Key definitions
Complexity – intense inter-relationship between two or more crisis drivers which will increase effects of any single humanitarian crisis exponentially. Inter-relationship between crisis drivers will require more holistic, less sectorally isolated approaches to crisis prevention and preparedness as well as response. Complexity, as Tainter has noted, is to a significant extent a creation of human behaviour and institutions: ‘People don’t think about long-term consequences [of the complexity they create]… but ultimately these things do endure for the long-term. They become entrenched and their long-term costs can be very high’ (Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,1988, p.195).
Crisis drivers – factors that expose human beings to life-threatening hazards. Crisis drivers in the future will increasingly include technological (eg systems collapse) and industrial factors as well as those related to climate change, demographic shifts, resource scarcity and economic inequalities.
Crisis preparedness – initiatives undertaken to reduce or eliminate the impact of a crisis driver or drivers upon vulnerable human populations. Normally associated with planning, pre-positioning of relief material and training at appropriate response levels, preparedness in the future will incorporate social and technological innovations such as virtual warehousing, telemedicine, mobile-phone-based early warning and delivery systems, and insurance-based support schemes.
Crisis prevention– initiatives designed to eliminate potential crisis drivers and therefore eliminate potential threats to otherwise vulnerable populations. There are various levels to crisis prevention. At its most basic, prevention deals directly with specific crisis drivers, e.g. through earthquake-resistant housing. At a more general and longer-term level, prevention concerns targeted development and economic growth. For futures planning, development and crisis prevention are inseparable.
Crisis response – action taken to relieve immediate impact of crisis drivers, including search and rescue, distribution of food and water, medical assistance and the provision of shelter. The modalities of response as well as the responders will change significantly over the next decade. Far greater reliance will be placed on insurance-based health and food assistance, on remittance-based support and upon indigenous relief institutions. It is increasingly likely that private-sector corporations as well as military services will play increasingly important roles in crisis response.
Opportunities– the use of natural and social scientific innovations to eliminate, mitigate or prepare for the effects of future crisis drivers. Key to such opportunities is the need to ensure an active dialogue between the scientist, social scientist and policy-maker, and the commitment of the latter to experiment and innovate.
Human vulnerability
Compound crises – the cumulative impact of one crisis increasing the vulnerability of human beings to other crises. In this instance, the impact of pandemics over time can weaken societies over time, and make them more susceptible to the effects of other types of hazards as well as to the effects of new pandemic variants.
Dimensions – the scope of humanitarian crises in the future will become increasingly global, and will reflect greater complexity. As in the past, so too in the future: humanitarian crises will reflect how societies structure themselves and allocate their resources.
Dynamics – describes the speed, scale and nature of crises. Greater uncertainty, complexity and rapidity will be the hallmarks of future humanitarian crises. Future humanitarian crises will be particularly prone to synchronous, simultaneous and sequential events that will intensify impact and complicate response.
Sequential crises – linked to the concept of complexity, sequential crises describe the dynamics resulting from one crisis driver triggering another or multiple crisis drivers. Increasingly so-called natural crisis drivers (eg drought) will lead to human-made crisis drivers (eg conflict), or vice versa. The intensifying inter-relationship between a series of crisis drivers will characterise a growing number of future threats.
Simultaneous crises – major humanitarian crises will occur at the same time, more than likely in different parts of the world and quite possibly as the result of different types of crisis drivers. A principal concern is that the conventional humanitarian-response sector will not have the capacity to meet two or more such crises occurring at the same time, and that a kind of large-scale triage will be the inevitable consequence.
Synchronous failures – full-scale collapse of systems leading to the unravelling of entire social, economic and geographical sectors. Such systems collapse can be triggered by a range of factors such as cyber-hacking into economic systems (eg banks), electricity failures that cripple infrastructures (eg flood barriers) and radiation poisoning (eg through exposure of nuclear waste sites).
The humanitarian organisation of the future
Anticipation – organisational capacity and commitment to be sensitive to longer-term factors that may result in crisis drivers, and the opportunities to address such drivers. Often misinterpreted as ‘futurology’ or prediction, anticipation in the futures context is about an active effort to understand ‘what might be’ and to review these issues from a longer-term perspective (eg two decades). Such longer-term perspectives should relate to strategic end-states. An anticipatory organisation is one that, amongst other things, promotes and provides incentives for futures-oriented speculation.
Adaptation– a measure of the agility with which organisations can respond to new situations, innovations and changes in their environments. In light of the possibility that future humanitarian crises will be marked by rapid change and intense complexity, the effective humanitarian organisation will have the flexibility and fluidity to adjust accordingly.
Collaboration– cooperative behaviour between two or more entities focused upon achieving a particular objective, set of objectives or ensuring a mutually beneficial relationship. Effective collaboration is marked by reciprocity and defined boundaries. To deal with humanitarian crises of the future, collaboration will be essential to cope with crises that will all too often transcend the capacities of any single humanitarian organisation or group of organisations within the humanitarian sector. Positive rather than negative competition will be a characteristic of effective future collaboration. Collaboration too will occur increasingly on-line (via the internet) and crowdsourcing as well as crowdfunding will become increasingly important factors in humanitarian prevention, preparedness and response.
