events. He calls them Black Swans, and says while we may not have predicted the 2008 crash, we would be wise to assume there exist unforeseeable/non-modeled events that would have non-linear impact on the system. I think of it this way: future events* will occur that will invalidate our models and have outsized/nonlinear impact on the KPI we care about. Our blindness is because there are so many baked-in assumptions and possible futures we can't mentally model for them. Any single "Black Swan" event has a vanishingly small probability of coming true, but the sum of the Black Swan probabilities is the important metric, not any given one. Taleb's thinking is filled with judgement of his peers, and his egotistical writing style is bombastic. His themes, however, from his trilogy of books, marries human psychology with rare outcome events to form an interesting contrarian take on the world. * 1987 crash, dot-com crash, the Great Recession, etc.