Future Cell: Accelerate Learning Across Regions in Crisis

Covid-19 Critical Emerging Issues and Effects

Foresight and Crisis Management

Donna Dupont: Purple Compass, Richard Thomas: The Foresight Studio, Sady Ducros: The Foresight Studio, Advisor — John A. Sweeney: Purple Compass

The goal of this article is to propose a method for enhancing situational awareness for public safety professionals, emergency managers, and critical decision makers during a crisis through the creation of an anticipatory tool for emerging issues analysis that can also accelerate learning exchange on a global scale.

Concept Paper: We are in the process of prototyping an anticipatory tool for the crisis management ecosystem. And we have decided to prototype for Covid-19 as a case study and are sharing our work in progress broadly with those who may be interested in its current form.

We are living amidst a globally diverse, distributed, and simultaneous crisis response to the novel coronavirus - Covid-19. The challenges faced by nations are complex and complicated daily as new issues emerge.

As public safety and emergency management professionals work to keep pace with the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus, the ability to stay abreast of emerging issues and their cascading effects can be advantageous to preempt and mitigate problems that may worsen the situation. It can also be helpful to keep a record of these issues to support after-action reports that capture lessons-learned post-crisis.

One challenge in a fast moving and complex crisis is the ability to maintain a continuous systems view of the unfolding situation and capture new knowledge on an on-going basis. The ability to maintain this critical lens and access credible information can enhance situational awareness by identifying, categorizing, and anticipating the evolution of impactful issues. Tracking learning can provide a channel through which to effectively communicate valuable information and support decision-making with intelligence to implement tangible solutions, and, ultimately, reach communities in need in more contextualized and effective ways.

With this in mind, we see an opportunity to develop a solution that assists in organizing explorations of the near-term future. One that scans the horizon, captures, and transfers active learning across jurisdictions during a crisis. The creation of this type of anticipatory tool could be used to identify emerging issues related to Covid-19 at a variety of scales, locally, nationally, regionally, and globally. Most importantly, such a platform can help decision makers understand associated response actions and/or have greater awareness of the benefits and constraints of solutions prior to implementation.

Here is what we are going to cover in this article:

• The Use of Foresight in Crisis Management
• Category Selection
• A Method for Transferring Possible Response Efforts to Covid-19 Across Countries
• Situational Awareness: Monitoring Emerging Issues, Cascading Effects and Possible Response Efforts (Future Cell Database)
• Summary
• Jobs to Be Done, Call to action: Our capability gaps and how you can get involved

The purpose of the collection of issues is to understand the evolution of the crisis to date, centralize knowledge for transfer learning, anticipate emerging issues, and identify cascading effects that may worsen the situation. The goal is to support learning and identify potential tangible solutions used to mitigate risk and prevent exacerbation of the situation.

Let’s jump right in.

The Use of Foresight in Crisis Management

The global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus or Covid-19 has taken the world by surprise despite early warnings from experts. In times of crisis, understanding and coping with the immediate present can override thinking about the future.

One observation, the coronavirus is unequally distributed around the world. What some nations and regions faced first, others are facing now, and this gives us a window onto their past experience, which provides a rich resource for action on our present and future. Both successes and failures around the world offer insightful resources for learning.

Strategic Foresight offers a capability through which to think about our actions in the present, conceptualize tactics for the immediate challenges we face, and develop strategies to influence and shape the direction of the future.

Foresight cements a culture of ‘future mindedness’ that coupled with historical knowledge opens up an aperture through which we sense, make sense, and gain insights that can help us now. Complementing global efforts to combat the coronavirus, our goal is to enhance an anticipatory situational awareness capability during crisis response to support a broader ‘systems’ scope of inputs, including emerging response solutions occurring across jurisdictions.

Here, foresight in crisis situations acts as a reflective and forward-looking instrument that:

• Produces near-future scenarios of emerging issues and their cascading effects.
• Enables new response efforts through coordinated learning of response actions.
• Operates as an early warning system, flagging potential disruptions and critical uncertainties that require exploration and strategic dialogue.

Our scope must be laser focused on the emergent now, and consider how those emergent “nows”, interact and impact the developing “tomorrows”.

A tool for enhancing situational awareness and anticipating emerging issues alone, however, is not enough. Emerging issues tend to cascade into secondary and tertiary effects that when coupled with other adjacent threats can create multi-hazard situations that can impact response strategies.

