Situational awareness across different temporalities: scenario exercises for health, security and energy futures

ABSTRACT

This article looks at the concept of situational awareness in the context of scenario planning. It draws on three cases in which scenarios are used – scenario-based Turning Point exercises in Israel, which focus on security and emergency situations; health scenarios and simulations conducted by the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe; and energy scenarios in the World Energy Council – and examines the different ways in which situational awareness is manifested in these scenarios. In WHO scenarios, situational awareness is initially intricately connected to specific details of the situation described in the scenario, triggering a predefined model for reporting and responding to health crises. In Turning Point scenarios, however, the use of situational awareness not only activates a predetermined response but also encourages critical thinking about the broader context of the event and the important questions and challenges that arise from it. In the WEC scenarios, situational awareness is directed towards potential future changes and developments by creating rich narratives of plausible futures that enable engagement with the future. The analysis shows that the particular temporality of the context in which the scenario technology is used affects the way in which situational awareness is manifested in each case.

KEYWORDS:

• Situational awareness
• scenario planning
• temporality
• health
• security
• energy

Introduction

In this article, I examine the role of situational awareness (SA) in scenario planning techniques and the varied manifestations of its expression across different cases. I argue that the particular time horizon and temporality of the context in which the scenario technology is used affects the way in which situational awareness is manifested in each case.

The article draws on three case studies in which scenarios have been designed as part of preparations for future uncertainties: scenario-based exercises at Israel’s National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA), scenarios and simulations at the World Health Organization (WHO), and scenario planning at the World Energy Council (WEC). In each of these cases, the future event addressed in the scenarios is associated with a different future temporality. Accordingly, awareness is directed in different ways in each of these situations and requires varying practices from the participants at each site.¹

SA techniques are related to the broader rationality of future preparedness, which builds on an understanding that security actions cannot prevent a particular future emergency in advance but can be useful in improving the response to an occurring event and therefore reduce the amount of damage it causes. In this article, I describe the form taken and role played by SA in scenario planning as part of this rationality. By tracing empirical questions related to what participants need to be aware of during the scenario practice, how the crisis situation is defined, and consequently how awareness should be practised, I bring additional nuance to the concept of SA and its distinct interpretations and manifestations.

The article shows that SA is not a unitary/singular practice, as it can be directed towards different ends (and therefore has different expressions) when used in diverse temporal settings.

By ‘time horizon’ and ‘temporality’, I refer to a field’s particular relationship to time, the ways in which time is divided into sections (past, present, future), and how those segments are perceived to be related to each other – for example, linear connection, the future constructs the present, contemporaneous perception of past and future through the present, etc.

While previous studies have examined how the nature of situational awareness emerges and changes in accordance with the different spaces in which it is used and how security is understood in each case (particularly in urban security; see Krasmann and Hentschel 2019; Pauschinger 2023), I add to those studies by arguing that SA also changes in accordance with the different temporalities of the fields in which it is applied. Moreover, SA is too often embedded in a temporality that is limited to the immediate and urgent, given its initial focus on real-time decision-making in environmental and security spaces. Extending the situation beyond this temporality requires careful attention to the attribution of awareness and SA practices in individual cases. Accordingly, I ask: What are the temporal settings or boundaries of the situation/event in relation to which situational awareness practices are learned and in which they are meant to be activated? And how do temporal aspects of the situation affect the particular expression of SA in individual cases?

In addition, examining SA in scenario planning or scenaristic thinking enables a broader view of the relationship between SA time and temporality. Scenarios are technologies for imagining and practising different futures in order to prepare for and govern future uncertainties in different time horizons (i.e. immediate future, near future, far future). Within this governmental framework, one can examine the role of SA and how this practice changes across different time horizons (related to the particular fields – that is, the ‘outside world’ that is the real world in the field, beyond the scenario) and the particular temporality designed in the ‘scenario world’. That is, in the immediate future event, the practice of SA is related to the past-future; in the near-future preparedness scenarios, SA is related to the present-future; and in the far-future scenarios, SA is related to future-presents.

Situational awareness

SA emerges both at the limits of other means of future emergency governance, such as prevention or pre-emption, and when the logic of anticipation is insufficient and yet a prompt reaction is needed in an era of increasing threats and catastrophes. As Krasmann and Hentschel (2019, 182) have argued:

The increasing prominence of situational awareness can be read as a response to the faltering promise of security in liberal democracies (Haverkamp, Stefan, and Peter 2011)…. It speaks to the growing awareness of catastrophic threats that have become unpredictable in the complex networked societies of the 21st century where infrastructure and connectivity are both key to and critical for societal life.

In this regard, SA is presented as a response to and related to similar claims regarding the development of the problem of ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992, 2009) – a society in which both threats and awareness of those threats are growing, in tandem with the ethos of the necessity of managing such threats regardless of the impossibility of preventing them.