Crowdsourcing– a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. The solvers or users – also known as the crowd – typically form online communities, and submit solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem. (After Wikipedia.)
Crowdfunding– sometimes called crowd financing or crowd-sourced capital, this activity has been inspired by crowdsourcing, and describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money, usually via the internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organisations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns. (After Wikipedia.)
Humanitarian actors– organisations deemed to have roles and responsibilities to prevent, prepare for and respond to humanitarian crises. Such organisations may have multiple mandates, including organisations with development roles and responsibilities such as UNICEF, or security roles such as the US Department of Homeland Security. In the future the range and types of actors will expand and will include networks, transnational ethnic groupings, ‘non-state actors’ (eg Hezbollah), military establishments and the corporate sector.
Innovation – a growing number of scientific and technological discoveries and resulting inventions and related products offer many opportunities for humanitarian organisations to adopt means more effective than those at hand today, to deal with the complex threats that they will have to face. Innovation involves three main challenges: (i) ensuring the capacity for potential users to recognise innovation; (ii) fostering organisational adaptiveness and agility to incorporate innovation into organisational processes and outputs; and (iii) sensitivity to the culture and context of those partners and beneficiaries who might be affected by innovations. By analogy, ‘insufficient attention to innovation may be the principal reason that many of the leading American corporations of fifty years ago either shrunk in size or went out of business altogether’ (Howard Gardner, Five Minds of the Future, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2006, p.78).
Strategy – long-term plan of action intended to achieve an objective or set of prioritised objectives. Tactics, which can include programmes and projects, are the means by which strategies are to be achieved. It is normally assumed that strategies are focused on the longer term (eg a decade) but all too often they are confused with ‘budget cycle’ objectives or overly generalised aspirations. Traditionally, long-term strategies run contrary to the reactive ethos of humanitarian organisations. Such ‘short-termism’ is however increasingly being challenged due to the need to prepare now for the complex crises that will be faced in the future. Effective strategic formulation enables leadership to make constraints on achieving strategic objectives easier to understand and resolve.
Strategy-formulation process– the means by which an organisation determines its strategic objectives, formulates its strategy and reviews that strategy are indicators of institutional anticipatory and adaptive behaviour, as well as organisational coherence and commitment. The key to effective strategy formulation is management’s recognition that the strategy and its underlying assumptions need to undergo regular reviews. And, bearing in mind the dictum of Prussian Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke, ‘No battle plan survives contact with the enemy’, organisations must maintain their overarching objectives while not necessarily clinging to their standard operating procedures.
Strategic leadership– leadership to foster and promote a purpose, based on abiding goals and values, that will transcend the pressures of immediate operational objectives and organisational requirements, while at the same time providing a guiding framework for them. The challenge for this sort of leadership is that the paths towards achieving such goals appear increasingly unclear – marked by a growing sense of uncertainty and complexity.
Strategy–operational linkages– the activities of humanitarian organisations in relation to their longer-term strategic objectives. The alignment between such activities, eg programmes and projects, and an organisation’s strategic objectives is an important measure of organisational coherence. All too often, humanitarian organisations ignore strategic objectives, and focus on implementing the immediate without any consideration of longer-term objectives or consequences.
Planning from the future
Planning from the future– the ‘from the future’ perspective seeks to guide policy-makers and strategy-makers to speculate about ‘what might be’ rather than trying to envision the future by extrapolating from the past (ie trends). Speculating from the future requires people to go beyond the sectoral bounds where they feel comfortable, and into situations where roles, innovations, threats and opportunities introduce new perspectives about what the organisation needs to consider.
Scenario development – consistent with ‘planning from the future’, this is a technique to encourage people to think differently. Scenario development involves exercises that test peoples’ visions of the future by testing their assumptions about ‘what might be’ in the context of different worlds. For a full description of the utility of scenario development for humanitarian organisations of all types, see Scenarios .
Simulation– an imitation of a situation, process or condition designed to determine – in the HFP context – how those within humanitarian organisations would respond to a humanitarian crisis in terms of prevention, preparedness and response.
Strategic modelling– a means of assessing the robustness of organisational strategies by testing them against a mix of variables that will give insights into potential strengths and weaknesses under differing conditions. Strategic modelling has qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions, and its conceptual links stem from systems theory.
Trends – analysis of short- and long-term futures based upon extrapolation of past patterns. By definition, new variables cannot be directly factored into trends analysis because there are no previous patterns to compile into meaningful data to analyse. Trends such as history itself are important but they are potentially hazardous for longer-term planning and strategies, since they tend to restrict potential variables and factors that could dramatically alter planning assumptions.