A global pandemic coupled with an imminent environment hazard (e.g. flooding, wildfires) has the potential to exacerbate significantly the current situation if unprepared, stretching emergency response capabilities beyond their limits.

To support anticipation and opportunities for mitigation, we are building a team of individuals focused on emergent issues and cascading effects, as well as anticipating longer-term considerations. In order to deal with the ‘emergent now’ and the ‘imminent then’, crisis foresight teams should be composed of forward-looking subject matter experts and foresight strategists who have subject matter expertise.

For this project, we find it useful to refer to Danish Emergency Management Agency’s (DEMA’s) Pandora Cell. ‘Pandora Cell’ is an add-on feature to the Crisis Management Unit or Incident Command System structure . The aim is to provide near-term foresight during a crisis by exploring the potential disruptive consequences that a complex crisis may cause in the immediate future.

“Managing a crisis response at any level requires the full attention of the personnel involved. There is rarely time to ponder over much other than the current situation and what is being done to address it. Yet, a concise overview of potential imminent dangers and difficulties would appear to be a valuable asset in the effort to anticipate the development of an unfolding crisis. To address this issue, DEMA suggests the integration of a forward looking unit into the crisis management organization as we know it. We refer to this unit as the “Pandora Cell”. - DEMA

The tool we are proposing builds on DEMA’s ‘Pandora Process’ to enhance and support decision making across a set of critical categories.

In addition, we are integrating other foresight tools with the ‘Pandora Process’ to provide a structured approach. This includes:

• Horizon scanning to broaden the lens and view changes in the external macro-environment, and explore different forces using a STEEPV-L framework (social, technology, economic, environment, political, values and legal) that could have an impact on an organization’s micro-environment and response operations.
• Anticipatory methods, such as Emerging Issues Analysis, to identify weak ‘signals of change’ that could be influential in the future and exacerbate the current situation. These ‘signals of change’ could challenge assumptions of the crisis management team, and whether the situation is following the standard trajectory based on past experience.
• Futures Wheel to explore possible cascading effects playing out over time.

2. Category Selection — What To Work On

The collective volume of data and information produced globally for COVID-19 on a daily and ongoing basis is overwhelming. Adding a layer of complexity are the varied regional and national-level responses. In order to pull from reliable and authentic sources, and avoid misinformation, a type of ‘epistemic hygiene’ is needed to cross reference responses, academic discourse and on-the-ground news and social media reporting.

To guide inputs to the issues database, we will refer to a range of reputable and reliable sources, including governmental institutions as our categorical reference model for national measures taken, news and media sources (reactive zone), academic, think-tank reports and business literature (early framing/exploration zone). In addition, we look to asymmetric sources to shed light on nascent emerging issues, perspectives and fringe thinking. These sources will be curated by professionals trained in horizon scanning to ensure a range of issues across effected zones are captured in the database.

We chose public safety and public disturbance as a focus for a Proof of Concept (POC) as it is a category we could work with due to the expected slower rate of development. This provides the additional time needed to build a tool that provides real and timely value to decision makers. This window will close as the global situation worsens, and public unrest may rise as some nations move toward enforcement versus a voluntary compliance paradigm.

As such, our initial scope for the tool includes priority subcategories aligned with Public Safety Canada’s mandate, this includes:

• Security and Safety
• Border Security
• Crime and Terrorism
• Emergency Management
• Law Enforcement
• Corrections

Independent UN human rights experts have stated that public health and emergency measures for Covid19 must respect the fundamental human rights of every individual. This is reflected as a cross-cutting priority focus within the six public safety subcategories.

As the project progresses we plan to build out additional category specific teams.

3. A Method for Transferring Possible Response Efforts to Covid-19 Across Countries

We propose a novel method for enhancing situational awareness for public safety professionals, emergency managers and critical decision makers in real-time crisis through the creation of an anticipatory tool for Accelerated Covid-19 Transfer Learning (ACTL).

Timing, speed and capacity. The health of nations, the social and economic impacts, and length of recovery are directly linked to the speed and timing of actions, contingent on the selection of appropriate measures and the capacity of nations to effectively respond.

Leveraging the aforementioned advantage, that ‘the coronavirus is distributed unequally across the globe’, we can glean general situational knowledge and contextual insights regarding emerging issues from places that first experienced an outbreak.

Transfer Learning is a term adopted from machine learning whereby the knowledge gained while solving one problem, is stored and applied to a different, but related problem. Another helpful definition by Dipanjan (DJ) Sarkar, a Google expert developer in machine learning is given in his Medium article:

Transfer learning is the idea of overcoming the isolated learning paradigm and utilizing knowledge acquired for one task to solve related ones.