Moreover, beyond this ontological shift that goes hand in hand with the rise of SA as a possible solution, one can also include SA within the range of security actions that go beyond risk prevention or calculation and join the more recent conception of ‘preparedness’ (Andrew and Collier 2008; Lev and Limor 2014; Samimian-Darash 2013). Preparedness is an overarching concept for various security technologies that accept the impossibility of prevention and prediction of particular threats and yet present a way of limiting the potential damage of an emergency event. Put differently, according to the preparedness rationality, though future risk is incalculable and thus uncertain, the occurrence of the dangerous event is certain. The aim of preparedness action is therefore to improve the system’s reaction and thus minimise the damage caused by the ‘emergency event’ when it occurs – that is, to prevent it from becoming a catastrophe.

In this sense, SA is part of a range of governing techniques that are activated after an event takes place – that is, within the context of governing after the fact (Chandler 2014; Krasmann and Hentschel 2019). However, these techniques are learned and practised before the event takes place, as part of preparation efforts. In other words, what is involved is both an acknowledgement that one cannot prevent a particular threat and a willingness to improve current capabilities to ensure an improved response when something does happen.

Previous studies have looked at how the nature of situational awareness changes depending on the type of the complexity of the space in which it is used and the particular understanding(s) of security seen in each case (e.g. Krasmann and Hentschel 2019; Pauschinger 2023). Here, I add to those studies by arguing that SA also changes according to the different time horizons in which it is applied (e.g. immediate future, near future, far future). In particular, in preparing for different types of future threats in different fields, the focus on the situation and the kind of awareness that is needed changes. Since SA ‘is never given but is rather an artifact’ (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019, 183), I suggest that, when analysing SA, we should view the specific temporality of each case as an additional factor that affects its design, contours and expressions.

Situational awareness, it is often argued, ‘is about presence in the here and now, which entails a particular mode of capturing time and space in “live governance”…. At stake is the concrete and immediate, instead of the indeterminate and uncertain that the future might bring’ (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019, 185). The question, then, is how different understandings of the situation – and particularly the future – affect SA, where ‘the interacting participants are constantly involved in interpreting what counts as a serious disruption in a particular situation, what is worthy of immediate attention, and when a situation turns critical’.

Put differently, at stake are the following questions: How does SA take place? How is the situation imagined, perceived and experienced in scenarios? How is awareness created? And what in a particular situation do participants need to be aware of? In this article, the examination of different cases illustrates the complex details and expressions of scenarios in different fields, as well as the kinds of awareness developed, required and practised in each (future) situation.

However, whereas the original temporal context of SA is the immediate (somewhat urgent) here and now, in the current article I examine SA in the context of scenario planning for future threats along a spectrum of present – future emergencies. Furthermore, I suggest adding the notion of temporality to the analysis of time and speed in SA, and particularly analysing different future temporalities in which SA is enacted in the three scenario cases. That is, one should ask, in the context of governing ‘before the fact’, how are possible catastrophic situations envisioned? And how do these imaginaries invoke particular forms of awareness ‘after the fact’, as they are expressed in the design and use of scenarios?

Scenarios

‘Scenarios’ (or ‘scenario planning’) is an umbrella term for various imagination-based preparedness techniques and is historically related to the early development of the scenario approach during the Cold War era (e.g. Herman and Wiener 1967; Kahn 2011). More recently, scenarios have been developed and deployed within various fields and sectors, on different levels, and for multiple kinds of purposes. Accordingly, sociologists and anthropologists have examined and discussed them as they appear in particular areas and domains, and as technologies for governing the future, within the broader logics of anticipation, precaution, pre-emption, premediation and preparedness (e.g. Adey and Anderson 2012; Amoore 2013; De Goede and Randalls 2009; Goede, Marieke, and Hoijtink 2014; Samimian-Darash 2011, 2016).

Adey and Anderson (2012) have argued that scenario planning is a technique of imagination within wider apparatuses of anticipation. Krasmann (2015) has proposed that, in the context of governing future threats, scenarios are used as a knowledge practice that is supposed to make future threats accessible and manageable both by stimulating the imagination and by framing and forming feelings and emotions. And, in the context of governing futures in climate, finance and energy, Cooper (2010, 185) has argued that scenarios are a forecasting technique that uses the power ‘to create possible worlds’ to help maintain world order by informing strategic planning for crises.

Broadly speaking, in much of this literature, scenarios are understood as a technology for preparing for the future in a way that helps to identify and plan for future risks that cannot be known or calculated. For example, Lentzos and Rose (2009) have examined how, in the context of futures that cannot be addressed through risk calculations, new strategies for managing biorisks have been developed. Within such new ways of thinking about, preparing for and pre-empting future events, scenarios appear as a ‘technology of futurity’ that is used within strategies that seek to imagine futures and manage their consequences. Tellmann (2009) has examined how scenarios are deployed in the fields of finance and insurance to produce new knowledge about risks, and Opitz and Tellmann (2015) have suggested that scenarios of future catastrophes and financial technologies are interrelated in practices of risk management in finance. For their part, Brassett and Vaughan-Williams (2015) have presented scenarios as a practice of future preparedness that is embedded in the discourse of resilience and therefore linked to a wider politics of (in)security that seeks to govern risk by folding uncertainty into everyday practices that plan for, imagine and seek to pre-empt extreme events.

