by
John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers
The Millenial sun will first rise over human civilization in the independent
republic of Kiribati, a group of some thirty low lying coral islands in
the Pacific Ocean that straddle the equator and the International Date Line,
halfway between Hawaii and Australia. This long awaited sunrise marks the
dawn of the year 2000, and quite possibly, the onset of unheralded disruptions
in life as we know it in many parts of the globe. Kiribati's 81,000 Micronesians
may observe nothing different about this dawn; they only received TV in
1989. However, for those who live in a world that relies on satellites,
air, rail and ground transportation, manufacturing plants, electricity,
heat, telephones, or TV, when the calendar clicks from '99 to '00, we will
experience a true millennial shift. As the sun moves westward on January
1, 2000, as the date shifts silently within millions of computerized systems,
we will begin to experience our computer-dependent world in an entirely
new way. We will finally see the extent of the networked and interdependent
processes we have created. At the stroke of midnight, the new millenium
heralds the greatest challenge to modern society we have yet to face as
a planetary community. Whether we experience this as chaos or social transformation
will be influenced by what we do immediately.
We are describing the year 2000 problem, known as Y2K (K signifying 1000).
Nicknamed at first "The Millennial Bug," increasing sensitivity
to the magnitude of the impending crisis has escalated it to "The Millennial
Bomb." The problem begins as a simple technical error. Large mainframe
computers more than ten years old were not programmed to handle a four digit
year. Sitting here now, on the threshold of the year 2000, it seems incomprehensible
that computer programmers and microchip designers didn't plan for it. But
when these billions of lines of computer code were being written, computer
memory was very expensive. Remember when a computer only had 16 kilobytes
of RAM? To save storage space, most programmers allocated only two digits
to a year. 1993 is '93' in data files, 1917 is '17'. These two-digit dates
exist on millions of files used as input to millions of applications. (The
era in which this code was written was described by one programming veteran
as "the Wild West." Programmers did whatever was required to get
a product up and working; no one even thought about standards.)
The same thing happened in the production of microchips as recently as three
years ago. Microprocessors and other integrated circuits are often just
sophisticated calculators that count and do math. They count many things:
fractions of seconds, days, inches, pounds, degrees, lumens, etc. Many chips
that had a time function designed into them were only structured for this
century. And when the date goes from '99 to '00 both they and the legacy
software that has not been fixed will think it is still the 20th century
-- not 2000, but 1900.
Peter de Jager, who has been actively studying the problem and its implications
since 1991, explains the computer math calculation: "I was born in
1955. If I ask the computer to calculate how old I am today, it subtracts
55 from 98 and announces that I'm 43. . . But what happens in the year 2000?
The computer will subtract 55 from 00 and will state that I am minus 55
years old. This error will affect any calculation that produces or uses
time spans. . . . If you want to sort by date (e.g., 1965, 1905, 1966),
the resulting sequence would be 1905, 1965, 1966. However, if you add in
a date record such as 2015, the computer, which reads only the last two
digits of the date, sees 05, 15, 65, 66 and sorts them incorrectly. These
are just two types of calculations that are going to produce garbage."
[Peter de Jager, http://www.year2000.com]
The calculation problem explains why the computer system at Marks &
Spencer department store in London recently destroyed tons of food during
the process of doing a long term forecast. The computer read 2002 as 1902.
Instead of four more years of shelf life, the computer calculated that this
food was ninety-six years old. It ordered it thrown out. [United Airlines,
Flight Talk Network, February 1998] A similar problem happened
recently in the U.S. at the warehouse of a freeze dried food manufacturer.
But Y2K is not about wasting good food. Date calculations affect millions
more systems than those that deal with inventories, interest rates, or insurance
policies. Every major aspect of our modern infrastructure has systems and
equipment that rely on such calculations to perform their functions. We
are dependent on computerized systems that contain date functions to effectively
manage defense, transportation, power generation, manufacturing, telecommunications,
finance, government, education, healthcare. The list is longer, but the
picture is clear. We have created a world whose efficient functioning in
all but the poorest and remotest areas is dependent on computers. It doesn't
matter whether you personally use a computer, or that most people around
the world don't even have telephones. The world's economic and political
infrastructures rely on computers. And not isolated computers. We have created
dense networks of reliance around the globe. We are networked together for
economic and political purposes. Whatever happens in one part of the network
has an impact on other parts of the network. We have created not only a
computer-dependent society, but an interdependent planet.
