Today we attended a seminar presentation by Associate Professor Andrew Wilford of Bond University held at the Department of Environment & Resources Management on the topic:
Spaceship Earth: all systems go? Applying best/next practice in safety and mission critical systems design development orperation and sustainment to wicked sustainability problems.

Professor Wilford spoke from his impressive and vast experience in the aerospace industry. He began as an Air Force aeronautical engineer then worked with Air New Zealand managing really complex systems then moved back to Australia to set up the F111 program then went to the Australian Institute of Project Management and helped put together the National Competency Framework then was with Engineers Australia then worked on safety emission critical systems with Department of Defence project management and systems engineering then worked for the International Centre for Complex Program Management.

Suffice to say he is a world leader on the subject of Safety and Mission Critical Systems.

He addressed the framing question: How do we enliven the collective genius of policy makers academics educators businesses institutions and the community to step up to the challenges of global sustainability?

He went on to provide a fascinating insight into the vast and complex global infrastructure in place to avoid catastrophic accidents when we fly aeroplanes. Flight is an inherently dangerous business. We had better go about understanding it really well and this is in fact something we do.

We have put in place systems to give us the highest fidelity picture of how air safety is going at any time.

But what sorts of systems do we have to give us a picture of how our home our planet is going and to help us understand it as a safety and mission critical system?

We do it extremely well for planes.

If we treat Earth as a fully-functioning aeroplane (a dynamic approach) we have a true complex adaptive system once we have to fly it as people.

We’ve got a nested system we want controls over and to understand the critical parameters.

You wouldn’t fly on an airline that didn’t do this.

The more complex and interconnected our systems become the more returns diminish and the more vulnerable we are to tiny perturbations in the system magnifying into catastrophe.

When pilots are put through really high fidelity simulations it becomes no longer a head exercise but a felt/ heart exercise for the pilot. How can we create Earth scenarios where policy makers play it out and feel it viscerally?

Facts aren’t good enough. Cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias work against us. The Global Financial Crisis and the Gulf Oil Crisis are both examples of how we don’t get it.

The highest fidelity environment for scenario development is warfare. What we need are warriors from the warfare games to get involved on the Spaceship Earth flight deck.

You want to feel like a hero? Come over here! Boy is there a job to do!!!

A system definition of sustainability is how any system relates with its environment and regulates its own activities to ensure enduring health and maintain viability.

At the moment Spaceship Earth is a business running down its assets fast. Australia is living at 4+ planet rate (world average 1.4 planets)

The free market is not the way we do Safety and Mission Critical Systems. We don’t give each passenger on a plane a throttle and joystick and leave them all to work it out.

We need to start looking at ourselves as a species rather than individuals or nations.

Carl Sagan’s ‘pale blue dot’ of Earth where everything we’ve ever done or known happened is very pertinent.

Drag is already exceeding lift. We’re exceeding the G-limit at which the wings of the plane fall off. We’re already going down.

Dick Smith has set up the ‘Wilberforce Prize’ of $1 million.

We were very quiet on the way home after the seminar.