Other scholars have argued, however, that the intervention of power in scenarios does not depend on calculations of cost and expected damage, as in the case of risk. Rather, scenarios should be understood and examined as a different kind and way of governing the future beyond probability and risk – that is, as an uncertainty-based-technology (Samimian-Darash 2022b). Viewed in this way, scenarios represent or promote the use of a particular type of imaginative activity to create future-now narratives in order to increase awareness of both potential futures and current gaps and vulnerabilities. This can improve future thinking and planning and enable appropriate intervention (Collier 2008; Samimian-Darash 2022a).

In this article, I draw on a long-term research project on scenarios and scenario planning in the fields of security, health and energy. I show how scenarios, used for preparing for future uncertainties in these contexts, are developed and play out differently according to the particular time horizon of the field and the kind of future (uncertainty) that is being prepared for. The expression or practice of SA accordingly varies in each scenario-case. That is to say, the form of awareness required in health scenarios that focus on responses to an outbreak that is occurring in the immediate present differs from the forms of awareness required in scenarios for near-future security threats or in scenarios to prepare for the far future in the global energy sector.

Temporality

Applying a cultural anthropological approach, Appadurai (2013) proposed studying the future as a ‘cultural horizon’, a cultural fact variably constituted through three concepts: aspiration, anticipation and imagination. Similarly, other scholars have inquired into specific cultural observations and images of the future, both positive (Abram and Weszkalnys 2013; Cuzzocrea and Mandich 2016; Fischer 2014) and negative (Jasanoff 2015; Lakoff 2015); and in terms of hope (Miyazaki 2006; Rose 2007), failure (Miyazaki, Annelise, and Ong 2005), and risk and uncertainty (O’Malley 2004; Samimian-Darash 2013; Samimian-Darash and Rabinow 2015).

Importantly, such studies of how futures are socially or culturally constructed have been accompanied by a re-examination of the presumed linearity of past, present and future. And, more broadly, they mark a shift from studying ‘the future’ as a unit in/of time to temporality as different possible reflections, orientations and connections in time (expressed at the individual level in terms of the experience of time and at the organisational level in terms of the different ways in which time and time sections are structured). That is to say, moving beyond approaches that assume the linearity of time, some scholars have considered not only how the present affects the future (Ringel 2016; Wallman 2003, 2), but also how the future and different conceptions of it affect experiences of and in the present (Brigstocke 2016; Nielsen 2014; Peebles 2009; Zeitlyn 2015). For example, Rebecca and Knight (2019, 17) have focused on ‘practices and orders of everyday life’, examining how different kinds of ‘future orientations’ affect the present and present experiences as, for them, actions in the present – and indeed the very concept of the present itself – are dependent upon the future and orientations towards it (e.g. anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope and destiny).

In addition, Bear (2016) has argued that an examination of the different aspects of temporality (techne [techniques], episteme [knowledge] and phronesis [ethics]) should form part of any socio-cultural inquiry, as tracing each of these can help deepen our understanding of the problems we examine. Likewise, several other studies (e.g. Ahmann 2018; Antonello and Carey 2017; Lorenzo and Pijpers 2018) have put forward the idea that considering different aspects of temporality can serve as a lens through which to better understand society, culture or the economy.

Consequently, in this article, I bring forward another aspect to the analysis of SA and examine the relationship between temporality and governing, and in particular discuss how time and temporality affect the development and expressions of social technologies. In addressing SA in scenario planning, I examine and show how the temporal condition affects the expression of SA seen in each case.

Temporal sites of situational awareness

The article draws on a long-term research project consisting of three anthropological case studies on the use of scenario technology in the fields of security-emergency, energy and health.

At the World Health Organization, scenario and simulation techniques² are related to the immediate future (already becoming an actual present) as it emerges, and focus on specific, known health issues. Narratives of the designed scenario often target specific states or regions, though the issues they address may have global implications. The scenarios are practised through occasional exercises that test and rehearse the abilities of participants to respond promptly in predetermined ways to the types of problems contained in the exercise – that is, the temporality is one of past-future, which brings recent future events that are already part of the past as events to prepare for, as well as their related solutions.

The scenario-based exercises of Turning Point build on nationwide security scenarios preparing for the near future (1–2 years forward). They are intended to prepare all governmental ministries, local municipalities, emergency operation units and the general population for possible emergencies (e.g. war, earthquake). A crisis narrative is created on the basis of events and incidents that have taken place in the past, as well as new imaginary threats and events that are devised for the sake of the exercise. The story that is developed is thus distinct from what may have already taken place, and at the same time does not seek to predict what is yet to come. ‘Plausible scenarios’ – a term commonly used in this context – attempt to make the future present through the use of imagination – that is, the temporality is one of present-future (Luhmann 1998).

