Episode 1: Avoiding Strategic Surprise: Lessons from NATO with Dr Florence Gaub

Strategic surprise happens when new information fundamentally changes how we see the world. In an increasingly uncertain global landscape, predicting exact outcomes is nearly impossible – and that unpredictability heightens the risk of surprise. Yet as Lord Mervyn King explored in Season 6, genuine ‘Black Swan’ events – to quote Nicholas Taleb – are rarer than we think. Dr Florence Gaub describes how we can use strategic foresight to anticipate possible – even if unlikely – futures and avoid being caught off guard. She cautions, however, that it is not enough to ‘think the unthinkable’, futurologists also need to have their voice heard and acted on by those in power, so the work has to straddle both creative thinking and engaging with bureaucracies.

Dr Florence Gaub is the Director of the Research Division at the NATO Defence College having previously worked at the European Union Institute for Security Studies. Her PhD in international politics is from Humbolt University. She is the author of Future, a User’s Guide, a graphic novel for NATO called NATO, 2099, and editor of What If…?: Ten Dragon King Scenarios for 2030, which was published at the NATO Defence College in 2025.

Florence Gaub, Future, a User's Guide, Hurst, 2026.

Florence Gaub, NATO, 2099: A Graphic Novel, NATO, 2024

Florence Gaub (ed.), What If…?: Ten Dragon King Scenarios for 2030, NATO Future Series, November 2025

Florence Gaub and Jonathan Heist, 'NATO's Permanent Crisis', Foreign Affairs, 16 June 2026.

Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Random House, 2015.