Crisis management Workshop
Crisis Management paper presented at the Flood-relief workshop at the Reno Hotel in Bangkok to Siam University International students 14 -23 November, 2011
Abstract
This workshop explores the shared patterns of thinking and acting of the human condition. It focuses on certain erroneous ethical notions, that have led or not lead as the case might be, to actions at critical junctures on the continuum as a crisis evolves. The human involvement itself is considered in the context of how societal consensus is shaped, won and spread so that it has become the way of thinking of the group (paradigm). While such paradigms are always contested, a system that has limited transparency and where accountability is indefinitely deferred calls for action only when economic expediency renders it necessary. In such a world-view both failure and victory are ultimately depicted as triumph of the human ability to respond. The response has frequently been too little and too late. It is not then, only the response that we must question, but the system itself that has made response the tool of choice. It is not in challenging and changing the management team’s ability to respond that we go forward, but in a wholesale overhaul of a system of thinking that knowingly permits crises to develop. Through understanding of the cyclical relationship between cause and effect that alternatives to present ways of seeing and acting are called forward. Scenario based workshops are a valuable instrument to tease out such alternative ways of seeing by providing participants with visual depiction of crises for their consideration and evaluation. Such alternatives gain urgency today if we are to survive as a species on this precious planet we call home.
Introduction
As a starting point to understanding a crisis is the necessary distinction to be made between a natural, human-made and a combination of both. The Bangkok flood-crisis of June-December, 2011 is one that falls in the third category because the natural was made the worse by processes that began at an earlier time thus affecting the ongoing ability to respond in the present. Nevertheless, the key factor is the verb “respond” because it prioritizes reaction when the causal factors that began at a much earlier time are deferred indefinitely and required quite a different action in the time continuum.
Background
Some have argued that the cause of the Bangkok flood was in April when erroneously the former government was preparing for a drought and in anticipation of which it commenced seeding clouds for rain and seeking mitigation by concurrently filling up the dams. This workshop argues that the critical causal factor for the Bangkok flood was neither an error of judgment by predicting drought, nor the seeding of clouds for rain, nor dams filled to capacity. Rather a particular human folly that began at a much earlier point of time that is not Thai specific. This then is the link between the current crisis and the crisis scenarios explored in the workshop. Human folly, manifest in a particular false self-belief that humans have a manifest right to influence planetary and human destiny is at the heart of the problem. In Thailand human actions and nature have come together to devastating effect both in human and environmental costs. The cost in lives is counted in hundreds (in excess of 600 and counting), economically in the billions, and for the environment the cost remains to be calculated at some future time if ever.