We already have frequent experiences with how fragile these systems are,
and how failure cascades through a networked system. While each of these
systems relies on millions of lines of code that detail the required processing,
they handle their routines in serial fashion. Any next step depends on the
preceding step. This serial nature makes systems, no matter their size,
vulnerable to even the slightest problem anywhere in the system. In 1990,
ATT's long distance system experienced repeated failures. At that time,
it took two million lines of computer code to keep the system operational.
But these millions of lines of code were brought down by just three lines
of faulty code.
And these systems are lean; redundancies are eliminated in the name of efficiency.
This leanness also makes the system highly vulnerable. In May of this year,
90% of all pagers in the U.S. crashed for a day or longer because of the
failure of one satellite. Late in 1997, the Internet could not deliver email
to the appropriate addresses because bad information from their one and
only central source corrupted their servers.
Compounding the fragility of these systems is the fact that we can't see
the extent of our interconnectedness. The networks that make modern life
possible are masked by the technology. We only see the interdependencies
when the relationships are disrupted -- when a problem develops elsewhere
and we notice that we too are having problems. When Asian markets failed
last year, most U.S. businesses denied it would have much of an impact on
our economy. Only recently have we felt the extent to which Asian economic
woes affect us directly. Failure in one part of a system always exposes
the levels of interconnectedness that otherwise go unnoticed -- we suddenly
see how our fates are linked together. We see how much we are participating
with one another, sustaining one another.
Modern business is completely reliant on networks. Companies have vendors,
suppliers, customers, outsourcers (all, of course, managed by computerized
data bases.) For Y2K, these highly networked ways of doing business create
a terrifying scenario. The networks mean that no one system can protect
itself from Y2K failures by just attending to its own internal systems.
General Motors, which has been working with extraordinary focus and diligence
to bring their manufacturing plants up to Year 2000 compliance (based on
their assessment that they were facing catastrophe) has 100,000 suppliers
worldwide. Bringing their internal systems into compliance seems nearly
impossible, but what then do they do with all those vendors who supply parts?
GM experiences production stoppages whenever one key supplier goes on strike.
What is the potential number of delays and shutdowns possible among 100,000
suppliers?
The nature of systems and our history with them paints a chilling picture
of the Year 2000. We do not know the extent of the failures, or how we will
be affected by them. But we do know with great certainty that as computers
around the globe respond or fail when their calendars record 2000, we will
see clearly the extent of our interdependence. We will see the ways in which
we have woven the modern world together through our technology.
Until quite recently, it's been difficult to interest most people in the
Year 2000 problem. Those who are publicizing the problem (the Worldwide
Web is the source of the most extensive information on Y2K) exclaim about
the general lack of awareness, or even the deliberate blindness that greets
them. In our own investigation among many varieties of organizations and
citizens, we've noted two general categories of response. In the first category,
people acknowledge the problem but view it as restricted to a small number
of businesses, or a limited number of consequences. People believe that
Y2K affects only a few industries -- primarily finance and insurance --
seemingly because they deal with dates on policies and accounts. Others
note that their organization is affected by Y2K, but still view it as a
well-circumscribed issue that is being addressed by their information technology
department. What's common to these comments is that people hold Y2K as a
narrowly-focused, bounded problem. They seem oblivious to the networks in
which they participate, or to the systems and interconnections of modern
life.
The second category of reactions reveals the great collective faith in technology
and science. People describe Y2K as a technical problem, and then enthusiastically
state that human ingenuity and genius always finds a way to solve these
type of problems. Ecologist David Orr has noted that one of the fundamental
beliefs of our time is that technology can be trusted to solve any problem
it creates. ["Slow Knowledge," ____1997] If a software engineer
goes on TV claiming to have created a program that can correct all systems,
he is believed. After all, he's just what we've been expecting.
And then there is the uniqueness of the Year 2000 problem. At no other time
in history have we been forced to deal with a deadline that is absolutely
non-negotiable. In the past, we could always hope for a last minute deal,
or rely on round-the-clock bargaining, or pray for an eleventh hour savior.
We have never had to stare into the future knowing the precise date when
the crisis would materialize. In a bizarre fashion, the inevitability of
this confrontation seems to add to people's denial of it. They know the
date when the extent of the problem will surface, and choose not to worry
about it until then.
However, this denial is quickly dissipating. Information on Y2K is expanding
exponentially, matched by an escalation in adjectives used to describe it.
More public figures are speaking out. This is critically important. With
each calendar tick of this time, alternatives diminish and potential problems
grow. We must develop strategies for preparing ourselves at all levels to
deal with whatever Y2K presents to us with the millennium dawn.