At the World Energy Council, global scenarios are designed to explore plausible far futures (20–30 years forward) for the energy sector, including multiple aspects of concern: population growth, new technological developments, environmental challenges, and shifts in economic and geopolitical power. An internal team of experts is in charge of the triennial process of creation, revision an implementation of these scenarios (three scenarios at a time). Each triennial cycle involves global, regional and sectoral work. In this scenaristic process, the participants are ‘taken into’ the potential future – that is, to a temporality of future-present (Luhmann 1998).³

WHO: situational awareness in the immediate future

Exercise JADE was a functional simulation exercise. While the exercise was managed from the WHO Regional Office, participants attended it remotely from their home offices through platforms such as email and phones. The exercise aimed at five objectives, all related to the aim of testing communication between NFPs – the national focal points of WHO member-states – and their regional contacts in the WHO headquarters, testing the NFPs’ access to and use of the Event Information Site and Annex 2 of the International Health Regulations (IHR) and their notification process.

Accordingly, at a meeting to decide on the scenario that would be used in the exercise, discussions focused less on the content of the scenario event than on whether the scenario would serve the above objectives. The scenario expert who attended the meeting connected his laptop to a large screen and presented several options (e.g. zoonosis, cat flu, earthquake). One of the organisers, looking at the different options, suggested a food safety scenario could be suitable since ‘we have a person who is an expert on that’. The scenario expert then played a video – a food safety scenario inject. The organisers agreed that this scenario could be useful, and one of them noted that ‘Listeria is a burning issue, so it’s relevant…. We even have a multi-country event open’. After several questions were asked to ensure the scenario would fit with the objectives of the exercise, it was decided that this scenario would be used.

As indicated by the speed with which it was selected in this process, the actual story in the exercise was not particularly important in itself, but was viewed rather as a stimulant for certain responses that would serve to achieve the exercise’s objectives. In this and other exercises, then, participants are occasionally reminded that the narrative being presented is hypothetical so that they stay less engaged with the story itself, and instead remain focused on the instructions towards particular responses.For example, in an exercise that was conducted by the WHO Western Pacific Regional Office, participants were reminded:

Please recognise that this exercise will use a simulated, artificial scenario that may not reflect a real-world situation. Players should accept these artificialities. Please do not be overly concerned by complexities or details associated with the exercise scenario itself. The objective is to work with the scenario to facilitate your actions for communications, rather than to challenge it or seek to resolve every last possible detail. (WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific 2012, 31, emphasis added.

Thus, while narratives developed in the scenario technology take into account almost all possible information about the present and the future to ensure that the stories are as realistic as possible (as will be discussed in relation to the Turning Point exercises and the World Energy Council’s scenarios), the stories in the WHO simulations do not aim to precisely depict a fully ‘real-world situation’. What matters in the WHO’s case is not the specific content of the story, but rather the triggering of responses to the story (with an emphasis on the actors/responders). In other words, the story is designed to help the participants engage in the immediate urgent present, while also directing their awareness away from the exact details of the story (event) towards the necessary responses and the goals of communication.

Moreover, in another exercise, Exercise JADE, the scenario’s narrative referred to ‘Your Country’, a hypothetical place, and contained no concrete references to any particular place in the real world. Unlike in Turning Point and World Energy Council scenarios, which use the names of real newspapers and journalists when presenting media news, along with the real names of world leaders, etc., in order to make the exercise narrative as realistic as possible, in the WHO simulation names are fabricated – for example, ‘GlobalLand’, ‘Truth News’ and ‘News First’ – which makes it possible both to use the same scenario narrative in a generic manner (across countries) and to remind participants that the situation with which they are engaging is more than the exercise itself. That is, the urgent present is the triggered situation, yet awareness should go beyond it, and to a certain extent out of the immediate time, to ensure that the rules and actions required from the participants in the simulation are kept in mind.

Similarly, in the exercise, every inject (of information and instructions) sent to the participants was marked in its title as being part of a ‘simulation’, to emphasise the fact that the information contained in the inject was related only to an exercise and not to a real event. In principle, then, the accuracy and realism of the story used in the exercise had less significance than the actions it was supposed to prompt.

Although the simulation’s narrative was unfolded through the provision of specific details regarding how the disease outbreak began and might potentially spread throughout the ‘world’, in terms of practice, the activities of the participants in relation to this narrative were oriented towards engagement with potential key personnel from their own countries (e.g. Ministry of Agriculture staff) or from international bodies (e.g. members of the International Food Safety Authorities Network) rather than towards identifying and understanding the event itself so as to solve the actual health crisis. As a WHO technical officer commented in a discussion about the scope of the exercise: ‘The minimum is just knowing who to contact…. More than that would be to ask communication people to participate’. Put differently, here awareness is directed towards the mere acknowledgement of the fact that something is happening and being able to respond quickly and to communicate with whoever needs to receive the information. In other words, a kind of a ‘surface awareness’ is initially triggered by the simulated (relevantly) small event, which moves in the next step to a ‘full’ awareness expressed in the activation of organisational information/knowledge that had been created before this triggering event took place. In this regard, every inject or piece of information delivered to the participants ended with very specific instructions about the required response. For example, in Inject 2b, a simulated journalist emailed the participants with the following questions and requests for information:

