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A critical component of scenario planning is strategic communication. Interestingly, according to The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS): “Drought communication is important not only for informing people about current drought conditions, but also for providing education and encouraging people to take adaptation action.” While drought conditions are traditionally the domain of government agencies such as emergency and disaster management, public safety and public health, private sector companies should now look at drought conditions as a function of the strategic challenges brought on by climate change.
While scenario planning outcomes should be used to inform crisis and emergency responses while they are happening, the practice and process of scenario planning should not be performed if drought conditions have already impacted in real-time your geographic region or that of a major supplier or strategic partner. Whipping up scenarios on the fly while in scramble and panic mode is neither a productive response nor scenario planning a productive tool under such circumstances. The outcomes of a scenario planning exercise are primarily concerned with a longer, strategic view and are more aligned with internal efforts to educate and encourage your organization to think differently, pro-actively and early about strategic “adaptation action.”
Let’s now take the scenario planning suggestions and the formative scenarios we provided in the previous posts in this series (OODA Special Report: US Drought Requires Use Of Best Practices in Scenario Planning and How Drought In The US Should Impact Your Mid To Long Range Strategic Planning), locating the drought conditions in the U.S. relative to climate emergencies emergent in the domestic United States and globally. We also provided a six-step scenario planning methodology in the An Executive’s Guide to Scenario Planning for Strategic Decision-making.
In this post, we will do of our drought scenario planning process, in which we:
Throughout Step One:1) We will stop to explain unique pitfalls of this subject matter and a scenario of this scale and scope; and 2) We will point out how the scenario planning process itself generates value for an organization.
For the purposes of this scenario, we have a created a fictional IT Director or CIO for a medium-sized food wholesale and distribution company in the Northeastern United State. The company, Sweet Savory Foods (SSF), is heavily reliant on unique source ingredients and products found in the region most impacted by the drought conditions (fresh organic vegetables from the Central Valley of California and gourmet, organic food products from the Pacific Northwest). SSF also sources craft beer and spirits from both regions. The scenario planning team will execute step one through four of the process. Step 5 (Scenario Confirmation and Stress Test) and Step 6 (Monitor the Signals) will be put into a format for company-wide contributions and participation. The format of these steps is to be determined. Vendors, suppliers, strategic partners and top-tier customers will be integrated into all six steps of the process.
The SSF CIO is the leader of the scenario planning initiative for his company. All the C-Level executives at SSF are stakeholders in the scenario planning process and have selected contributors from each of their division or departments to participate in the process. Employees from San Mateo, CA, and Portland, OR will zoom into Scenario Planning – Foresight Facilitation Workshops. All scenario planning activities are owned by a partnership between the information systems and operations departments at the SST headquarters in Somerville, MA.
For the SSF CIO, the core questions that needs to be answered through this scenario planning facilitation process are:
How do the drought conditions in the Western United States impact the short term and long-term operations, information technologies and supply chains of Sweet Savory Foods and its partners and suppliers? And, more importantly, what are the information and communication technology (ICT), cybersecurity and resiliency risks and impacts informed by these scenarios?
As information technology, cybersecurity and operations experts taking a first stab at scenario planning, the CIO and his scenario planning team realize very quickly they all have differing and alarmingly vague notions of what a drought truly is based on newspaper and television news reportage. They were consumers of news about the crisis wrought by a drought in a far-off region, as opposed to having any working knowledge of drought conditions.
The team leader challenges the scenario planning team to start with a research insight leveraged from the humanities and social sciences (he was an anthropology major in college) which is identifying your unit of analysis or ‘theoretical object’ for observation. The discussion quickly turns to the obvious point that while drought is a word, drought is also a physical event, a news story, a regional meteorological condition, a disaster management event and a formally defined physical phenomenon in the academic discipline known as environmental science.
According to The National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) “research in the early 1980s uncovered more than 150 published definitions of drought. The definitions reflect differences in regions, needs, and disciplinary approaches.” When determining the scope of your scenario planning project, it is important to define terms and set variables which are unique to your subject matter.
A further challenge for the team is that many secondary research sources discuss the drought only as a direct result of climate change. The idea of compound impacts of climate change emerged in the discussion as well, in which other environmental variables caused by climate change were directly impacting the severity of the drought and floods. A long conversation ensued about the counterintuitive nature of droughts having a role in flooding.
