It’s tough making predictions, the legendary US baseball coach Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, “especially about the future”. The next few weeks will see the predictive abilities of some important public officials tested to the limit. In preparation for the Olympics, the Protocol Coordination Centre (PCC) has spent months asking that usually comical question: “What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen?” Scenario planning, and its scarier cousin ‘war gaming’, calls for imagination and clear-thinking. And even then not all possibilities can be accounted for.
One person who feels confident enough to make a prediction is John Yates, the former assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police. “The media will continue to do their level best to hype up the sense of doom and panic,” he said, and suggested officials now need to switch into what he called “active listening mode”. And the people they should listen to most carefully are the police.
That may be good advice. After seeing G4S fall short in the past few days, the idea that there will be more people on UK’s streets in uniform (whether khaki or blue) could go down very well. There is certainly a lot of pre-Olympic twitchiness about.
Two buses, one containing US athletes and the other Australian officials and medical staff, were both missing in action for several hours on Monday morning, owing to satnav and map-reading problems. In a further assault on antipodean prospects, the Australian sailing team has landed in the UK — without their sails. They were loaded on to a cargo plane by mistake and will arrive soon, the team has been assured. One permanent feature of any decent scenario plan has to be the possibility of human error.
General (later president) Dwight Eisenhower knew the truth. “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable,” he said. He meant, I think, that the discipline of preparing for a range of eventualities was useful, but that the future could never really be known. The good news is that the PCC seems to have grasped this. Too many rigid, scripted plans can leave you “locked in”, an unnamed official said recently. “You have to have flexibility.” How else could you deal with what Donald Rumsfeld once famously called “unknown unknowns”?
Unknown knowns
Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary, has been teased for the clunking logic of his epistemological formula about “known unknowns”. But from a management point of view he left off his list the most important category of all, that of the “unknown knowns” – the things that people somewhere in your organisation do know, it’s just that the message hasn’t got through to the top.
Good crisis management may be largely about prevention, and spotting potential sources of difficulty early on.
Whether it has to do with IT, logistics and supply chains, or personnel matters, ‘business continuity’ has risen up the agenda for senior managers in recent years. The chaos caused by the Icelandic volcano two years ago should have been enough to convince sceptics that alternative arrangements for keeping your operation going do have to be made. But volcanic eruptions, or their metaphorical equivalent, can be hard to predict.
The unexpected always happens. We must hope there will be no damaging disruptions either to the Games or to normal working life. But when you look at the dramas of recent weeks — the Libor-fixing scandal, the continuing woes of the economy and the financial markets, the G4S foul-up, and the joys of queueing to get in and out of Heathrow — you can’t help wondering whether some of the more dangerous subversives in UK’s midst aren’t the expensively attired chaps who inhabit boardrooms and chief executives’ offices.