What we know about Y2K: It is
We'd like to describe in greater detail the extent of Y2K. As a global network
of interrelated consequences, it begins at the center with the technical
problem, legacy computer codes and embedded microchips. For the last thirty
years thousands of programmers have been writing billions of lines of software
code for the computers on which the world's economy and society now depend.
Y2K reporter Ed Meagher describes "old, undocumented code written in
over 2500 different computer languages and executed on thousands of different
hardware platforms being controlled by hundreds of different operating systems
. . . [that generate] further complexity in the form of billions of six
character date fields stored in millions of databases that are used in calculations."
["The Complexity Factor" by Ed Meagher at http://www.year2000.com/archive/NFcomplexity.html]
The Gartner Group, a computer-industry research group, estimates that globally,
180 billion lines of software code will have to be screened. ["Industry
Wakes Up to the Year 2000 Menace," Fortune, April 27,
1998] Peter de Jager notes that it is not unusual for a company to have
more than 100,000,000 lines of code -- the IRS, for instance, has at least
eighty million lines. The Social Security Administration began working on
its thirty million lines of code in 1991. After five years of work, in June,
1996, four hundred programmers had fixed only six million lines. The IRS
has 88,000 programs on 80 mainframe computers to debug. By the end of last
year they had cleaned up 2,000 programs. [The Washington Post,
"If Computer Geeks Desert, IRS Codes Will Be ciphers," December
24, 1997] Capers Jones, head of Software Productivity Research, a firm that
tracks programmer productivity, estimates that finding, fixing and testing
all Y2K-affected software would require over 700,000 person-years. [Business
Week, March 2, 1998] Programmers have been brought out of retirement
and are receiving extraordinary wages and benefits to stick with this problem,
but we are out of time. There aren't nearly enough programmers nor hours
remaining before January 1, 2000.
Also at the center of this technical time bomb are the embedded microprocessors.
There are somewhat over a billion of these hardware chips located in systems
worldwide. They sustain the world's manufacturing and engineering base.
They exist in traffic lights, elevators, water, gas, and electricity control
systems. They're in medical equipment and military and navigation systems.
America's air traffic control system is dependent upon them. They're located
in the track beds of railroad systems and in the satellites that circle
the earth. Global telecommunications are heavily dependent on them. Modern
cars contain about two dozen microprocessors. The average American comes
in contact with seventy microprocessors before noon every day. Many of these
chips aren't date sensitive, but a great number are, and engineers looking
at long ago installed systems don't know for sure which is which. To complicate
things further, not all chips behave the same. Recent tests have shown that
two chips of the same model installed in two different computers but performing
the same function are not equally sensitive to the year-end problem. One
shuts down and the other doesn't.
It is impossible to locate all of these chips in the remaining months, nor
can we replace all those that are identified. Those more than three years
old are obsolete and are probably not available in the marketplace. The
solution in those cases is to redesign and remanufacture that part of the
system -- which often makes starting over with new equipment the best option.
That is why some companies are junking their computer systems and spending
millions, even hundreds of millions, to replace everything. It at least
ensures that their internal systems work.
At issue is time, people, money, and the nature of systems. These technical
problems are exacerbated by government and business leaders who haven't
yet fully understood the potential significance of this issue for their
own organizations, to say nothing of the greater economic implications.
The U.S. leads all other developed nations in addressing this issue, minimally
by six to nine months. Yet in a recent survey of American corporate chief
information officers, 70% of them expressed the belief that even their companies
would not be completely prepared for Y2K. Additionally, 50% of them acknowledged
that they would not fly during January 2000. If America is the global leader
in Y2K efforts, these CIO comments are indeed sobering.
The economic impacts for the global economy are enormous and unknown. The
Gartner Group projects that the total cost of dealing with Y2K worldwide
will be somewhere between $300 billion to $600 billion -- and these are
only direct costs associated with trying to remedy the problem. (These estimates
keep rising every quarter now.) The Office of Management and Budget (OMB),
in a recently released Quarterly Report, estimated total government
Y2K expense at $3.9 billion. This figure was based only on federal agency
estimates; the OMB warned that this estimate might be as much as 90% too
low considering the increasing labor shortage and expected growing remediation
costs as January 1, 2000 looms nearer. And in June of this year, it was
announced that federal agencies had already spent five billion dollars.
Of twenty-four agencies, fifteen reported being behind schedule.
