Transparency: Comparing the Chile and Haiti Earthquakes examines the impact of the Chile and Haiti earthquakes. Chile was higher on the Richter scale, but loss of life was worse in Haiti: because Chile, which has experienced quakes, was prepared, and Haiti was not.
One aspect of continuous improvement in swarmish organizations is preparation for wildcards–things you can’t anticipate in specific detail although you can anticipate generally. Being flexible and prepared will help you deal with “interesting times” (as the Chinese put it). It’s especially important for swarms to be prepared because they are often very resource poor. A good disaster could destroy a swarm’s capacity to operate.
What kinds of things are you not prepared for? One exercise is to take a page and doodle categories – big boxes. For example: Geography, Demography, Economics, Society, Religion, Christianity. What kinds of events would you put into each category? Earthquakes would obviously go in Natural Disasters which I generally would put in Geography. What if a natural disaster struck the area of your office? Would you be prepared?
My preparation for a data-destroying disaster is to put most if not all of my data on the “cloud,” which is managed by Google. I figure Google will probably be a lot more data resilient than I am.
What other categories contain “wildcard” events to prepare for?