Global headlines overwhelmed the team. Why are all these climate events occurring simultaneously and worldwide in the same time frame? What role does the Western United States drought play in the current climate crises and climate emergencies breaking out nationwide? Are they an anomaly or a cumulative sign of a permanent future state? This exploration of questions, research and information gathering (examined through the prism of foresight and strategy) allows a company to avoid scrambling into action or just plain panicking when real world problems inevitably present themselves.
The value proposition of scenario planning: The challenge ahead is communicating your insights to the rest of the company in the form of scenario narratives. For now, in Step 1 – iterative successes and positive outcomes of the process should be put into an accessible format for presentation and distribution to stakeholders, quantifying the value proposition and value creation of the scenario planning process itself.
Now, back to the basics: The team also concluded that if they had questions, the audience for the scenario narratives would have similar questions. Working definitions and an understanding of the basic concepts of drought were in order. “We are not environmental scientists,” offered one team member in a scenario planning workshop early in the process, “so let’s keep the language accessible to a broad audience concerned more with risk probability and impact and business issues.” The team agreed. With that, they set out to minimize vagaries which may emerge later in the scenario planning process by clearly defining crucial terms.
They will still have to use some portion of their research efforts to educate their audience on drought and the current thinking on the compound impacts of climate change. The decision was made to do the cursory research in-house and engage an environmental scientist or climate change expert at a later iteration of the scenario planning process. The team would then be able to ask informed questions from a business perspective, not just leaning on a subject matter expert to deliver broad information on the topic in the early stages of the process, but to respond to questions of business impact and risk at a later stage of their scenario planning endeavor.
Based on their research, the team decided The National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) definition of “drought….as a deficiency of precipitation over an extended period (usually a season or more), resulting in a water shortage. The effects of this deficiency are often called drought impacts. Natural impacts of drought can be made even worse by the demand that humans place on a water supply” which the NDMC features on their Drought Basics webpage.
The team also decided to clarify the difference between lack of rain and the lack of ground water in drought conditions, if any, and the types of drought conditions which most impact agriculture as well as conditions for wildfire. To start, supply chains and drought will be the organizing principle of their business strategy research and information gathering.
After two team meetings are two hours in length) the team discovered working definitions of drought which validated all their points of confusion and open research efforts. The NOAA NIDIS and the NDMC provide definitions of five types of droughts: meteorological, hydrological, agricultural, socioeconomic, and ecological.[i] The first three definitions address ways to measure drought as a physical phenomenon and how to measure it. The last two with drought in terms of supply and demand and broader implications on the climate, tracking the effects of water shortfall as it ripples through socioeconomic and ecological systems.
The answer to their question was not only structured perfectly for their research efforts, but validated the time spent to clarify the disagreements and confusion of their first two scenario planning meetings. The issue of different types and definitions of drought has been integrated into the study of drought for many years.
To integrate an “extreme sampling” and “quick and dirty” meteorology based on global events, the team also defined a few other physical phenomena for further research and discussion, including “Polar Vortex” – as the scenario planning team in the Northeastern United States felt they could apply personal experiences with extreme winter weather events to their strategic thinking about drought.
A cheat sheet was compiled to guide research efforts and discussions moving forward:
“Meteorological Drought: The basis of the degree of dryness (in comparison to some “normal” or average amount) and the duration of the dry period. Definitions of meteorological drought must be considered as region specific since the atmospheric conditions that result in deficiencies of precipitation are highly variable from region to region.
Agricultural Drought: The link between various characteristics of meteorological (or hydrological) drought to agricultural impacts, focusing on precipitation shortages, differences between actual and potential evapotranspiration, soil water deficits, reduced groundwater, or reservoir levels, and so forth.
Hydrological drought: The effects of periods of precipitation (including snowfall) shortfalls on surface or subsurface water supply (i.e., streamflow, reservoir and lake levels, groundwater). The frequency and severity of hydrological drought is often defined on a watershed or river basin scale.
Socioeconomic Drought: The supply and demand of some economic good with elements of meteorological, hydrological, and agricultural drought. It differs from the types of droughts because its occurrence depends on the time and space processes of supply and demand to identify or classify droughts. The supply of many economic goods, such as water, forage, food grains, fish, and hydroelectric power, depends on weather. Because of the natural variability of climate, water supply is ample in some years but unable to meet human and environmental needs in other years.