These numbers don't consider the loss of output caused by diverting resources
to forestall this crisis. In more and more businesses, expenditures for
R&D and modernization are being diverted to Y2K budgets. Business
Week in March of 1998 estimated that the Year 2000 economic damage
alone would be $119 billion. When potential lawsuits and secondary effects
are added to this -- people suing over everything from stalled elevators
to malfunctioning nuclear power plants -- the cost easily could be over
$1 trillion.
But these problems and estimates don't begin to account for the potential
impact of Y2K. The larger significance of this bomb becomes apparent when
we consider the next circle of the global network-- the organizational relationships
that technology makes possible.
The global economy is dependent upon computers both directly and indirectly.
Whether it's your PC at home, the workstation on a local area network, or
the GPS or mobile telephone that you carry, all are integral parts of larger
networks where computers are directly connected together. As we've learned,
failure in a single component can crash the whole system; that system could
be an automobile, a train, an aircraft, an electric power plant, a bank,
a government agency, a stock exchange, an international telephone system,
the air traffic control system. If every possible date-sensitive hardware
and software bug hasn't been fixed in a larger system, just one programming
glitch or one isolated chip potentially can bring down the whole thing.
While there isn't enough time or technical people to solve the Y2K problem
before the end of next year, we might hope that critical aspects of our
infrastructure are tackling this problem with extreme diligence. But this
isn't true. America's electric power industry is in danger of massive failures,
as described in Business Week's February '98 cover story on
Y2K. They report that "electric utilities are only now becoming aware
that programmable controllers -- which have replaced mechanical relays in
virtually all electricity-generating plants and control rooms -- may behave
badly or even freeze up when 2000 arrives. Many utilities are just getting
a handle on the problem." It's not only nuclear power plants that are
the source of concern, although problems there are scary enough. In one
Year 2000 test, notes Jared S.Wermiel, leader of the Y2K effort at the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, the security computer at a nuclear power plant failed
by opening vital areas that are normally locked. Given the complexity and
the need to test, "it wouldn't surprise me if certain plants find that
they are not Year 2000-ready and have to shut down." [http://www.igs.net/~tonyc/y2kbusweek.html]
Other electric utility analysts paint a bleaker picture. Rick Cowles, who
reports on the electric utility industry, said at the end of February: "Not
one electric company [that he had talked to] has started a serious remediation
effort on its embedded controls. Not one. Yes, there's been some testing
going on, and a few pilot projects here and there, but for the most part
it is still business-as-usual, as if there were 97 months to go, not 97
weeks. ["Industry Gridlock," Rick Cowles, February 27, 1998, http://www.y2ktimebomb.com/PP/RC/rc9808.htm]
After attending one industry trade show, Cowles stated that, "Based
on what I learned at DistribuTECH '98, I am convinced there is a 100% chance
that a major portion of the domestic electrical infrastructure will be lost
as a result of the Year 2000 computer and embedded systems problem. The
industry is fiddling whilst the infrastructure burns." [Cowles, January
23, 1998, ibid]
The Federal Aviation Administration is also very vulnerable but quite optimistic.
"We're on one hand working to get those computers Year 2000 compliant,
but at the same time we're working on replacing those computers," said
Paul Takemoto, a spokesman for the FAA in early '98. At the twenty Air Route
Traffic Control Centers, there is a host computer and a backup system. All
forty of these machines -- mid-'80s vintage IBM 3083 mainframes -- are affected.
And then there are the satellites with embedded chips, individual systems
in each airplane, and air traffic control systems around the globe. Lufthansa
already has announced it will not fly its aircraft during the first days
of 2000.
But the interdependency problem extends far beyond single businesses, or
even entire industries. Indirect relationships extend like tentacles into
many other networks, creating the potential for massive disruptions of service.
Let's hope that your work organization spends a great deal of money and
time to get its entire information system compliant. You know yours is going
to function. But on the second of January 2000 the phone calls start. It's
your banker. "There's been a problem," he says. They've lost access
to your account information and until they solve the problem and get the
backup loaded on the new system, they are unable to process your payroll.
"We don't have any idea how long it will take," the president
says.
Then someone tells you that on the news there's a story that that the whole
IRS is down and that they can neither accept nor process tax information.
Social Security, Federal Housing, Welfare -- none of these agencies are
capable of issuing checks for the foreseeable future. Major airlines aren't
flying, waiting to see if there is still integrity in the air traffic control
system. And manufacturing across the country is screeching to a halt because
of failures in their supply chain. (After years of developing just in time
(JIT) systems, there is no inventory on hand -- suppliers have been required
to deliver parts as needed. There is no slack in these systems to tolerate
even minor delivery problems.) Ground and rail transport have been disrupted,
and food shortages appear within three to six days in major metropolises.
