Tracking influenza

An interesting development since the arrival of pandemic flu has been the entrance of Google into the arena, with Google providing data on the progress of flu across the globe.  Initially this appeared when we knew the latest outbreak as "Mexican Flu" and has been steadily updated since.

Essentially, Google uses the search terms being used by all of us and links these terms to the countries in which we are searching.  They soon found that this provided a surprisingly accurate indicator of the progress of flu and led official figures by several weeks; after all compiling official figures takes time and may require diagnostic confirmation.  Google simply looks at what people are looking for and builds a picture from there.

Is it accurate? Well not in the sense of showing precise numbers per country but yes, in the sense of providing an overall picture of where flu is prevalent and increasing and where it may be declining.  So it is useful as an indicator and is likely to show trends more rapidly than official data, it is therefore of some use to the professional seeking to anticipate the threat, or at least anticipate management questions about the threat.  See www.google.org/flutrends.

Future Gazing

As we move towards the year end, it is traditional to think about what the next year may hold.  As it happens, The Economist is celebrating 25 years of future gazing and decided to look forward 25 years.  Some of this is interesting to those interested in resilience as it shapes the very context of our society so I thought I would mention some of the salient points and add a couple of my own. So what might the world look like in 2035?

First of all, there are massive economic shifts occurring.  By 2026 China will overtake the USA as the world's largest economy.  India and China together will be the power house of the world economy and it is expected that the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will overtake the G7 in terms of GDP in 2032.  This begs questions about representation at the UN and the various other bodies that have governed the world since 1945 and we can surmise that there will be a very profound shift of power and a move away from the individualistic free-market capitalism promoted by the US and to some degree by the UK.

This is coupled with the fact that we - i.e. the human race - have recently moved from a majority rural dwelling population to a majority who live in urban centres, a trend sure to continue as towns become cities, and cities become mega-cities.  These conurbations rely on infrastructure to work and are more vulnerable to large scale disruptions, after all a storm that affected a city of 200,000  may now affect city of 5,000,000.  Societal resilience and the resilience of the organisations on which societies depend therefore becomes crucial, and those cities and societies that are most resilient are liable to succeed at the expense of those that suffer set-backs.

Thirdly, the advances of technology will continue apace.  We have seen tremendous change in a very short period, the mobile phone, the Internet, Google, Facebook, the iPod and so on have all appeared in a very few years.  The future will see radical change to the way in which we interact with computers as the keypad and mouse gives way to the interactive surface, gestures and speech direction. Our reliance on such technology will be exposed at some point in the next 25 years when some systemic failure occurs, for instance a solar storm that disables the satellites that provide GPS services, and there will then be steps taken to improve the resilience following this "surprising" event.

Robotics will move from the stuff of science fiction into ordinary life, particularly driven by Japan's need to address its ageing population they will start to export the technology as other countries recognise the same demographic trends.  Already we can see realistic faces with recognisable expressions, robots that walk, talk and perform set tasks.  Integrating these is the challenge and I predict that this will be achieved but that the "creepiness" factor may prevent universal adoption for some time.  The creepiness factor is an expression of the problems that humans have when faced with a machine that is nearly, but not quite, human in appearance.  C3PO is recognisably a robot and we can readily cope with something that is clearly not human; however when something is trying to appear human but we start to pick up clues that it is in fact something else we react by saying that "its creepy".  Roboticists are working hard on this but my bet is that this proves very hard to crack.

So there are a few thoughts about the changing world, I'd welcome ideas from others about how they think the world will be in 2035 and perhaps what this means for our thinking about resilience for society and for the organisations within it.

A surprising approach to trauma

Professionals in business continuity and crisis management have learned that following major incidents, people may be emotionally very disturbed by events and require further consideration and support.  The business continuity plans for HR departments often refer to the ability to call upon a professional trauma counselling service to support staff in such circumstances.

Whilst there is clearly a place for professional counselling on occasion, it is my experience that people want to share their experience with others who had the same experience.  Consequently, following bombings in the UK, staff often reported that talking about their experience and sharing their feelings with those who had been there too was the most beneficial activity for them.  By admitting to feelings of fear, guilt at survival and the persistent questioning of "what if" - where different variations of what might have happened if they had made some slight change to their actual actions constantly play in their mind.  These can be completely debilitating and sharing these concerns with those with similar experiences usually proves very beneficial - and of course some professional facilitation of such an approach can be very useful indeed.

However, recently I became aware of a completely different approach to post-trauma work being pioneered amongst troops returning home from active duties. Both of which involve video games.  In one experimental approach, troops are able to re-enact the events of an actual engagement as video game and then to discuss the feelings that they had.  By repeating the game and exploring their feelings they are able to resolve the uncertainties that persist in the mind and recover to normal life.

Even more surprising is recent work looking at the resolution of issues with flashbacks - a phenomenon where the soldiers find themselves literally re-experiencing combat operations when they might be reading a book, travelling on the tube or otherwise living normal life.  These vary from bad dreams to completely encompassing experiences that prevent normal functioning of daily life.  Once again, video games are being used to see how it is that the brain can be helped to recover and the amazing answer is "Play Tetris".  It seems that playing a visual game like Tetris occupies the parts of the brain that are generating the disturbing images of war and gradually provide something different for the brain to concentrate on.  Clinical trials have found that participants found considerable reductions in their experience of flashbacks within a week of playing Tetris on a regular basis.

Whilst we are far from having a clinical therapy that is based only on computer games, and nor would I suggest that you cancel the professional trauma services and replace these with a set of game boys, it is certainly an interesting development and I am sure we shall see more development in this field in the near future.