Briefly outline the next steps that the Ministry of Health will take in communicating with the public, i.e. will a press statement be made. Are you aware of any Emergency Risk Communication (ERC) plan and SOPSs [Standard Operating Procedures]? If yes, please outline the next steps the Ministry of Health will take according to such a plan. If an ERC plan and SOPs are not known or available, outline specific actions that you would take as the IHR NFP, if any. (WHO Regional Office for Europe 2019)

In the WHO case, the temporality of health emergency is often related to an immediate-urgent event that is currently unfolding – a very near future already becoming past. Awareness is initially related to the mere acknowledgement of the event, understanding from the various details provided that an event has happened, and then focusing on the facilitation of actions of communication in accordance with pre-set manuals. Such response, however, moves awareness away from the mere immediate-urgent event and directs the intervention towards a structured pre-set response.

NEMA – turning point: situational awareness in the ‘near future event’

The annual Turning Point emergency exercise in Israel is designed by a private (security) company hired by Israel’s National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA) and aims to test the readiness of the entire Israeli state apparatus, including NEMA itself. Over the years, institutional participation in Turning Point has grown to include all ministries, as well as local municipalities and the entire population.

The scenario developed for each exercise is based on an integrated perception of threats that takes into account political and economic issues, both local and international, and refers to the possibility of war or a ‘natural’ crisis during the next year or two. In this case, scenarios are written over a period of several months, during which time NEMA and the exercise administration design the framework for the story to be used in the exercise and subsequently translate it into a detailed, concrete, rich story of multiple incidents.

Once the writing of the general national story has been completed, the administration transforms this into a detailed series of incidents that are tailored to the specific training needs of the various participating units. These incidents are then uploaded to a central computer system – termed the ‘Event Generator’ – which assigns incidents to participants. At the time of the exercise, the system activates the events that the administration has chosen and notifies each unit of specific ‘occurrences’ in its area. Incidents may include missile strikes, hazardous materials spills, terrorist attacks on schools, population and casualty evacuation, and damage to national infrastructure or emergency economy entities. The goal/role of the participants is to put these small incidents together to create a picture of the overall event. Put differently, by identifying these multiple minor incidents, they are able to engage with the information and create awareness towards broader problems/gaps.

The extract below, drawn from Turning Point 15, expresses the unfolding of the broad scenario narrative into its concrete small aspects, which are collected, identified, translated and explained by the participants:

It is Turning Point 15, Day 3, 11:20 a.m. I am at the evaluation meeting at a municipality in central Israel. The municipality emergency centre is open for the purpose of the exercise. Staff at the centre receive reports (by phone and computer) and forward specific information to the municipality situation room, where the municipality chief executive officer (CEO) and main coordinators are stationed. At 11:20 a.m. a situation evaluation meeting begins. The heads of teams charged with monitoring the effects of the scenario event on local infrastructure and services present their reports.

CEO: This is an emergency state, but the system can function this way for a long time. The public should obey the directives of the Home Front Command, and when a siren is heard everyone must enter a protected space. These are not easy times, but we can deal with this threat. The blackouts are a problem, and we need to know how to deal with them.

Engineering team head: There are power crashes; we spoke to the power company and they are aware of the problem and said that the power should be back within four hours.

Population team head: Two people were injured during this morning’s rocket attack, one low and one medium in severity. We received a notice from the manpower team and are in touch with the hospitals. A team was sent to the location where the incident took place.

Health team head: There is a shortage of physicians. We turned to the Ministry of Health and they said they would send physicians – especially paediatricians. Additionally, 40% of the social workers haven’t arrived at work, and 805 elderly caretakers left their patients alone….

The broad event presented in the scenario narrative is actualised and translated into multiple incidents with concrete repercussions. Many subevents emerge, each with the potential to develop in unexpected ways depending on participants’ reactions and how those incidents interact with other incidents. For example, an electricity shutdown can affect pharmacies’ ability to operate and physicians’ ability to get to work, thus compromising medical aid to the injured.

Awareness is produced through notifications of these multiple small incidents, which are then collected and connected, as the participants attempt to grasp the implications of these incidents. Moreover, this SA does not lead to the manufacturing of pre-set responses, as was the case in the WHO, but rather works with close attention to the development of the scenario event and the participants’ creation of the ‘broader picture’. This dynamic was strongly expressed in another Turning Point scenario that exercised an earthquake event:

It is 11 June 2017, the first day of an earthquake exercise. I am in the situation room at Haifa County. The room is staffed with people reporting on incidents in the area in the aftermath of an earthquake.