Hospitals, dealing with the failure of medical equipment, and the loss of
shipments of medicine, are forced to deny non-essential treatment, and in
some cases are providing essential care in pre-technical ways.
It's a rolling wave of interdependent failures. And it reaches across the
country and the world to touch people who, in most cases, didn't know they
were linked to others. Depending on what systems fail, very few but strategically
placed failures would initiate a major economic cascade. Just problems with
power companies and phone systems alone would cause real havoc. (This spring,
a problem in ATT rendered all credit card machines useless for a day. How
much revenue was lost by businesses?) If only twenty percent of businesses
and government agencies crash at the same time, major failures would ensue.
In an interdependent system, solving most of the problem is no solution.
As Y2K reporter Ed Meagher describes:
"It is not enough to solve simply 'most of these problems.' The integration
of these systems requires that we solve virtually all of them. Our ability
as an economy and as a society to deal with disruptions and breakdowns in
our critical systems is minuscule. Our worst case scenarios have never envisioned
multiple, parallel systemic failures. Just in time inventory has led to
just in time provisioning. Costs have been squeezed out of all of our critical
infrastructure systems repeatedly over time based on the ubiquity and reliability
of these integrated systems. The human factor, found costly, slow, and less
reliable has been purged over time from our systems. Single, simple failures
can be dealt with; complex, multiple failures have been considered too remote
a possibility and therefore too expensive to plan for." [The
Complexity Factor, Ed Meagher]
The city of New York began to understand this last September. The governor
of New York State banned all nonessential IT projects to minimize the disruption
caused by the year 2000 bomb after reading a detailed report that forecasts
the millennium will throw New York City into chaos, with power supplies,
schools, hospitals, transport, and the finance sector likely to suffer severe
disruption. Compounding the city's Y2K risks is the recent departure of
the head of its year 2000 project to a job in the private sector. [http://www.computerweekly.co.uk/news/ll_9_97]
But of course the anticipated problems extend far beyond U.S. shores. In
February, the Bangkok Post reported that Phillip Dodd, a Unysis Y2K expert,
expects that upward of 70% of the businesses in Asia will fail outright
or experience severe hardship because of Y2K. The Central Intelligence Agency
supports this with their own analysis: "We're concerned about the potential
disruption of power grids, telecommunications and banking services, among
other possible fallout, especially in countries already torn by political
tensions." [Reuters: "CIA: Year 2000 to hit basic services: Agency
warns that many nations aren't ready for disruption," Jim Wolf, May
7, 1998]
A growing number of assessments of this kind have led Dr. Edward Yardeni,
the chief economist of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, to keep raising the probability
of a deep global recession in 2000-2001 as the result of Y2K. His present
estimate of the potential for such a recession now hovers at about 70%,
up from 40% at the end of 1997. [http://www.Yardeni.com]
As individuals, nations, and as a global society, do we have a choice as
to how we might respond to Y2K, however problems materialize? The question
of alternative social responses lies at the outer edges of the interlocking
circles of technology and system relationships. At present, potential societal
reactions receive almost no attention. But we firmly believe that it is
the central most important place to focus public attention and individual
ingenuity. Y2K is a technology-induced problem, but it will not and cannot
be solved by technology. It creates societal problems that can only be solved
by humans. We must begin to address potential social responses. We need
to be engaged in this discourse within our organizations, our communities,
and across the traditional boundaries of competition and national borders.
Without such planning, we will slide into the Year 2000 as hapless victims
of our technology.
Even where there is some recognition of the potential disruptions or chaos
that Y2K might create, there's a powerful dynamic of secrecy preventing
us from engaging in these conversations. Leaders don't want to panic their
citizens. Employees don't want to panic their bosses. Corporations don't
want to panic investors. Lawyers don't want their clients to confess to
anything. But as psychotherapist and information systems consultant Dr.
Douglass Carmichael has written:
"Those who want to hush the problem ('Don't talk about it, people will
panic', and 'We don't know for sure.') are having three effects. First,
they are preventing a more rigorous investigation of the extent of the problem.
Second, they are slowing down the awareness of the intensity of the problem
as currently understood and the urgency of the need for solutions, given
the current assessment of the risks. Third, they are making almost certain
a higher degree of ultimate panic, in anger, under conditions of shock."
