In early December 05, this was one of a hundred plus blogs google melted down; we'll buold forward but here's a sample of where this blog's hostory had got to
Let's examine the view that the 21st C needs wholly different risk analysis.
EARLY CLUES 13 years ago I met what may have been the last business school leader to systemically understand risk - delighted to be emailed with bookmarks if you feel such people are still permitted to head business schools
He used to say Chris: the number 1 dynamic of human relations
systems is degradation- even the most perfectly productive system is tensely calibrated so that it will tear relationships apart unless leaders are stewarding its context with great love and openness. I worked as a senior visting fellow at his bussiness school for 4 years. Unfortunately, when I applied for the first professorship of
branding, awarded at his school, thye syllabus of connecting globalsiation risk and communications identity was too much for fellow academics. And as our head of business school was in his sixties, he was suffering from increasing internal politics. Perhaps if he had been ten years younger, we would have opn sourced a globalsiation risk syllabus by now. Instead today, the first thing this blog can do is commemorate every global disaster by trying to learn systemic clues from it. The least we can do for people who have perished is to map how to prevent repeat disasters of exactly the same environmental meltdown
EARLIER CLUESI have been concerned about systems since 1984 when my father and I co-authored a book on
Death of Distance. How globalisation*localisation of networks is a system*system revolution of a scale and simultaneous shockwave to econoimes*societies never previously experienced by our human race. Given how few people have even tried to map risks of one human system's trust-flows transparently, it is not clear that any of our 6 billion beings will survive the 21st C due to system*system risks. It is clear by 2024, we will know whether we will; one way to know is to see what quality of disaster learning has been distributed transparently to all cooordinates of the globe by then. In our book, we also timelined 2005-2010 as the most critical years in starting to see what a revolutionary new syllabus of risk needs to be valued as well as taught at every age group and up from every community's culture and greatest need.
LATEST CLUESYou should never ever let any big decision maker loose, unless you want them to blow up risks, unless they have been trained in systems and
exponentials. We now have crises not only at separated geographies of democracy but at democracy squared, cubed and higher order levels of global*local survival of freedoms and happiness (access to productive and demanding realtionship systems transparently spinning true purpose and collaborating sufficiently with other transparent systems in trade that evolves economic of abundance instead of 20th century externalities and economics of scarcity). Unfortunately in electing people to public office or to power over any of the world's largest corporations, we do not yet test whether these leaders lack of systemic understanding and transparent care may be their and our greatest risk. I have no idea how we change this other than trying to spread learnings about disasters in a way that does not blame anyone- we invite everyone to learn what nobody has wholly understood before. Why business schools have failed to pioneer this most valuable curriculum is an issue that sustainability investment circles are earnestly posing -
please help us survey where these circles are formingIf you have any fast track questions or concerns about what you have just read, please mail me at
wcbn007@easynet.co.uk - include valuetrue in subject line. Thanks! Chris Macrae
posted by macrae.nets @
4:21 PM Monday, November 21, 2005
I am interested to see that
yahoo has included Katrina at the top 10 level of menu choices of what types of egroup dialogues existWhat questions does this raise in your mind? I had opne which went both ways: why Katrina rather than say "World's Biggest Human Emergencies"; on the other hand will the sub-structure that evolves out of Katrina provide a replicable model for the next big location disaster
posted by macrae.nets @
5:24 AM Saturday, October 01, 2005
Some opening questions
Bird Flu should make us ask root cause questions? Is this a newly exacerbated crisis? If so , why (because people themselves are flying round like birds more than ever before in our global age? because battery farmed birds have been dosed up to the beak with penicillin breeding a nastier virus?). Or is it an old crisis - in which case why have our global and local institutions becomne so sudedenly scared and ill-perpared?)
Pakistan: what is the model a developing country needs for one local NGO to interface in times of crisis at a level of transparency higher than its national government has operated and yet able to locally interface global aid organsiations?
New Orleans: Why is that even a sophisticated country like the USA does not wholly map disasters as a test of your weakest link between top-down and bottom-up organsiations. What minimum training on
systems and
networks should all leaders operating large scale safety budgets be certified as having undergone? From the top down: white house; federal disaster organsiations; from the bottom up city or micro community awareness, state, etc? In particular why appoint people in federal institutions who behave as if they are not aware that federal disaster agencies are there to spend years preparing for a most occasional event that wil need to support grassroots up weblike crises compounding ctitically in very short periods of real time. This adaptivity requires different system learning and readiness than almost any other organisational model. Worldwide there are inquisitively open communituies of critical response practice - had the US participated in any of these. Locally had FEMA learnt anything from the NASA spaceship disaster - itself an amazing map of organsiations not connecting with each other at times of critical response due to many years of perfomance being measured in ways that compounded separability.National Crisis response requires recruitment of officers with great care not becasue they are in some buddy network or subscribe to one side of lefty versus right politics. Nothing could be a more damaging selection criteria in
any country's national emergency practitioners net than left versus right politics dictating choice of leaders.
