Redesign

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 7 DAYS

With a week left before WICO’s deadline for completing its global strategy for dealing with the imminent extinction threat, the organization is going quiet again, “Focusing completely on our task,” as Secretary General Decatur put it in a brief statement today. Given what I learned about the results of their testing, it is reasonable to assume that a major redesign followed by rapid retest is in progress.

Various public and private organization are trying to anticipate how the publicly released information might impact the final product. A major thread through their efforts is the question of whether core assumptions provided to national strategy developers have changed, which could prompt pushback from policy makers and their constituents who have been using the published strategies as a guide to planning future action.

Predictably those who are worried the most about adverse outcomes consider themselves likely to be partially in what Ambassador Lazlo called the “collapse stage.” We already know what fraction of the world’s population has that issue. Rich nations like the United States are attempting to identify what the most radical aspects of the strategy might be, including larger than expected movements of people within and between nations, and major demolition and environmental cleanup activities.

Notably, prominent companies in energy and other resource-extraction industries have announced that they will resist any significant changes to the roles they agreed to in the nation-level negotiations.

Reality Check

Major redesign is not uncommon when test results throw into question key assumptions and structural decisions made in the design process. This is such a case, and it is also not uncommon to resist pushing back a schedule when it happens because of commitments already made to stakeholders and customers of the “product.”