[http://www.tmn.com/~doug]
Haven't we yet learned the consequences of secrecy? When people are kept
in the dark, or fed misleading information, their confidence in leaders
quickly erodes. In the absence of real information, people fill the information
vacuum with rumors and fear. And whenever we feel excluded, we have no choice
but to withdraw and focus on self-protective measures. As the veil of secrecy
thickens, the capacity for public discourse and shared participation in
solution-finding disappears. People no longer believe anything or anybody
-- we become unavailable, distrusting and focused only on self-preservation.
Our history with the problems created by secrecy has led CEO Norman Augustine
to advise leaders in crisis to: "Tell the truth and tell it fast."
["Managing the Crisis You Tried to Prevent," Harvard Business
Review, Nov-Dec. 1995, 158.]
Behaviors induced by secrecy are not the only human responses available.
Time and again we observe a much more positive human response during times
of crisis. When an earthquake strikes, or a bomb goes off, or a flood or
fire destroys a community, people respond with astonishing capacity and
effectiveness. They use any available materials to save and rescue, they
perform acts of pure altruism, they open their homes to one another, they
finally learn who their neighbors are. We've interviewed many people who
participated in the aftermath of a disaster, and as they report on their
experiences, it is clear that their participation changed their lives. They
discovered new capacities in themselves and in their communities. They exceeded
all expectations. They were surrounded by feats of caring and courage. They
contributed to getting systems restored with a speed that defied all estimates.
When chaos strikes, there's simply no time for secrecy; leaders have no
choice but to engage every willing soul. And the field for improvisation
is wide open -- no emergency preparedness drill ever prepares people for
what they actually end up doing. Individual initiative and involvement are
essential. Yet surprisingly, in the midst of conditions of devastation and
fear, people report how good they feel about themselves and their colleagues.
These crisis experiences are memorable because the best of us becomes visible
and available. We've observed this in America, and in Bangladesh, where
the poorest of the poor responded to the needs of their most destitute neighbors
rather than accepting relief for themselves.
What we know about people in crisis:
As we sit staring into the unknown dimensions of a global crisis whose timing
is non-negotiable, what responses are available to us as a human community?
An effective way to explore this question is to develop potential scenarios
of possible social behaviors. Scenario planning is an increasingly accepted
technique for identifying the spectrum of possible futures that are most
important to an organization or society. In selecting among many possible
futures, it is most useful to look at those that account for the greatest
uncertainty and the greatest impact.
For Y2K, David Isenberg (a former AT&T telecommunications expert, now
at Isen.Com) has identified the two variables which seem obvious -- the
range of technical failures from isolated to multiple,
and the potential social responses, from chaos to coherence.
Both variables are critical and uncertain and are arrayed as a pair of crossing
axes. When displayed in this way, four different general futures emerge.
(1) In the upper left quadrant, if technical failures are isolated and society doesn't respond to those failures, nothing of significance will happen. Isenberg labels this the "Official Future" because it reflects present behavior on the part of leaders and organizations.
(2) The upper right quadrant describes a time where technical failures are still isolated, but the public responds to these with panic, perhaps fanned by the media or by stonewalling leaders. Termed "A Whiff of Smoke", the situation is analogous to the panic caused in a theater by someone who smells smoke and spreads an alarm, even though it is discovered that there is no fire. This world could evolve from a press report that fans the flames of panic over what starts as a minor credit card glitch (for example) and, fueled by rumors turns nothing into a major social problem with runs on banks, etc.
The lower quadrants describe far more negative scenarios.
(3) The lower right, "Millennial Apocalypse" presumes large-scale technical failure coupled with social breakdown as the organizational, political and economic systems come apart.
(4) The lower left quadrant, "Human Spirit" posits a society that, in the face of clear adversity, calls on each of us to collaborate in solving the problems of breakdown.
Since essentially we are out of time and resources for preventing widespread
Y2K failures, a growing number of observers believe that the only plausible
future scenarios worth contemplating are those in the lower half of the
matrix (scenarios 3 and 4). The major question before us is how will society
respond to what is almost certain to be widespread and cascading technological
failures?
Here is one possible natural evolution of the problem: Early, perhaps even
in '98, the press could start something bad long before it was clear how
serious the problem was and how society would react to it. There could be
an interim scenario where a serious technical problem turned into a major
social problem from lack of adaquate positive social response. This "Small
Theatre Fire" future could be the kind of situation where people overreact
and trample themselves trying to get to the exits from a small fire that
is routinely extinguished.
