Goodreads asked Michele Wucker:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Michele Wucker I got the idea for the main question in THE GRAY RHINO after sounding an early warning in 2011 that Greece's creditors needed to learn from the opportunity that Argentina had missed a decade earlier to write off some of its debt to avoid a chaotic default. Private creditors came to an agreement with Greece just in time to pull it back from the edge and avoid tearing apart the euro. So I wondered: what made the difference between leaders who saw a crisis coming and acted in time to keep it from getting worse, and those who didn't. The title came when I was describing to a friend the idea of a giant, scary, dangerous threat coming right at you, and the image of a rhino popped into mind. It was perfect. Then he joked that it had to be a black rhino -a reference to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Black Swan," describing highly improbable, high impact risks. I knew there was such a thing as a black rhino, and white rhinos too. When I looked them up on Wikipedia, it struck me that black rhinos weren't actually black, any more than white rhinos were white: they were all gray. The real color was so obvious, but because of the misleading names, it was easy to overlook that rhinos are gray. So the rhino was an even more perfect metaphor when I added the color in.

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