Coming Soon: Get Ready ‘cos Here it (some kind of disaster) Comes

This is a selection from Future Here Now, a newsletter produced by the Wise Economy Workshop/ Wise Fool Press.

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Route 50’s summary of key disaster preparedness risks is geared toward state public works and health agencies, but it holds lessons for all of us. Failures in emergency preparedness, like Florida’s recent announcement that it had let about 1 million vaccine doses expire in a warehouse, highlight the fact that we have to level up our managment systems in the face of a wider variety of needs and more complex items than we used to assume. You can leave a cubic yard of road salt in a warehouse for a few months, and chances are it won’t change much, but when public agencies have to manage complex and delicate goods, they need inventory management systems closer to Amazon than the primitive systems that public service warehouses usually have, thanks to decades of underinvestment.

Contingency planning also gets a highlight here, and that’s a very different activity than our usual command-and control approaches. I’ve written about that before, but as this article makes clear, planning for a range of potential outcomes — a wide range — needs a lot more attention than we usually give it.

In the aftermath / middle / ??? of the pandemic, we’re much more aware of these issues than we were a few years ago. We still don’t know what the next normal will look like, but our history tells us that we’ll be strongly inclined to go back to our status-quo assumptions a few years from now. This article, as well as many of our experiences in this time, point us to the fact that we have to take those possibilities much more seriously than we used to assume.

The Fusion Era is expected to be more complex, more volatile and more unpredicable than we’ve gotten used to. For an easy read on some of the big factors emerging and what they mean for your local community, check out The Fusion Era Will Impact Your Community. Here’s How to Survive.