Ecological Drought: A prolonged and widespread deficit in naturally available water supplies — including changes in natural and managed hydrology — that create multiple stresses across ecosystems.”[ii]
Heat Dome: “Summertime means hot weather — sometimes dangerously hot — and extreme heat waves have become more frequent in recent decades. Sometimes, the scorching heat is ensnared in what is called a heat dome. This happens when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean, i.e. La Niña, creating vast areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the high-pressure “dome.”[iii]
Dry Lightning – “Dry lightning occurrence is of critical importance to land management agencies since this type is most likely to cause wildland fires. Dry lightning is cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning without any accompanied rainfall nearby.”[iv]
Polar Vortex – “A large area of low pressure and cold air surrounding both of the Earth’s poles. It ALWAYS exists near the poles but weakens in summer and strengthens in winter. The term “vortex” refers to the counterclockwise flow of air that helps keep the colder air near the Poles. There are several things the polar vortex is NOT. Polar vortexes are not something new. The term “polar vortex” has only recently been popularized, bringing attention to a weather feature that has always been present. It is also not a feature that exists at the Earth’s surface.”[v]
Wet Bulb conditions – According to Motherboard, “Climate change is here and it’s killing us. But it’s not just the heat. It’s the humidity. That’s why scientists are studying ‘wet bulb conditions’— or temperatures at which humans spontaneously die. What, exactly, are “wet bulb” conditions and when do we need to start worrying about them? Can we do anything to stop them? Are people already dying?”[vi] Also: “One critically important and underreported fact is that as temperatures rise, absolute humidity, the total amount of moisture in the air, will also increase. That may create combinations of heat and humidity so extreme that the evaporation of human sweat won’t sufficiently cool our bodies, leaving even healthy adults at risk of death from overheating.”[vii]Heat plus humidity equals more human misery than heat alone or humidity alone—and more than the sum of the two. Above a specific heat/humidity threshold, outdoor activity with any physical exertion (farm labor, construction work, or a pick-up basketball game) will be dangerous.
The Grasshoppers: “A massive population of grasshoppers is proliferating in the sweltering American west, where a deep drought has made for ideal conditions for grasshopper eggs to hatch and survive into adulthood. They eat and eat [crops] from the day they get born until the day they die. That’s all they do.”[viii]
[i] Drought Basics | Drought.gov
[ii] Types of Drought | National Drought Mitigation Center (unl.edu)
[iii] What is a heat dome? (noaa.gov)
[v] What is the Polar Vortex? (weather.gov)
[vi] It’s Not the Heat, It’s The Humidity That’s Killing Us | CYBER on Acast
[vii] Opinion | Heat and Humidity Are a Killer Combination – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[viii] ‘A scourge of the Earth’: grasshopper swarms overwhelm US west | Climate change | The Guardian
OODA Special Report: US Drought Requires Use of Best Practices in Scenario Planning
How Drought in The US Should Impact Your Mid to Long Range Strategic Planning)
An Executive’s Guide to Scenario Planning for Strategic Decision-making.
Dangerous combination of drought and dry lightning to set up in the Northwest US AccuWeather
Chance of dry lightning in Bay Area prompts fire weather watch (sfchronicle.com)
Thunderstorms and lightning threaten to spur more fires in US west | US news | The Guardian
Drought Status Update for the Pacific Northwest | Drought.gov
Unprecedented Heat Wave in Pacific Northwest Driven by Climate Change – Scientific American
Thunderstorms and lightning threaten to spur more fires in US west | US news | The Guardian
Five heat waves have swelled across the Northern Hemisphere – The Washington Post
Forest fires | European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (europa.eu)
Sarkozy proposes emergency service to respond to disasters in Europe and beyond (apa.az)
110 Dead, 1,300 Missing as Once-in-a-Century Flooding Hits Germany and Belgium | Democracy Now!
Dam in China’s Henan province collapsed by heavy flooding (insiderpaper.com)
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About the Author
Daniel Pereira is research director at OODA. He is a foresight strategist, creative technologist, and an information communication technology (ICT) and digital media researcher with 20+ years of experience directing public/private partnerships and strategic innovation initiatives.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence