Not all disruptions are created equal. Some create temporary turbulence, while others reshape entire industries. Then there are the disruptions that seem to appear out of nowhere – events that change the course of society itself, altering how people live, work, and make decisions. These are the moments that force organizations to adapt to an entirely new reality.
COVID-19 was one. The sudden leap in AI technology is another.
Often labelled “historic,” “transformational,” or “unprecedented,” Vanessa Hasse, Assistant Professor of International Business at Ivey Business School, argues these disruptions belong to a category of their own, what she calls “rare and impactful events.” And what sets them apart comes down to two factors.
“In contrast to other, more predictable disruptions, rare and impactful events are much lower in probability and higher in severity of effect,” said Hasse.
Although these events are rare, Hasse emphasized that they are significantly more common today, in large part due to the increased interconnectivity of human activities.
“Global trade and travel networks, for instance, fuel the conditions that make rare events like pandemics, climate-related disasters, and economic crises much more likely to occur and consequential once they do arise,” she explained.
Driven to develop stronger evidence-based guidance for businesses navigating these turbulent times, Hasse set out to better understand the phenomenon.
As a starting point, she explored how rare and impactful events, specifically infectious disease outbreaks and the rise of AI, have been reflected in a sample of all articles ever published in more than 20 top management journals. The results of this analysis, shared in her article From Trailing Behind to Shaping the Curve: Researching Rare and Impactful Events for Societal Benefit for Business & Society, challenge prevailing assumptions and offer guidance on how both researchers and business leaders can better prepare for rare and impactful events now – before the next arrives.
When research lags behind reality
One of Hasse’s key findings, visualized through decades-spanning graphs, is that both infectious disease and AI phenomena have a long trailing latency period, quietly simmering for years before gaining broader attention in business research.
“AI, for instance, first came up as a concept in the 1950s and much progress was made on the technology in the decades that followed… it just didn’t really make it into the top business journals until ChatGPT was launched,” she explained. “Then, all of a sudden, there was a lot of attention on it.”
This tendency for researchers to engage with major disruptions once they are already well into the exponential (growth) phase is a pattern Hasse calls “trailing behind the curve.” Several factors drive it, including incentives to study common phenomena, reliance on established theories, an emphasis on large datasets, and limited space in top journals.
Yet whatever the cause, the outcome is consistent: when a rare and impactful event inevitably hits, business leaders have little evidence-based guidance to draw on. By the time the research arrives, the most consequential decisions have often already been made.
Looking in the wrong places
Hasse’s analysis of infectious disease outbreaks revealed an additional troubling dimension: business research has a blind spot.
“Local epidemics of communicable diseases have always happened, but only after COVID-19 emerged did infectious diseases really show up across top business journals,” she said.
Why the sudden interest? Hasse has a theory.
Top-tier business journals tend to focus on wealthy countries like the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe, where serious outbreaks are rare. Lower-income countries, which face outbreaks far more often and more severely, rarely get the same spotlight. As a result, when COVID-19 crossed every border and income level, there was little published business research to draw on for preparedness or response. The warning signs had been there for years, just not where business researchers were looking.
Casting a wider net
For Hasse, the implication is clear. Business research needs a fundamental rethink. Rather than waiting for disruptions to become mainstream, she calls for researchers to devote greater attention to emerging, fringe, and unconventional phenomena, giving business leaders better evidence to navigate uncertainty before it becomes crisis.
Another important consideration, Hasse emphasizes, is that anyone exploring business phenomena should challenge the convention of removing outliers or forcing data into tidy distributions. By working with the data as it truly is, rather than what it should be, researchers can uncover insights that might otherwise go unnoticed.
As an example, she pointed out that to many, the 2008 financial crisis had appeared as a complete surprise. “Part of the reason,” she said, “was that many analysts, regulators, and other market participants used models that relied on statistics requiring normal distributions, which render outliers exceedingly unlikely. Had outliers been accounted for correctly, the crisis might have been easier to see coming.”
Hasse also sees tremendous value and potential in co-creating knowledge. Researchers, business leaders, and policymakers who collaborate to generate system-level insights are far better positioned to identify and interpret signals.
She added: “There’s a lot we can learn from other disciplines about how to actually predict and address rare events.”
Preparing for the unexpected
While anticipating rare and impactful events is never straightforward, Hasse believes organizations can improve their preparedness by rethinking how they approach disruption. In her article, she outlines three practical considerations for researchers and business leaders alike.
1. Apply rigorous imagination.
Anticipating rare events, including those without any precedent at all, requires moving away from overreliance on established theories and large-sample statistics.
“Of course that doesn’t mean resorting to speculation,” Hasse said.
Instead, she advises using structured, disciplined methods to think through scenarios that haven't happened yet. Known as “rigorous imagination” in science and philosophy, this approach resembles scenario planning but remains largely underused in business research. To do this successfully requires analyzing historical patterns and cross-disciplinary expertise to construct plausible futures and stress-testing assumptions against them.
2. Widen contextual lenses.
Context matters, especially geographically and temporally, in the anticipation of rare and impactful events.
“If we look at pandemics and epidemics, for instance, they don’t seem that rare if we look at broader time spans,” said Hasse. “If you asked any epidemiologist, right before COVID-19 they would've said, ‘We should be ready for a pandemic right now.’”
Widening the lens, geographically, historically, and across disciplines, doesn’t guarantee you’ll see the next crisis coming, but it does improve the odds that someone in your network will.
3. Incentivize resilience.
Highlighting a striking gap between risk and readiness, Hasse referenced a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) survey conducted less than a year before COVID-19 became a global pandemic, which found that only 11 per cent of organizations had crisis plans in place.
“In business, there’s a misalignment of incentives,” she said. “Short-term incentives are often prioritized.”
To counter this trend, Hasse calls for stronger incentives that prioritize long-term resilience, especially as organizations continue to confront a broader range of complex risks. Researchers and business leaders alike have a responsibility to ensure the next rare and impactful event doesn't find organizations as unprepared as the last one did.
To disseminate her research, case writing, and teaching materials on rare and impactful events, Hasse founded The Rare Events Lab in 2025. For her full article on how to better anticipate rare and impactful events, read Hasse’s paper here: From Trailing Behind to Shaping the Curve: Researching Rare and Impactful Events for Societal Benefit for Business & Society.
