Delving into Heatwave Scenarios
Later this month I’ll be facilitating a scenario session looking at the potential impact of a long standing heatwave event for the City of Greater Dandenong here in Australia.
Heatwaves kill more people than any other weather event. By a long way. Importantly they also have a ‘fat tail’ with physical impairments to individuals often catching up with them two or three days AFTER the heatwave has subsided. For a local Council, exploring where their strategy might be stretched or even fall over is a key outcome of this process. It’s not designed to enable people to feel comfortable they have everything covered. To the contrary, the aim of this scenario will be to push and stretch the perceived capabilities and capacities such that they are likely to break. The key question for us will be ‘where?’.
There’s a great line up of people involved. Along with CGD’s own staff, the Department of Health, Monash Hospital, Ambulance Victoria, Victoria Police, Department of Transport and a raft of other Councils (among a wide variety of other organisations) have provided significant time and input at helping guide the context for the emerging narrative. Although the ‘traffic light’ scenarios are common in a Government setting and 2×2 Deductive scenarios common in Industry, this will be an Inductive scenario using questions to help write another page into the story line.
At the conclusion, the key session takes place – ‘If that, then what?’ which will explore the beginnings of a strategic response to an event of the kind described. Without tying a scenario to a specific strategic thought process, most scenarios are moot. Included in that session will be NeuroPsychologist Dr Kim Hazendonk of Positive Brain who’ll give an overview of what happens to our decision making, and those of members of our communities, when suffering heat stress, and importantly, what organisations can do to prepare their staff for such an outcome. We already know, few organisations have considered how to prepare their staff.
It’s going to be a big day and hopefully I’ll be able to report back a few days after the event to let you know how it went
In this chat with Vicki Kerrigan on radio ABC Darwin we discuss the future of sex. This is the first of potentially three conversations where we look at the increasing reach of technology way beyond current online match making sites, the social pressures driving the use of technology as well as the use of technology…
Read More >There’s been a bit of discussion in recent months about a softening housing market around Australia but I wonder how much of it is more indicative of unrealistic expectations on behalf of sellers? In futures work we think in terms of Assumptions and Expectations and aim to test our understanding and so I offer this…
Read More >Unfortunately it looks like my main email address has been hijacked and has been used to send out a series of spam emails. I’d like to apologise to anyone who has received some junk email purporting to come from ‘desiredfutures’ with a series of html links asking you to go and have a look. You…
Read More >Given the amount of plastic swimming in our oceans and rivers and the volume littering our land, the NT Government is aiming to introduce compulsory returns legislation on soft-drink bottles (as happens in South Australia), something that has apparently raised the ire of bottler, Coca Cola. Although they’ve recently backed away from their initial statement…
Read More >Deciphering the hype from reality with regard to drug use can be a challenge for most of us. Professor David Nutt in the UK has given me permission to post a link to the paper he has co-authored with Ruth Weissenborn that looks at the reality of a comparison of harm caused by two common…
Read More >Vicki Kerrigan and I finished off our discussion about the Future of Clothing on ABC Darwin yesterday. We discussed invisibility style cloaks, singlets that monitor your heart rate and stress levels, runners that capture electricity to power your wearable electronics and a few philosophical questions regarding our ability to deal with stress. The file…
Read More >I’ll be talking with Vicki Kerrigan again this afternoon, this time discussing robotics as in-home carers. I’m due on at about 4.45pm Darwin time which is around 5.15pm on the eastern seaboard. You can listen to the audio stream via the link below http://www.abc.net.au/darwin/programs/webcam_radio.htm?ref=listenlive If all things go well, I’ll record the session and…
Read More >I recently attended a session with South East Business Networks where the CEO of Siemens Australasia provided some great ideas as to where Australian Manufacturing was headed and could go, and indeed perhaps needed to go. What I found most useful from Allan Goller’s perspective was the encouragement for businesses to just get on with…
Read More >In this very brief chat with Vicki Kerrigan on ABC Darwin, we kick off the discussion of the future of clothing – not the ‘style’ elements but the functional elements like capturing perspiration to convert for water. You can listen to the audio via the link available here – cue it up about a…
Read More >Marcus Barber will present the case study of his work with Central Highlands Water and their use of Scenarios for Strategy setting at World Water Week in Stockholm this Thursday. You can follow the twitter feed via #watermanagement, #rightfuture or #wwweek This case study looks at the flaws in a reliance on forecasting as the…
Read More >