INDUSTRY
Facilities and Public Spaces conference offers answers to ‘wicked’ problems Conferenz’s Safe and Secure Facilities and Public Spaces conference in August was the first in a string of events this year exploring the ‘wicked problem’ of securing ‘crowded places’ from attack, writes chief editor Nicholas Dynon When I was asked by Conferenz to chair their two-day conference in Wellington, I jumped at the opportunity. At the very least it was a free pass to an event featuring around 26 of the brightest minds in security from New Zealand and further afield.
The security event calendar for the second half of 2019 looks a little different to that of previous years. In addition to the Conferenz event, there is the arrival of other first-timers, including September’s Crowded Places NZ event (Marcus Evans) and November’s Venue Safety and Community Security conference (Aventedge) in Auckland. The common theme shared by these events is ‘crowded places’ or ‘public spaces’. The Australia-New Zealand Counter Terrorism Committee defines crowded places as “locations which are easily accessible by large numbers of people on a predictable basis.” The trigger for the appearance of the events is, no doubt, the 15 March Christchurch mosque attacks and the questions the attacks raise in relation to protecting people in the places they tend to frequent. The mosque attacks have provided security managers around the country with a new problem, or set of problems. Their employers and customers are now asking them: “How do we make our sitting duck venue, which is easily accessible by large numbers of people
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on a predictable basis, secure against the extremely unlikely possibility of a terrorist attack? And how do we do it cheaply?” It’s a problem that conference speaker Dr Bridgette Sullivan-Taylor describes intriguingly as a “wicked problem”. A wicked problem is a problem that is ‘complex’ rather than just ‘complicated’. It is essentially novel and unique to the extent that every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot operation’. Wicked problems are often intractable, with no clear relationship between cause and effect. Solutions are neither right nor wrong. Social, economic and political problems, such as poverty, economic failure, political instability, climate change, are regarded as wicked problems, although the latter has been described more precisely as a ‘super wicked problem’ because those seeking to solve the problem are also causing it. Ultimately, wicked problems are problems for which there is the great practical reality of there being no hope of a solution. But, importantly, they are problems for which there is a great moral expectation that a damn good attempt at a solution is made. The New Zealand public, for example, justifiably expect that ‘something be done’ to minimise our collective vulnerability to another mass casualty weapons attack. In her presentation, Dr SullivanTaylor also mentioned Black Swan Theory, or the Theory of Black Swan Events. This theory was named for
Dr Bridgette Sullivan-Taylor is Senior Lecturer in business at the University of Auckland. During 20 years in the UK, she worked in the NHS and with the UK Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Secretariat.
the black swan, which was thought for centuries to be a fiction until actual black swans were discovered in Western Australia. A Black Swan, wrote proponent Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is an event with the following three attributes. Firstly, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Secondly, it carries an extreme ‘impact’. Thirdly, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, “making it explainable and predictable.” According to Taleb, a small number of Black Swans explains almost everything, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical
October/November 2019
