Planning for SurvivalOrganizations will differ in what they regard as ‘long term’ and said it would adopt longer rather than shorter timescale.
It should be obvious that we are looking to achieve rather more than conventional planning sets out to do.
In particular, whether most conventional planning extrapolates from existing trends, we are attempting to detect the major discontinuities which may derail these trends.
The greatest long term threat faced by organizations and by whole industries, comes from unexpected discontinuities which undermines the way that they do business.
In example of this has been the coal industry, especially in the United Kingdom. Barely two decades ago miners were the ‘aristocrats’ of manual labor, working in an industry – one of the fundamentals in any economy which seemed to have a a very prosperous future.
The trends were there for all to see: steadily growing use of electrical power, which had to be produced by large coal-burning power stations, which depended upon deep pits nearby for their supplies.
In fact, the outcome is very different. The reason for this are complex, but a number of unexpected discontinuities contributed to this:
Economics
The introduction of bulk carriers, a development in the technology of sea-borne transport, meant that coal could be delivered cheaply from vast open-cast mines on the other side of the world.
Despite the distances involved, it could be delivered to the power stations at prices considerably below that of the coal expensively hewn from the deep pits nearby.
Society
The emergence of a powerful environmental lobby, opposed to the pollution (especially acid rain) caused by coal burning stations, changed the ground rules.
Much of the foreign coal had a low sulphur concept so that it required less treatment of the emissions, while local coal needed significant investment in ‘scrubber’.
Worse still, the newly available supplies of natural gas did not need any such treatment.
Technology
A new generation of gas powered generators were not just more efficient and less polluting, but required a capital investment which was only a fraction of their coal fired competitors.
Politics
All of this was, at the end of the day, overshadowed, in the United Kingdom at least by political developments. At one extreme, the onset of privatization created regional electricity companies which wanted to control their own supplies – even at a cost – and the lower investment in gas powered stations met this need.
At the other extreme, Conservative government wanted to contain the power of the trade unions; and miners – with leaders who powerfully symbolized all that was seen to be wrong with the previous political balance were naïve enough to allow themselves to be used in the destruction of the coal industry as a major weapon in the governments’ campaign.
Caught on the middle of these discontinuities, the coal industry changed from being a major part of the economy, employing hundreds of thousands of manual workers, to a few privatized pits, with a few thousand workers.
Planning for Survival
