The Wisdom of Crowds

There can be a tendency when planning events to prepare for the big dramatic 'what ifs' but ignore the smaller, less visible although more likely ones which collectively can cause serious problems

The United Kingdom Government maintains what it calls a “UK Resilience” presence on the United Kingdom Cabinet website (http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ukresilience/about.aspx).

The UK Resilience website is run as a news and information service for emergency practitioners by The Cabinet Office and provides advice for practitioners on the pre-emergency phase; advise for practitioners on the post-emergency phase and specific assessments and guidance.

What caught Honestly Lay Bare’s eyes was a recent series of studies released by UK Resilience which argued that focusing on technology instead of people is a key factor in events going wrong.

Compiled by researchers from the Leeds University Business School, the reports also claim that over-reliance on technical and IT solutions means we fail to learn the lessons from past disasters.

The Understanding Crowd Behaviours reports are the first to bring together sociological and psychological research on events and crowd behaviour, reviewing over 550 academic papers and drawing on in-depth interviews with 27 specialists in the field (police, emergency planners and event managers) to produce detailed guidelines for event organisers.

The researchers cite the recent debacle at the opening of Heathrow's Terminal Five as a prime example of a situation where faith in the power of new software and other technology meant that the importance of people – in this case, training and familiarisation in the new building and systems and involving those on the front line in decision making – was overlooked.

Researcher in Organisational Psychology, Rose Challenger, and colleagues Professor Chris Clegg and Mark Robinson, believe that an approach which treats technical and sociological/ psychological considerations in parallel – known in organisational psychology as a 'systems approach' – is the best preparation for a crowd event. It would also, they believe, help us learn lessons from previous mistakes.

"A systems approach is widely seen as best practice in organisational management, particularly in managing change – and is clearly applicable in crowd and event management as well," says Challenger, who led the research.

"Technical solutions will give you the engineering calculations to determine the ideal width of exits but you need to tie that in with understanding how people will behave and use those exits in given situations and how you will communicate with people in an emergency to ensure best use of them.

"Believing new technology can be the answer to all problems means we are more likely to overlook basic lessons from past events.

In the reports, the team highlights gaps in knowledge and areas where further research is needed, including more detailed analysis of the different types of crowd and their behaviour and better simulation models which take the complexity of behaviour into account.

Also identified is a need for more sophisticated risk assessment tools, which can ensure a full range of 'what if' scenarios are taken into account. The reports highlight how the chaos at Terminal Five was caused not because of one major failure, but when lots of smaller and otherwise manageable problems had a cumulative effect.

"There can be a tendency when planning events to prepare for the big dramatic 'what ifs' but ignore the smaller, less visible although more likely ones which collectively can cause serious problems," says Challenger.

"It's important to ensure your risk assessment isn't blinkered. For example, at Hillsborough there was an over emphasis on hooliganism as that was the big issue of the day, but other more generic safety issues were overlooked. Today, we may tend to focus on the risk of a terrorist attack and ignore more banal risks such as power or transport failures or a gas leak." (The Hillsborough Disaster was a human crush that occurred on 15 April, 1989, at Hillsborough, a football stadium, the home of Sheffield Wednesday F.C, resulting in the deaths of 96 people, all fans of Liverpool Football Club. It remains the deadliest stadium-related disaster in British history and one of the worst in international football).

The reports are available on the Cabinet Office UK Resilience website (http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ukresilience/news/crowd-behaviour.aspx ).

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As Honestly Lay Bare read the reports it was struck by how little we apply the principles of risk management to the dynamics of something that happens every moment of every day of every year somewhere in the world – the gathering of a crowd whether it be at a planned event or spontaneously.

We cannot expect of a discipline such as risk management that it will be all things to all people and perhaps therein lies its flaw.

The discipline of engineering CAN be all things to all people – a bridge is a bridge is a bridge.

Therein lies the expectation gap between thinking that we know and knowing what we know.

Post based on “Losing Sight of People In A Crowd Can Spell Disaster, Warns New Report” by Science Daily – 13th July 2009

The Eagle Has Landed

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it.

He said, "Because it is there."

Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.

And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

President Kennedy announcing the aim of a moon landing by the end of 1969 - Rice University, Texas - 1962

This week as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of what is surely one of the greatest achievements of mankind, Honestly Lay Bare today take a journey down the path of an alternative universe that – thankfully – never came to bear.

In 233 words that were lost to the world for 30 years lies a fascinating insight into the extent of scenario planning that accompanied Apollo 11’s voyage into immortality.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon.

The following speech, revealed in 1999, was prepared by President Nixon's then speechwriter, William Safire, to be used in the event of a disaster that would maroon the astronauts on the moon:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

**

We often hear of detailed contingency planning.

In writing this speech we see not an acknowledgement of potential failure but a preparedness for all outcomes.

How many organisations – 40 years after this momentous event – can say that their contingency plans are as extensive.

You've Got Mail

Inform all the troops that communications have completely broken down

For those long term readers of Honestly Lay Bare you will recall back in October 2008 we examined the concept of what we titled the Governance Distress Call – a tool for interested spectators to objectively measure the risk / control environments within differing organisations against a universal measure of distress or success.

Perhaps we were trying too hard to invent something that was before our very eyes and is the very thing that you are now reading this missive on – email!

At the wonderfully named International Workshop on Complex Networks (note to the internal audit profession – we need better names for our conferences!) held in May 2009 in the Sicilian town of Catania (note to the internal audit profession - we need better locations for our conferences), two academics – Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes of the Florida Institute of Technology – argued that email logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point.

**

After Enron collapsed in December 2001, federal investigators obtained records of emails sent by around 150 senior staff during the company's final 18 months. The logs, which record 517,000 emails sent to around 15,000 employees, provide a rare insight into how communication within an organisation changes during stressful times.

The academics identified key events in Enron's demise, such as the August 2001 resignation of CEO Jeffrey Skilling. They then examined the number of emails sent, and the groups that exchanged the messages, in the period around these events. They did not look at the emails' content.

It was expected that communication networks would change during moments of crisis.

Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before.

For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

Perhaps Collingsworth and Menezes have hit upon something that the standard models of communication within internal control environments miss.

As stress builds within a company, employees start directly talking to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.

**

The difficult part is confirming this DURING the (usually silent) build up of stress within the organisation as privacy concerns mean that email logs are hardly ever made public.

(Post based on “Email Patterns Can Predict Impending Doom” by Jim Giles, New Scientist, 22nd June 2009)