Why Surprises Catch Us Off Guard — And How to Anticipate Them

Surprise parties. Marriage proposals. Sports upsets. Bank collapses. Military sneak attacks. Why do some unexpected events catch us completely off guard while others don’t?

For years, political scientists, security analysts, and financial gurus have tried to understand how information can be used to forecast what comes next and, through post-mortems, diagnose why certain predictions fail. “But psychologists, who have deep expertise in emotions, have not looked into this,” says Nir Halevy, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “I thought that perhaps we needed to join the conversation.”

Halevy and Stanford GSB research assistants Elizabeth Miclau and Serena Lee immersed themselves in the literature on strategic surprises. They found paper after paper about problems with the acquisition and use of information — either available information was overlooked or the information on hand was inaccurate. But the research was missing a key consideration.

“What we realized by doing this was that so much attention is focused on the process of failure, on ignoring signals or misinterpreting data,” Miclau says. “But nobody looked at how people were doing what they did: what they expected as they looked at information, how they structured these expectations or construed the situation.”

Into this gap, the researchers brought construal level theory, a psychological framework that rests on two key insights. First, people represent objects and events in the world around them along a sliding scale that runs from abstract to concrete. Second, psychological distance from these objects and events — temporal distance, social distance, spatial distance, and uncertainty — can shift how abstractly or concretely people think. Greater psychological distance tends to promote abstract thinking, while proximity promotes concrete thinking. Both approaches have unique blind spots.

Applying this lens to strategic surprises, the researchers suggest that people and institutions can be caught off guard when they think too abstractly or too concretely about the information related to a particular situation. The quality of information matters, but so does the framework in which it is interpreted.

Overly abstract thinking relies on broad schemas that can lead decision-makers to apply poorly fitting mental models, misjudge possible threats or opportunities, or assume that others will behave in stereotypical ways. Concrete thinking, on the other hand, involves being deeply immersed in the minutiae of a specific situation, which can lead people to ignore broad trends.

Managing Expectations

“A CEO, for example, might focus in on a handful of tweets from a rival CEO, placing too much weight on these local signals while missing or misinterpreting broader industry patterns,” says Lee. Conversely, the CEO might look at the historical culture of a rival company and, based on this, assume its leadership will take a certain course of action that falls in line with this abstraction. Either approach on its own may be insufficient to avoid undesirable strategic surprises.

Minimizing strategic surprises thus requires not only gathering the best available information but also moving between concrete and abstract frames of mind when analyzing it. Miclau, who currently works at the consulting and training company Vantage Partners, noted that despite the high levels of competence among her clients, they often find themselves surprised during negotiations, which leads them to inquire how to better collect and elicit information.

“Our paper shows that it oftentimes may not be about that,” she says. “You may simply need a team that is toggling between these different frames during a specific negotiation as a way to see more options.” Or perhaps one team is tasked with thinking abstractly about a situation while another team thinks concretely about it.

A range of exercises can help people move between abstract and concrete frames of mind. Considering “why” people engage in an activity, for instance, encourages abstract thinking, while considering the “how” encourages concrete thinking. Thinking about possibilities in the more distant future engages abstract thinking, while generating ideas for the near future engages concrete thinking. For example, when trying to anticipate a business rival’s behavior, try to think both about what they might do tomorrow as well as about what they might do next year.

Halevy notes that these exercises should not be reserved for war games at the Pentagon or high-stakes decisions in corporate boardrooms. They hold value across a surprising number of domains. How might a film crew continue its work if several members resign? How will a collegiate sports team adapt if the competition shows up with an atypical lineup?

“Thinking strategically basically means reasoning about how our actions help or hurt other people in our lives. So every social situation is an opportunity to think strategically,” Halevy says. Thinking about strategic surprises is not only for attorneys during litigation and PR teams in tech corporations thinking about the worst-case scenario. Our brains constantly try to predict what lies ahead, preparing us for everyday social interactions at work, at home, and on the road.