If the technical situation is bad, a somewhat more ominous situation could
evolve where government, exerting no clear positive leadership and seeing
no alternative to chaos, cracks down so as not to lose control. A common
historical response to social chaos has been for the government to intervene
in a non-democratic, sometimes brutal fashion. In response to Y2K, "techno-fascism"
is a plausible scenario: governments and large corporations would intervene
to try to contain the damage, rather than build for the future. This dictatorial
approach would be accompanied by secrecy about the real extent of the problem
and ultimately fueled by the cries of distress, prior to 2000, from a society
that has realized its major systems are about to fail and that it is too
late to do anything about it.
Obviously, the scenario worth working towards is "Human Spirit,"
a world where the best of human creativity is enabled and the highest common
good becomes the objective. In this world we all work together, developing
a very broad, powerful, synergistic, self-organizing force focused on determining
what humanity should be doing in the next 18 months to plan for the aftermath
of the down stroke of Y2K. This requires that we understand Y2K not as a
technical problem, but as a systemic, worldwide event that can only be resolved
by new social relationships. All of us need to become very wise and very
engaged very fast and develop entirely new processes for working together.
Systems issues cannot be resolved by hiding behind traditional boundaries
or by clinging to competitive strategies. Systems require collaboration
and the dissolution of existing boundaries. Our only hope for healthy responses
to Y2K-induced failures is to participate together in new collaborative
relationships.
At present, individuals and organizations are being encouraged to protect
themselves, to focus on solving "their" problem. In a system's
world, this is insane. The problems are not isolated, therefore no isolated
responses will work. The longer we pursue strategies for individual survival,
the less time we have to create any viable, systemic solutions. None of
the boundaries we've created across industries, organizations, communities,
or nation states give us any protection in the face of Y2K. We must stop
the messages of fragmentation now and focus resources and leadership on
figuring out how to engage everyone, at all levels, in all systems.
As threatening as Y2K is, it also gives us the unparalleled opportunity
to figure out new and simplified ways of working together. GM's chief information
officer, Ralph Szygenda, has said that Y2K is the cruelest trick ever played
on us by technology, but that it also represents a great opportunity for
change. [In Fortune, April 27, 1998] It demands that we let
go of traditional boundaries and roles in the pursuit of new, streamlined
systems, ones that are less complex than the entangled ones that have evolved
over the past thirty years.
There's an interesting lesson here about involvement
that comes from the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Just a few weeks prior
the bombing, agencies from all over the city conducted an emergency preparedness
drill as part of normal civil defense practice. They did not prepare themselves
for a bomb blast, but they did work together on other disaster scenarios.
The most significant accomplishment of the drill was to create an invisible
infrastructure of trusting relationships. When the bomb went off, that infrastructure
displayed itself as an essential resource--people could work together easily,
even in the face of horror. Many lives were saved and systems were restored
at an unprecedented rate because people from all over the community worked
together so well.
But there's more to this story. One significant player had been excluded
from the preparedness drill, and that was the FBI. No one thought they'd
ever be involved in a Federal matter. To this day, people in Oklahoma City
speak resentfully of the manner in which the FBI came in, pushed them aside,
and offered no explanations for their behavior. In the absence of trusting
relationships, some form of techno-fascism is the only recourse. Elizabeth
Dole, as president of the American Red Cross commented: "The midst
of a disaster is the poorest possible time to establish new relationships
and to introduce ourselves to new organizations . . . . When you have taken
the time to build rapport, then you can make a call at 2 a.m., when the
river's rising and expect to launch a well-planned, smoothly conducted response."
[quoted in "Managing the Crisis You Tried to Prevent," Norman
Augustine, Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec 1995, 151.]
The scenario of communities and organizations working together in new ways
demands a very different and immediate response not only from leaders but
from each of us. We'd like to describe a number of actions that need to
begin immediately.
We urge leaders to give up trying to carry this burden alone, or trying
to reestablish a world that is irretrievably broken. We need leaders to
be catalysts for the emergence of a new world. They cannot lead us through
this in traditional ways. No leader or senior team can determine what needs
to be done. No single group can assess the complexity of these systems and
where the consequences of failure might be felt. The unknown but complex
implications of Y2K demand that leaders support unparalleled levels of participation
-- more broad-based and inclusive than ever imagined. If we are to go through
this crisis together rather than bunkered down and focused only on individual
security, leaders must begin right now to convene us. The first work of
leaders then, is to create the resources for groups to come together in
conversations that will reveal the interconnections. Boundaries need to
dissolve. Hierarchies are irrelevant. Courageous leaders will understand
that they must surrender the illusion of control and seek solutions from
the great networks and communities within their domain. They must move past
the dynamics of competition and support us in developing society-wide solutions.
