MountainScenarios

Scenario Planning within Nonprofits

A seminar for nonprofits included discussion of scenario planning as it pertained to the Great CIVID Pandemic. It wasn’t so much scenario planning as we use it here on ScenarioPlans.com, as best, worst, and most-likely case (but more on that later). Imagine the nonprofit, out on thin ice, as the world’s economy went into lockdown. What if all funding froze up, even the promises of commitment? What if we are over-whelmed (under-whelmed) with customer needs? What if we have to cease operations (for an indefinite time)?

An excellent article with tools is at Bridgespan: Nonprofit Scenario Planning During a Crisis. (Image is from Bridgespan.)

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The EV Hurricane Disaster: a 1-sided scenario, part 2

Read  The EV Hurricane Disaster: a 1-sided scenario, Part 1 on ScenarioPlans.com (also DelphiPlan.com). The EV disaster article analyzes a viral email that talks about how horrible it will be when a hurricane is storming into a population center and the electric vehicles are all stuck on the road with no possibility for charging.

PART 2 of this discussion is from SustainZine: The EV Hurricane Disaster: a 1-sided scenario, part 2. (Repeated here for convenience.)

The EV Hurricane Disaster: a 1-sided scenario, Part 1

An unsigned, undated, email came circulating the web presenting a horror story about EVs: Everyone has electric cars, and they are all trying to flee the peninsula (let’s say South Florida) as a hurricane approaches. Cars are stuck in traffic with no place to go, and no place the recharge. Can’t run radios and air conditioning because that uses precious batteries. Kids and elderly suffering in sweltering heat.

The obvious conclusion: we all need to stick with huge gas-guzzling SUVs and avoid moving into the future.

Crypto Currency as Legal Tender in El Salvador, and more…

It has been interesting to find people within governments trash talking crypto currency. “No way it will become mainstream.” “Doesn’t have backing of a sovereign government, so …”

Bitcoin in El Salvador store. Official starting Sept 7 2021. (Reuters)

WEF Global Risks Report for Scenario Plans

The Global Risks Report 2021, 16th Ed., Insight Report, was just released by the World Economic Forum (WEF). This is one of the best places in the world to gather ideas for scenario planning, especially Chapter 1 on Fractured Futures. Essentially, this report is scenario planning, but for the whole of the world, and then on a region-by-region basis. So, a government, a business, or a non-profit organization can simply review these risks, adapt the concepts to your locale and situation, and wa-la, you have scenarios to plug into your scenario planning workshop. Of course, multiple risks might have similar results for your organization; for example, disaster recovery planning might be similar for man-made disasters as well as natural disasters.

Survival Plan

Survival Planning: using scenarios in times of extreme uncertainty

A Recession is destructive innovation. It has accelerated, for example, the Amazon effect of online sales and purchases with the closure of some 29 retailers. The recession of the 2020 Pandemic is different in some respects, straining local restaurants and bars, even the best of local.

Beyond Moore’s law, Beyond Silicone Chips

Beyond Moore’s law (by Dr Ed Jordan)

After almost 60 years, Moore’s law, related to the doubling of computing power every year-and-a-half-ish, still holds. At the current exponential speed, there is a brick wall looming in the foreground: the physical limitations of silicon chips. The most straightforward example of how that might impact a company is to look at Intel Corp. But first more on Moore’s law and the more general idea of learning curves.

COVID in the US

We talked about how scenario planning would and should have help see this pandemic, and have early warning signs for continuing plans.

PREDICT a Pandemic: First Kill those Pesty Scientists

Rough Road Ahead

Oh My God!

Trumps administration completely stopped the PREDICT program that did USAID training and response world-wide for pandemics.  Since the Bird Flu of 2005 (H5N1), the US presidents (Bush II and Obama) have moved toward building a program to identify potential pandemics and to help countries (including the USA) deal with such an eventuality. Of course, the PREDICT program got to deal with several pandemic-type events including SARS, MERS, Ebola and even Zika (mosquito). The idea, which apparently worked very well, is to fight a pandemic where it originates in other countries, so that you don’t have to fight it here in the USA. Of course, the train-the-trainer program would be developed and applied here in the USA.

Pandemic Scenario in Trump Transition Team, Days before Office

Okay!. So the Obama administration left the incoming Trump administration several scenarios for them to think about. No evidence as to what happened to the final report. But apparently, it showed everything that we have seen since November in China, and the first outbreaks outside of China. The result was a world-wide pandemic. Overwhelming the US with supply shortages and patent overflows. What happened to the final report? The early warning signposts? The disaster (recovery) plans?

We did a blog post about the military planning scenarios that would have realized a pandemic as an act of war… Or, even if it wasn’t caused by an act of war, the resulting story line would be similar. And, of course, if the pandemic started elsewhere, there would signals and signposts, in the jargon of Shell related to early warning signs in scenario planning.

A major country should be doing military scenario planning for several topics. None is quite as huge and integrated as climate change. Look at this report produced by The National Security, Military, And Intelligence Panel on Climate Change (NSMIP, February 2020), A Security Threat Assessment of Global Climate Change: How Likely Warming Scenarios Indicate a Catastrophic Security Future. It doesn’t seem possible that the US would not have a plan like this for a pandemic? It also doesn’t seem possible that the US would not have multiple plans for economic recession, no matter the cause. Since we missed the boat on the pandemic, hopefully we didn’t miss planning for a recession… However, this recession is like none we have ever had before. Kind of like turning the switch off on most of the economy for a while. (How long is a “while” is a $4T question?)

Kiaser Health News did a composite of highlights from several articles about the Trump transition team and how badly they apparently failed in the Pandemic exercise: How A Crisis Simulation Run Before Trump’s Inauguration By Obama’s Team Eerily Mirrors Current Outbreak!

November in China. By December, the military and health official had to know that expansion into a global pandemic was was not only possible, but likely. In Florida, when we see a Hurricane coming, we dust off all of our contingency plans for the businesses and start buying toilet paper and canned goods. We make sure that we have lots of jugs to fill with water if needed (no need to buy water, by the way).

Did the military and health officials simply forget to mention these things up the chain of command, or — apparently more likely — did the higher-up-the-chain-of-command not listen? What the hell happened to the results of the simulation? Did it take the path of anything and everything that Obama did/mentioned/signed/said, flushed down the toilet?

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