A one-day workshop about turning risks into opportunities
with the theme “understanding future sources of human-induced disasters”
led by Nathaniel Forbes, Robert Kay and David Parsons

The Forbes Kay Parsons Charrette 2022 (FKPC) is a one-day exploration of ways to turn the risks of the next ten years into opportunities. (Get it? 2012 + 10 = 2022) FKPC  is an accelerated planning workshop focused specifically on how to get a return on your investment in organizational and community resilience planning.

The Forbes Kay Parsons Charrette 2022 is an innovative approach to resilience organized by Nathaniel Forbes (Singapore), Robert Kay (Australia) and David Parsons (Australia). As far as we know, no one’s ever organized a charrette on resilience risks and opportunities before.

What’s a charrette? It is “an intense period of design activity… organizing thoughts from experts and users in a structured medium that is unrestricted and conducive to creativity and the development of myriad scenarios.” From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charrette

FKPC 2022 will be held on Sunday, 24 June 2012, at the Ontario Bar Association in downtown Toronto, Canada. Admission to FKPC 2022 is CAD $395.00, including lunch.  Participation is limited to seventy-five (75) people selected from the public, private and non-governmental sectors.

Sunday, 24 June is the Sunday before the World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM).  Read more... (646 words, 1 image, estimated 2:35 mins reading time)

‘Because every year, I meet twenty people I should know.’ – David Parsons

In evaluating any conference, I think there are just three questions to ask:

• Did you learn something new?
• Did you meet someone new?
• Afterward, will you do something new?

For the World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM), my answer to all three questions has been ‘yes’ – or ‘Yes!’ – every year since 2005. I always get new insights, often from the same smart people who attend year after year. I always bring back a fistful of name cards from new people I’ve met – public sector emergency managers (EMs), private sector business continuity managers (BCMs), crisis managers (CMs), risk managers (RMs), disaster relief (DR) professionals. And I always lug home my well-travelled leather bag stuffed with new scribbles, new strategies and new quotes to try out immediately.

Those are the KPI’s of a worthwhile conference, in my opinion. And for a guy who lives on the sweltering equator, Toronto weather in June is wonderful.

Some unofficial WCDM history

At its peak five years ago, WCDM drew 1,800 people to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (MTCC) for three (3) days. It seemed to be the only truly “international” resilience conference in the world; flags from 20+ countries accurately represented the origins of the attendees. Its organizer, the Canadian Center for Emergency Preparedness (CCEP), was able to operate for a full year on its revenue from WCDM.  Read more... (3176 words, 0 images, estimated 12:42 mins reading time)

Most industrial parks don’t include SCUBA divers in their recovery plans. But car companies and a shoe maker in Thailand – but nowhere near the ocean – had to hire divers to retrieve hard-to-replace moulds from submerged factories in November. “No one thought about such a worst-case scenario”, said one company president. “In future we will need to reconsider the flood risk.”

They sure will. Three (3) major rivers – the Chao Phraya, Lopburi and Pa Sak – converge around the industrial estates in Ayutthaya. But companies obviously decided that tax incentives and the proximity of suppliers outweighed the risks of catastrophic flooding. Or maybe they just skipped a risk assessment entirely.

Supply chain resilience strategy: don’t build a shoe-, car- or disk drive factory in a floodplain. Some companies may even avoid Thailand. Impact: if one Japanese multinational were to choose, say, Vietnam or Myanmar for its next factory, others would follow, beginning a chain of falling dominoes for Thailand – eventually. Prime Minister Shinawatra’s crisis management effort is just beginning.

• In addition to flooding and storms, risks in Asia include volcanoes, earthquakes and volcanoes with earthquakes – not generally worries in Europe or North America.

Is sexual abuse an organizational resilience issue?

It is for Pennsylvania State University, a large, multi-campus public university (“college”) of 44,000 thousand students in the eastern United States. It could be at any organization – not just a school – if one of that organization’s employees were accused of abusing vulnerable individuals, especially children. Sexual abuse of children is a “significant public health problem” in many parts of the world, including the United States.

College (university) sports are a billion-dollar business in the U.S., a source of weekend pride and prejudice for millions of Americans. The top thirty (30) college sports programs alone raked in $5 billion in revenue last year (the 2010-2011 season). Penn State’s football team generated $73 million for the school, and they don’t even pay their players.  So the business impact of losing the trust of a campus, a community or a country because of criminal sexual conduct is enormous.

If you were a trustee of an educational institution at which lurid charges of sexual abuse by an employee had publicly exploded onto every screen in the land, you’d have a right to expect the school’s administrators to have a crisis management plan, and to brief you about it.    The trustees of Penn State have hired a public relations agency, Omnicom Group’s Ketchum agency, to advise them about crisis management.  Read more... (2929 words, 1 image, estimated 11:43 mins reading time)

The Singapore Crisis Response Network (CRN) provides emotional support and crisis intervention for expatriates from all countries in a crisis. Started by the Singapore American Community Action Council (SACAC), CRN meets about five (5) times a year on the first Wednesday of a month.

If you lived and worked in a foreign country, what would you want or need after a disaster? CRN is thinking about:

You can find Crisis Response Network meeting announcements on the CRN Facebook page; while you’re there, “like” them. Better yet, volunteer. Contact Suzanne Anderson to register for training or to get on the mailing list.