Risk Management în Vesuvius Area

1. Introduction

‘The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.’

Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Strategy and planning has to do with future. And the future is unknown. This makes strategy a fascinating, yet frustrating topic. Fascinating because the future can still be shaped and strategy can be used to achieve this aim. Frustrating because the future is unpredictable, undermining the best of intentions, thus demanding flexibility and adaptability. To strategists, the idea of creating the future is highly appealing, yet the prospect of sailing for terra incognita without a compass is unsettling at best.

The duality of wanting to intentionally design the future, while needing to gradually explore, learn and adapt to an unfolding reality, is the tension central to the topic of strategy formation. It is the conflicting need to figure things out in advance, versus to find things out along the way. On the one hand, strategists would like to forecast the future and to orchestrate plans to prepare for it. Yet, on the other hand, strategists understand that experimentation, learning and flexibility are needed to deal with the fundamental unpredictability of future events.

When we speak about strategy, we can’t omit the demand for strategy emerges. Emerge is the process of becoming apparent. A strategy emerges when it comes into being along the way. Where there are no plans, or people divert from their plans but their behavior is still strategic, it can be said that the strategy is emergent – gradually shaped during an iterative process of ‘thinking’ a ‘doing’.

Strategy is a part of strategic management, which effectively merges with strategic planning, implementation and control.

Strategic management is formed from strategic planning plus implementation plus control.

Strategic management = strategic planning + implementation + control

The strategic management process consists of four major steps: (1) formulation of a great strategy, (2) formulation of strategic plans, (3) implementation of strategic plans and (4) strategy control.

The first step, formulation of a great strategy refers how the strategist’s mission will be accomplished, because grand strategies are not drawn out of the air. Strategists must analyze very carefully all the aspects of the main problem, a ‘situational analysis’ for matching organizational strengths and weaknesses with environmental opportunities and threats and in the end to determine the right way for solving it out.

In our case is about SWOT analysis. Strategists are using forecasting techniques, which help them to cope with uncertainty about the future. They have to sort carefully environmental opportunities and threats, because many times a perceived threat may turn out to be an opportunity, or vice versa.

The same thing was happen in our case when a possible Vesuvio eruption represents not only a threat to be managed in case of emergency, but also an opportunity to be exploited.

When we speak about the possibility that eruption to represent a threat, we refer at one serious thing: the Vesuvio volcanic area is in the vicinity of the densely populated city of Neaples, Italy.

Moreover, the area at risk, located along the coast has an extraordinary natural beauty, complemented with high architectural and historical value of the vesuvian villas (17th century) and the archeological sites of Pompei and Ercolano.

On the other hand, a possible Vesuvio eruption represents an opportunity for a significant rehabilitation of the whole area. So, many times steps can be taken to turn negatives into positives.

In the second major step in the strategic management process, general intentions are translated into more concrete and measurable strategic plans and policies.

Plans at all levels should specify who, what, when and how things are to be accomplished and for how much.

Many strategists prefer to call these specific plans ‘action plans’ to emphasize the need to turn good intentions into action.

In the third place, the last two steps: implementation and strategic control refers at the questions at which the strategists must to have answers, related with organizational structure, people, and culture and control system.

In the last place we have strategic control closely related with strategic plans, like our more informal, daily plans can go astray. But a formal control system helps keep strategy, plans on track. Before strategies are translated downward planners should set up and test channels for information on progress problems, and strategic assumptions about the environment or organization that proved to be involved. If a new strategy varies significantly from past ones, new production, financial or marketing reports will probably have to be drafted and introduced.

Strategic planning is the ongoing process of ensuring a competitively superior fir between an organization and its changing environment. In a manner of speaking, strategic management is management on a grand scale, management of the ‘great picture’ (Arnoldo C. Hax)

A short description of the article

Contingency management, in particular the management of unanticipated events outside the control of an ordinary planning system has, in the last 50 years, become an important and frequently debated issue in the scientific literature on complex systems management under risk conditions. The urban system can be regarded as such an open complex system where external events, not always foreseeable with a closed system's model, may strongly impact on the internal dynamics of an urban area.

Conventionally, planning the future presupposes collecting information and analyzing it rationally in order to control for unexpected contingency events. But it is an important question in the field of urban planning how proper strategies can be developed to deal with external uncertainty and shocks that transcend the imagination of policy-makers. How should decision-makers respond to such unforeseen jumps in a system? The aim of this article is to present and apply a new scientific decision support

method based on the future studies literature, with the aim to help decision-makers in the strategic management of uncertainty and risk in order `to anticipate the extraordinary events correctly in order to act more effectively' (Godet, 1987). In particular, we here deploy the scenario methodology in combination with multicriteria analysis and fuzzy set theory, as a useful learning tool for the governance of complex dynamic systems. In current debates on policy-makers' possible reactions to uncertainty (e.g., in the context of sustainability strategies), very often the socalled `no regret' principle is advocated. The validity of this approach is tested, in the context of the present article, on real-world threats in the Vesuvio volcanic area in the vicinity of the densely populated city of Naples, Italy. Four different policy scenarios are developed with the purpose to examine, control and reduce the risk for the people concerned in case of a future volcanic eruption and to lay, at the same time, the foundation for a drastic rehabilitation of the entire metropolitan area.