In this case, the only story given to the participants by the directorate of the exercise is that there has been an earthquake of a certain magnitude at a certain location. All other secondary events – including roads being blocked, hospitals and schools being damaged, people considered missing, etc. – are being made up by the participants themselves in order to translate the big picture into concrete developments. In other words, the participants themselves are transforming the event into concrete incidents that are then distributed to other units as additional information. Through these developed consequences, the participants begin to understand the implications of the earthquake event and the problems that may arise within their areas of responsibility.

The emergency desk operator enters the operations room and asks everyone to get on the phone with relevant government ministries within ten minutes to obtain a situation assessment. Reserve soldiers are manning the computers in the operations room. The emergency desk officer turns to them and asks them to check an event related to a blockage in the road to Carmel Hospital: ‘Can they or can they not receive patients?’

The Haifa District emergency manager reports to the people in the room: ‘There’s an update from the police: the earthquake epicentre is Beit She’an. There is also wreckage in Haifa and its surroundings. The police are working on a statement that will be issued to the press. The road to Carmel Hospital is blocked. Many people are leaving their homes for open spaces. Everyone should continue communication with government ministries and local municipalities for further details…’.

Concomitantly, another representative turns to one of the reserve soldiers, who has been in touch with government ministries, and asks questions regarding the schools that were damaged in order to get more information.

The Haifa District emergency manager gathers everyone together and says: ‘We are in the midst of gathering data, trying to understand what happened in our realm – from local municipalities to government ministries. A difficult problem that we need to deal with is that this is the middle of a school day’.

An emergency desk operator urges: ‘Try to verify the reports! In the information flowing into the operations room, there was information about a hospital collapsing, and they said that it was Carmel Hospital, but on the news they said that it was Rambam Hospital. Call the Ministry of Health once again to verify’.

In this example, participants located in a situation room are provided with initial and general information about the earthquake and, on this basis of this information, have to use their imagination to invent secondary events that are highly concrete (e.g. roadblocks, missing persons). These newly invented events are communicated as information to other participants, who then put all the information together in an effort to understand the bigger picture.

To sum up, in the Turning Point scenarios, the time horizon is the near future. One plausible event is developed into the main narrative of the exercise and is actualised in multiple small incidents. Awareness is developed through the initial monitoring and identification of the small concrete incidents and, in a very dynamic fashion, it then moves away from these incidents per se towards understanding broader gaps and problems that could emerge once a real (similar) future event occurs. That is, the possible future is brought into the present, creating a temporality of the present-future.

WEC: situational awareness in the ‘far-future event’

The World Energy Council creates global energy scenarios that represent alternative plausible futures for the energy sector through a three-year process that involves various workshops with numerous representatives of central organisations in the energy field, including private companies, government ministries and research institutions from around the world. In 2016, the Council published three future scenarios with a long-term horizon of 2060 – entitled ‘Modern Jazz’, ‘Unfinished Symphony’ and ‘Hard Rock’ – which aimed at informing discussion on the transition to a low-carbon economy. These scenarios, it was claimed, would provide ‘energy leaders with an open, transparent, and inclusive framework to think about the uncertain future, and thus assist in the shaping of the choices they make’ (World Energy Council 2016, 2).

Two years after the production of these 2060 scenarios, however, it was decided that the WEC needed to begin the process of updating them, to take account of recent developments and to focus specifically on the period leading up to 2040. Accordingly, the WEC scenario planning team conducted a series of scenario planning workshops in different parts of the world, seeking to capture different perspectives on the three initial scenarios and how they might potentially unfold in diverse cultural and geopolitical contexts.

Unlike the Turning Point scenarios, then, which were mainly constructed by a central administrative group, in this case the scenarios were the outcome of a series of workshops, whereby members of the WEC from different countries played a central role in the process of building the scenario narratives (inventing all small incidents and other broader events).

In this process, the goal was to identify new uncertainties and new domains in which unpredictable paths could be developed for the (far) future. As scenario expert Nick Mayer, one of the facilitators, explained in his opening remarks: ‘We cannot banish uncertainty, but we can offer to stimulate thinking on what might be certain and uncertain, and where new opportunities and risk might be’.

During meetings and workshops to create the scenario narratives, it was often stated that participants were involved in narrative-based scenario planning – a reference to the importance of the stories that they were collaboratively building throughout the various meetings. This, as noted earlier, stands in contrast to the role stories have been given in the WHO simulations, for example.

During one workshop (held in Paris in 2018), following a discussion of the broad framework of the three scenarios, participants were asked to take specific ‘future drivers’ and develop them into a detailed story composed of multiple events, describing the concrete results or impacts brought about by those events. Seated around tables in groups, participants were encouraged to write down different events for the three different future scenarios on sticky notes. Coloured green, orange and pink, these notes were then posted on the wall in areas marked for the relevant scenario archetype (green for ‘Unfinished Symphony’, orange for ‘Modern Jazz’, pink for ‘Hard Rock’). The result of this part of the workshop was that next to each table was a board with three scenarios, with the title of each scenario being accompanied by various sticky notes that described events that had ‘happened’ on different dates and in different places and had been caused by different developments (e.g. global warming or political change).