Leaders can encourage us to seek out those we have excluded and insist that
they be invited in to all deliberations. Leaders can provide the time and
resources for people to assess what is critical for the organization or
community to sustain -- its mission, its functions, its relationships, its
unique qualities. From these conversations and plans, we will learn to know
one another and to know what we value. In sudden crises, people instantly
share a sense of meaning and purpose. For Y2K, we have at least a little
lead time to develop a cohesive sense of what might happen and how we hope
to respond.
Secrecy must be replaced by full and frequent disclosure of information.
The only way to prevent driving people into isolated and self-preserving
behaviors is to entrust us with difficult, even fearsome information, and
then to insist that we work together.
No leader anywhere can ignore these needs or delay their implementation.
Communities need to assess where they are most vulnerable and develop contingency
plans. Such assessment and planning needs to occur not just within individual
locales, but also in geographic regions. These activities can be initiated
by existing community networks, for example, civic organizations such as
Lions or Rotary, Council of Churches, Chamber of Commerce, the United Way.
But new and expansive alliances are required, so planning activities need
quickly to extend beyond traditional borders. We envision residents of all
ages and experience coming together to do these audits and planning. Within
each community and region, assessments and contingency plans need to be
in place for disruptions or loss of service for:
Organizations need to move Y2K from the domain of technology experts into
the entire organization. Everyone in the organization has something important
to contribute to this work. Assessment and contingency plans need to focus
on:
The trust and loyalty developed through these strategic conversations and
joint planning will pay enormous dividends later on, even if projected breakdowns
don't materialize. Corporate and community experience with scenario planning
has taught a important principle: We don't need to be able to predict the
future in order to be well-prepared for it. In developing scenarios, information
is sought from all over. People think together about its implications and
thus become smarter as individuals and as teams. Whatever future then materializes
is dealt with by people who are more intelligent and who know how to work
well together.
And such planning needs to occur at the level of entire industries. Strained
relationships engendered by competitive pressures need to be put aside so
that people can collaboratively search for ways to sustain the very fabric
of their industry. How will power grids be maintained nationally? Or national
systems of food transport? How will supply chains for manufacturing in any
industry be sustained?
We urge you to get involved in Y2K, wherever you are, and in whatever organizations
you participate. We can't leave this issue to others to solve for us, nor
can we wait for anyone else to assert leadership. You can begin to ask questions;
you can begin to convene groups of interested friends and colleagues; you
can engage local and business leaders; you can educate yourself and others
(start with http://www.Year2000.com
and http://www.Y2K.com for up-to-date
information and resources). This is our problem. And as an African proverb
reminds us, if you think you're too small to make a difference, try going
to bed with a mosquito in the room.
There is no time left to waste. Every week decreases our options. At the
mid-May meeting of leaders from the G8, a communique was issued that expressed
their shared sensitivity to the "vast implications" of Y2K, particularly
in "defense, transport, telecommunications, financial services, energy,
and environmental sectors," and the interdependencies among these sectors.
(Strangely, their list excludes from concern government systems, manufacturing
and distribution systems.) They vowed to "take further urgent action"
and to work with one another, and relevant organizations and agencies. But
no budget was established, and no specific activities were announced. Such
behavior -- the issuing of a communique, the promises of collaboration and
further investigation -- are all too common in our late 20th century political
landscape.
But the earth continues to circle the sun, and the calendar relentlessly
progresses toward the Year 2000. If we cannot immediately change from rhetoric
to action, from politics to participation, if we do not immediately turn
to one another and work together for the common good, we will stand fearfully
in that new dawn and suffer consequences that might well have been avoided
if we had learned to stand together now.
Copyright 1998 John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley,
Myron Kellner-Rogers
John L. Petersen is president of The Arlington Institute,
a Washington DC area research institute. He is a futurist who specializes
in thinking about the long range security implications of global change.
He is author of the award winning book, The Road to 2015: Profiles
of the Future and his latest book is Out of the Blue - Wild
Cards and Other Big Future Surprises, which deals with potential
events such as Y2K. He can be reached at 703-243-7070 or johnp@arlinst.org
Margaret Wheatley
and Myron Kellner-Rogers are authors and consultants to
business. A Simpler Way, their book on organizational design
was published in 1997. Dr. Wheatley's previous book, Leadership &
the New Science, was recently named one of the 10 best management
books ever, and it also was voted best management book in 1992 in Industry
Week, and again in 1995 by a syndicated management columnist. Their
consulting work takes them these days to Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Australasia
and Europe. In the States, they've worked with a very wide array of organizations.