Decision Theater

Communicating through chaos: What could a pandemic flu teach us

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

Very happy to be able to break the story about a pandemic flu exercise we conducted here at the Decision Theater at ASU.

It was an exercise that worked on several levels:

  • Strategic Planning
  • Testing Scenarios
  • Communicating with multiple groups
  • Testing a plan through systems dynamic model

I am in the Communications business, so I was keenly observing how different players interacted, assumed leadership positions, and communicated from within the ‘crisis.’

I was lucky to be the fly on the wall (the camera-toting fly, that is) so it got me thinking of the parallels there were for businesses. How do organizations communicate and act in a crisis? As in any marketing campaign or business crisis, the war room is staffed by team members who are are suddenly confronted with the need to operate without the usual props. They may have Blackberries, but the information is coming at them fast and furious through other channels. They may have strong opinions, but so too do the people across the table.

Then there was the interesting irony of some having too much information (mock TV news updates, threat levels, a web cam feed, fact sheets etc) on one side of the room, and others deprived of the usual sources of information (CNN, RSS feeds, radio etc) –all this according to plan. We hosted this event in two areas. Emergency Ops was situated in the ‘drum’ -the high-tech room with a 260-degree panoramic screen, laptops etc. Incident Command and the Executive Policy Group were situated in an adjacent conference room, tethered to the drum via a live camera feed and a land line. No cell phone communication was allowed between the rooms.

Communicators often face situations like this, albeit not in the same life-threatening context. How does a team of those representing PR, Marketing, Advertising, Web Design, HR, IT and Legal Affairs work in crisis mode, in a compressed time frame, when they barely talk to each other in normal life? We seldom act out scenarios, assuming bad things won’t happen to us. History tells us otherwise.

Unless we plan for these hypothetical ‘pandemic’ events we won’t really know. That’s the deeper meaning of strategic planning, isn’t it?

Great picture, but what’s your story?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I wrote this article, titled “Great picture, but what’s your story?” for Communication World magazine, based on a post here on the blog. Actually three posts. This, this and this.

This is a perfect example of the ROI (if you will) of my blog. It’s place where I test ideas out in a short post which gathers steam and based on online and off line conversations, and the idea quickly takes on a second life as a column.

Download article here.

Arizona’s water asset not promoted

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Unlike rivers and dams, aquifers are not something we think about. After all, they are a few hundred feet below. But in Arizona, these constitute our back-up plans in the advent of a drought. They are also the intangible benefits of a desert state.

Unfortunately Arizona doesn’t market its water advantage enough. Water is framed as a crisis, rather than an asset because it’s the damn easiest thing to do. The media don’t help either, focusing on the problem not the solution.

This month WIRED magazine has an extensive feature called “Peak Water” by Matthew Power, covering the US, England and Australia. It leads with water management strategies in Arizona –Chandler in particular. “Thanks to this so-called recharge, the local aquifer is actually rising a few feet a year.” he says, illustrating it with a program between one of Intel‘s fabrication plants (Fab 32) which uses 2 million gallons of water a day, and pumps back 1.5 million gallons a day into an aquifer six miles down the road.

Peak Water is a topic close to me, by virtue of where I work -at the Decision Theater. Among other ways of addressing issues through visualization, we have a sophisticated supply and demand model of water called WaterSim. We are also right next to DCDC which plans for these precious resources. I mean assets.

To some the aquifer is either half empty. To others the aquifer is half full.

In Arizona, what story do we like to tell?

Visualization meets communication – my new job

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

A new phase of my career kicked in this week at ASU. I’ve joined the Decision Theater. A perfect fit for my deep interest in technology and collaborative media.

Excuse the brochure-speak, but if you’ve never stepped into an “immersive environment” on the edge of information technology this is it. The thing that strikes me is how useful it would be to apply this blend of informatics and visualization to other disciplines. Marketers and analysts who value pattern recognition will relate to this high end visualization.

If you’ve dabbled in database mismanagement, you know that spreadsheets and bar charts in spiral-bound books don’t quite set people’s heartbeats racing. Which would you prefer: reading a 90-page document on the ‘water atlas’ or moving a slider to see what happens to the community when reservoir levels dip? Data in 3D, and information presented as alternative scenarios make us want to do something, because we don’t live in one dimensional worlds.

Speaking of which, there was a lot of talk in the last year that the web as we know it is quietly gravitating to a “3D web.” For now it’s a visually interactive web, but the visualization part is making quantum leaps.

Let me know if you would like to see what the future of decision making looks like.