The method proposes that the concise documentation and sharing of recent crises issues (within 24–48 hours) can increase the awareness of, and accelerate the movement of responses destined for comparable countries or contexts with similar expected trajectories.

Integrating crisis response intelligence with foresight for learning is one primary goal for us. By creating public, secure and accessible software that focuses on the transfer learning of cascading issues, we can significantly increase the exchange of ideas and lessons learned from those around the world working to contain the virus, and accelerate opportunities for success.

South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and the Italian town of Vo Euganeo gave us our first blueprints and have become global leaders in defining models for “flattening the curve,” and in the case of Vo Euganeo, the potential to eradicate the virus locally altogether.

Below is a very basic overview of our issues database:

Future Cell Database

Global Monitoring of cascading issues and response efforts gives us an opportunity to benchmark best practices as they evolve. As such, we are building the following database structure:

Building National Crisis Response Profiles

How nations respond, what happened, what they did, and how they did it, are foundational for helping other nations in different stages of contagion.

Category Definition/Selection

The types of emerging issues ladder up into broader categories and subcategories that issues would be nested under.

Issue, Cascading Issues (1st, 2nd, 3rd order ‘Effects’)

When faced with the emergent nature of issues we find it best to cast a wide net and triangulate sources, pulling from: reputable news sources, public health organizations, national data sets and social media to build an ‘emerging picture’ as it unfolds.

Possible Causation is also in scope within the task of issue identification.

Possible Response Efforts Identification

Response identification fall under two categories:

1. Real world response efforts from nations.
2. Speculative responses — Identification of experimental responses in the global discourse that show promise.

Below is an example snapshot of a category > issues > 2nd and 3rd order cascading issues > and response efforts.

Issue Example:

Issue: Not following self isolation and quarantine measures

Canadians returning home from abroad ignore recommendations to self isolate and quarantine for 14 days. Enforcement measures currently not in place for compliance. [CANADA]

Cascading Issues 01:

Potential to increase virus spread with outbreak clusters > potential increase high to local communities and potentially vulnerable populations > potential increase need for medical services and strain on health care system >

Cascading Issues 02:

The epidemic will most likely be longer in countries where social distancing is voluntary > long-term strain on health capacity, resources, social and economic recovery > compliance measures could include monetary penalties up to and including criminal penalties

Possible Causation Example:

Possible inconsistent messaging of public health measures from border guards > People need access to essentials and support with daily routine

Possible Response Efforts Example

Send out emergency alerts (texts, radio, tv) to inform public message and provide for links for more information [CANADA]; [CANADA]; [SOUTH KOREA]; [SINGAPORE]

New Order Makes Self-Isolation Mandatory for Individual Entering Canada under the federal Quarantine Act [CANADA]; [SOUTH KOREA]; [SINGAPORE]; [CANADA]

Consider quarantining in designated facilities for households with multiple occupants [SOUTH KOREA]; [SINGAPORE; TAIWAN; HONG-KONG]

Food and essentials can be delivered to mitigate community contact and spread [USA] [USA]; [CHINA]; [SINGAPORE]; [SOUTH KOREA]; [CANADA]; [CANADA]

Supporting the elderly and vulnerable populations — build volunteer groups, designated shopping hours for elderly or online shopping to shop once a week for essentials and drop packages off at door, especially [CANADA]; [UK]; [CANADA]

We defer to the expertise of decision makers to weigh possible response efforts based on their specific needs and expertise. Special consideration should be paid to timing, effectiveness and local capacity thresholds. We attempt to address these considerations in Part 2 of this article.

4. Situational Awareness: Monitoring Emerging Issues, Cascading Effects and Possible Response

The objective of the software application is to increase the near-term ‘scope of awareness’ of a given situation for crisis management and other crisis response stakeholders.

It is the goal of the Future Cell to:

• Broadly collect, compile and monitor emerging issues, potential cascading consequences and response efforts globally.
• Triage sources and re-contextualize issues and response efforts for local, regional, and national governments.
• Build trust in decision making through sourcing diverse, credible, reliable, performant, ethical and/or asymmetric perspectives on the crisis.
• Provide a timely, global, accessible, systemic view of emerging issues by category.
• Identify out-of-view issues and possible response efforts for crisis response personnel that could significantly impact response strategies, avoiding surprises and blindspots.
• Remain sensitive to cultural, environmental, capacity considerations as not all response efforts are broadly applicable across nations.

The purpose of mapping issues visually is to provide rapid situational awareness at a glance. Issues are clustered into Categories for findability. We aim for future versions of this to be dynamic, interactive and near real-time.

An interactive tool such as the one we are proposing would give public safety, emergency managers and decision makers, another option through which to assess and gain insight into their current state, and look ahead when considering possible response activities.

Considerations for Future Cell’s Scope: Calibration

By broadly monitoring emerging issues and their cascading effects as well response efforts, we can assist to broaden the perspective and provide a forward-looking lens for crisis management stakeholders and decision makers.

In order to accomplish this we need to calibrate for a wider scope:

Consider Longer near-term horizons:

• By increasing our time horizon in relation to crisis response’s hyper focus on the present. Focusing instead on the near-term horizon, we can identify cascading out-of-view issues and effects that will negatively or positively interact with the current situation.

Looking to the past for insights on relevant experience:

• Scanning historical records for similar cases, underlining both progress and persisting challenges.

Increase Speed and Accuracy:

• In communicating emerging issues across countries and similar contexts.

Capture a Global View:

• Increase geographic reach of crisis cases being referenced.

Render Systemic /Peripheral vision:

• By increasing the number and diversity of sources to construct an enhanced systemic picture of a situation/current state ie. how different issues and effects are unfolding and interacting across systems.

5. Part 1 Summary

In summary we are:

• Helping to further define the role of foresight in crisis response.
• Expanding the concept of an independent foresight function to create a forward looking capability available to crisis management organizations, international agencies and global leadership.
• Using Transfer Learning as a conceptual framework to create a tool for mobilizing emerging issues, cascading effects and benchmarking solutions across compatible countries and contexts with significant crisis case similarities.
• Anticipating a near future context where law enforcement and/or military involvement is authorized, we have selected ‘Public Safety’ as our focus category to prototype the system.
• A call to action as there are many jobs to be done, that we cannot do alone.
• Even under the ambitious timelines we have set for the team, we acknowledge the time it will take to launch such a tool surpasses its immediate need. As such we will be distributing weekly situational reports focusing on critical issues within the public safety category and respective sub categories.
• Part 2 of this article overview

Jobs to Be Done: Call to action

We are currently seeking capable and passionate individuals to join our team in the effort to realize the tool and resources required. We are also open to feedback and discussion.

Roles and Responsibilities

1. Google Cloud Architect: Lead Architect, Planning, and Implementation of required cloud architecture.

2. Sr. Software Engineer: Lead Engineer and Software Architecture

3. Front End Developer: Define responsive and accessible user interface

4. UX Designer: Define User Experience

5: Project Manager: Manage project timeline, deliverables, and communication

In part 2 we will be discussing the evolution of ideas expressed in part one as we prototype the tool.

Part 2 Overview:

• Future Cell Situation Reports
• Response Adoption Across Nations: Timing, Fit and Effectiveness
• Modelling Situations and Transfer Learning Approach

The Future Cell Team would like to thank public safety professionals, emergency managers, law enforcement professionals, military personnel, policy makers, border control, human rights experts, journalists, essential service workers and all health care providers on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic who work tirelessly to continue to provide access to services during this time.

The Future Cell is a joint effort between Purple Compass and The Foresight Studio.

Future Cell: A Joint Effort

About Purple Compass

Purple Compass helps organizations navigate today’s complexity and uncertainty, anticipate future changes, and create innovative solutions. A unique B2B company, with a niche focus on strategic foresight and design services for disaster risk management and sustainability. Our approach to strategic planning is holistic, inclusive and collaborative, and combines traditional methods with foresight and design methodologies. Purple Compass also hosts the Emergency Management Futures Lab, a lab designed to support anticipatory and adaptive leadership capabilities for resilience.

W: www.purplecompass.ca

About The Foresight Studio

The Foresight Studio is a strategic foresight advisory group working to increase the quality and variety of strategic options available to our partners and clients. We are motivated to observe and understand dynamics of change, and navigate the challenges they present in a methodical, honest and artful manner. As perpetual optimists we apply our anticipatory capability in service of elevating the human condition. TFS is engaged in futures research driving the development of experimental software in generative engineering and design, the industrial internet of things and long range strategic planning for artificial intelligence with a focus on implications for society and culture.

W: https://www.theforesightstudio.com/

Get Involved

Contact: futurescell@gmail.com