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
Futurist Marcus Barber will be joining ABC’s Vicki Kerrigan in Darwin for the first of an ongoing discussion about the future this Wednesday. Each week on Wednesday afternoon’s, Vicki and Marcus will discuss the future of something, how we prepare for the future, what the future looks like for some industries and other related futures…
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Read More >Hi everyone – a quick note to let you know that our phones lines have been down for a while now and we are working on getting them fixed. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you. In the meantime, try using either our 1800 number where you can leave a message only…
Read More >ABC journalist Adam Stephen interviews Marcus Barber on the subject of GM foods and whether they might be more widely embraced as part of the global food requirements The interview (about 3& 1/2 mins) is available in MP3 format here and a link to the shorter web article is here. Some key points –…
Read More >South East Business Networks, the City of Greater Dandenong’s longest running business development program, is an exceptional avenue for learning about issues to do with Manufacturing. This week they provided one ‘out of the box’ with an excellent presentation by Professor Goran Roos, a worldclass expert on Manufacturing and currently South Australia’s Thinker in Residence.…
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