Additionally, participants were guided on what good storytelling requires and how to create an effective and useful storyline. To assist them in creating their narratives, it was explained to them that a storyline represents a series of events and how they are linked both in time and in relation to different actors. Every story has a start, a middle and an end, they were told. It sets out what happens, and how, and thus connects the future to the present. Narratives should reflect the drivers of change: the predetermined facts and the critical uncertainties. A plausible storyline answers the question ‘What might happen?’rather than describing what we would like to happen. In this part of the workshop (the scenario narrative-building), then, events were developed into other events or impacts that created more future events, and this process was extended gradually into the far future (2040).

Beyond simply creating and inventing the content for specific events for each scenario, the workshop was about getting participants to practise their storytelling capabilities and to embrace not only the content of the scenario narrative but also particular ways of thinking about, practising and observing into the future as if they were being brought into it, and thus was dependent upon experiencing oneself in a different temporality (not only a different space or place). In this case, therefore, awareness also requires participants to move away from the immediate present, this time to the future (whereas in the WHO they move to pre-set past responses, and in NEMA they move to broader conceptual problems and gaps in the present).

Becoming storytellers, participants were instructed to take an active role and to stand by the board in front of the group and tell a story in one of two possible ways: they could either recount their story narrative from the present (2019) to the future (2040) and show a chronological development of events into the future, or they could tell the story from the future back to the present, as though looking back from 2040. As facilitator Nick Mayer commented: ‘We encourage you to think not just about your experience from the past, but also of what comes from the future, as historians of the future’.

In the WEC scenarios, then, the time horizon is related to the far future. Three plausible futures are examined, but rather than actualising them as a way of identifying concrete gaps (as was the case with NEMA) or practising particular responses (as was the case with the WHO), here the goal is to develop future trends and important developments in the future. Awareness is thus directed towards constellations of potential developments and further future trends, in a temporality of future-present. In order to develop such awareness, the practice involves imagining oneself in the future through the continuous narration of the scenarios.

Conclusions

As situational awareness becomes a valuable preparedness practice in a world of increasing uncertainty and fewer capabilities to prevent undesired futures, a nuanced analysis of the ways in which it is developed, expressed and works is required.

SA is too often embedded in a temporality that is limited to the immediate and urgent, given its initial focus on real-time decision-making in environmental and security spaces. Extending this temporality requires careful attention to the attribution of awareness and SA practices in individual cases and how they might change across time and temporality. The analysis of SA in cases of scenario planning enables just that. The examination of the three sites presented in this article has thus sought to open a discussion on the need to address the conception of time horizon of the field and the temporality of the scenario in which this technique is activated.

Here, the conceptual distinction between the ‘time of occurrence’ and the ‘time of event’ could assist in highlighting the examined differences. The time of the event is complementary to ordinary time (in which events occur) and refers to a broad type of framework of potentials from which actualities emerge. As Deleuze ([1969] 1990), 5) puts it:

time must be grasped twice, in two complementary though mutually exclusive fashions. First, it must be grasped entirely as the living present in bodies that act and are acted upon. Second, it must be grasped entirely as an entity infinitely divisible into the past and future, and into the incorporeal effects that result from bodies, their actions, and their passions. Only the present exists in time and gathers together or absorbs the past and future. But only the past and future inhere in time and divide each present infinitely. These are not three successive dimensions but two simultaneous readings of time.

In using the term ‘time of occurrence’, I refer to the time of the situation or the concrete field of the future event (the health/security/emergency event), whereas ‘time of event’ refers to a concept that presents the entire temporality of preparing for such an event, including that which is expressed in the scenario situation.

Thus, the boundaries of an event extend beyond the concrete time during which the event occurs, so as to include the broader relational temporality of preparedness – its future scenarios, in the time of the event – from which certain events, as situations, emerge. Through this type of analysis, an event becomes an inclusive concept. It contains a comprehensive temporality of the ‘time of event’ (the broader temporality of the scenario) and the ‘time of occurrence’ (the real future situational time). Reading SA through these two simultaneous dimensions of time expands the boundaries of the situation, as well as our understanding of the awareness developed/practised.

SA practices are created in a particular site and time, and are practised across diverse temporal orientations. In the WHO case, awareness is related to acknowledgement of the occurring immediate event and understanding from the various details provided that an event has happened, but then moves to the ‘time of event’ and focuses on the facilitation of actions of communication to go beyond this concrete occurring event towards pre-set solutions. Put differently, since the time horizon of health emergencies is often related to the immediate unfolding present – a very near future already becoming past – the scenario encourages the participants to focus on concrete information provided to them through small incidents (injects) that, taken together, mark the occurrence of an emergency that requires their response.

This, however, reflects only the ‘ordinary time’ of the health situation (which is the immediate future becoming present). Furthermore, the scenario event in this case moves away from the mere immediate-urgent time horizon and its directed intervention, towards an awareness created ‘out of (the concrete) time’ in which a non-contextual sphere enables the use of past pre-set responses – what is termed a temporality of past-future.

In the NEMA exercises, participants’ awareness is initially directed towards a particular actuality occurring in the near future. In this concrete situation, incidents are communicated to address a broader temporality (the time of the event) in which actual incidents are only signals of the extraction and conceptualisation of new broader problems. That is, in the Turning Point scenarios, the time horizon (of the security situation) is the near future. However, once a plausible event is developed into the main narrative of the exercise, its activation/actualisation shifts the awareness beyond this limited time of occurrence towards a present-future temporality, which enables the extraction of possible gaps and problems that could emerge once a real future takes place.

In the WEC scenarios, the time horizon of the ‘real’ energy event (in the ordinary time) is located in the far future, while it is configured into three plausible future events/scenarios. Rather than actualising these as a way of identifying concrete gaps (as was the case with NEMA) or as a platform to practise generic past responses (as was the case with the WHO), here the goal is to imagine future trends and important developments in the future by shifting/extending the temporality of the event by practising the imagination of oneself in the future (i.e. a temporality of future-present) through the continuous narration of the scenarios.That is, awareness is directed (away from the ordinary time) towards constellations of potential developments and further future trends.

These three types of time horizons and temporalities affect the design, role and possible practices of SA in each case. Overall, the analysis of this article brings together three cases that present different future horizons and distinct scenario temporalities, and accordingly shows how SA acts differently in them. In doing so, it contributes to the discussion about future governing technologies by showing not only how technologies are shaping/designing future imaginations, and therefore affecting potential futures in their actualisation, but also how diverse temporal settings affect and shift future-governing techniques.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [1635/15 and 1120/19].

Notes on contributors

Limor Samimian-Darash

Limor Samimian-Darash is an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has published extensively on preparedness, future risks, and scenarios as imagination and uncertainty-based techniques.

Notes

1. I present cases of the use of scenario technology in the fields of security and emergency preparedness, energy, and health by analysing scenario narratives and practices at the National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA) in Israel, the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe (WHO Europe) and the World Energy Council (WEC). These three different spaces enable comparative analysis along a number of different axes. All three organisations produce and practise scenarios on different scales and with different spreads (i.e. the extent to which the scenarios they enact have implications beyond their respective organisational or locational boundaries and are concerned with multiple future trends and threats). The three different fields examined also diverge in terms of their temporal orientations and how the past, present and future interrelate in the creation of scenario scripts.

In relation to NEMA, my findings are based on a long-term fieldwork-based research project on scenario-based emergency exercises in Israel. This fieldwork was conducted mainly during the years 2015 and 2017, when I closely followed the planning for three annual events (2015, 2016 and 2017), the writing of their scenario narratives and the execution of the exercises themselves. These exercises – known as Turning Point (Hebrew: Nekudat Miffne) – build on nationwide scenarios and are intended to prepare all governmental ministries, local municipalities, emergency operation units and the general population for future emergencies (e.g. war, earthquake). In this case, I followed the creation of a large-scale national scenario narrative and then observed the participation of various organisations in the exercises based on that narrative, studying how they enacted and played out the scenario narrative and its multiple events.

Following this long-term project on national future scenarios, I inquired more broadly into the technology of scenario thinking and planning. First, I inquired into the expertise of scenario planners and the origins of this mode of thought and practice through an examination of the work of Herman Kahn and Pierre Wack and the scholarly literature about them. Second, moving from the national use of scenarios to their use at the international and global levels, I looked at how scenario planning is used within two leading international organisations: the World Health Organization and the World Energy Council. I was specifically interested in the ways in which these organisations chose and assembled their scenario narratives, along with the process thorugh which these scenarios were delivered and experienced in their respective fields. The data on World Energy Council scenarios were collected from multiple official documents and the World Energy Council website, participation in the organisation’s scenario planning workshops, and interviews. The data on WHO scenarios were collected mainly from official documents, the WHO website and interviews.

2. For a discussion of the difference between these two concepts, see Samimian-Darash (2022a).

3. Please see all three cases summarised in Table 1 below.

Table 1. Scenarios, situational awareness and temporalities.

Site	Time horizon and Temporality	Situation (the scenario event)	Awareness (what participants are expected to be aware of in the situation)
WHO – health	Immediate future (already becoming) present Past-future	Possible, concrete but fabricated event	Awareness is about detecting and acknowledging the concrete immediate by moving away from the immediate towards reliance on past events and therefor pre-set responses, created in the past.
Turning Point – security	Near future (1–2 years forward) Present-future	Plausible future event; realistic and concrete event	Awareness is about identifying multiple occurring incidents of the near future by extracting new gaps and unexpected emerging problems of present futures.
WEC – energy	Far future (20–30 years forward) Future-present	Imagined plausible future events	Awareness is about engaging with rich and detailed imagined future narratives by ‘bringing’ oneself into the far future and becoming aware of possible future-present developments.