Making Sense of The Week That Was #38: Winter is Coming — Climate Change, Ticking Time Bombs & Post-Pandemica
News Wrap Edition #38 of Volume 1 | October 8, 2021
Lead Editors: Sean Moffitt and Gina Clifford
W e shared our thematic earlier this week to get out in front of the headlines. Have a look. In short, winter can be a time of foreboding storms, impending darkness and life threatening cold, or be seen as majestic, festive and a time of creativity & renewal. Which will it be on our key three fronts — Climate Change, Ticking Time Bombs and Post-Pandemic One Year Outcomes?
We’d love to discuss our headlines. Why not join us on Clubhouse this Sunday the 10th of October 2021 at 8am PST | 11am EST | 4pm BST | 5pm SAST for our News Wrap Forum, to make sense of it all.
In the meantime….Let’s Wrap.
The Top Headlines 📰 :
We feel our News Wrap functions on three levels:
- Themed headlines for making sense of the world
- Implications & sensemaking for what it means now and the future and
- A time capsule for what was top-of-mind for that specific week
With that in mind, before we get into the themed part of the wrap, here is our distillation on what 8 leading newspapers, 6 leading websites and 2 social media sites served up as the major headlines of the week:
- #10 James Bond and Daniel Craig
- #9 15% Minimum Corporate Income Tax, 136 Country Deal
- #8 China & Taiwan — Reunification vs. Security
- #7 Recovery, Inflation & Interest Rate Changes
- #6 Vaccines — Effectiveness, Some approved/banned, 400MM in US
- #5 Oil leak California- Warnings, How it Started, Effects
- #4 Squid Game — Macabre streaming game TV show phenomenon
- #3 Losing Power — Austrian PM resigns, Czech PM loses election
- #2 Coronavirus — Some regions opening up, some in suppression mode, variants
- #1. Facebook — Whistleblowing, Outage and Affect on Young People
The Great 😇
1. Climate Change — Who Killed the Gas-Fuelled Car? & Nobel Spice!
Finally, a company declaring their old business model is dead and fully prepared to tackle a new upstart — brave for GM’s iconic female CEO Mary Barra. General Motors to throw the gauntlet down against Tesla. The company that once helped kill the electric car is now helping kill the gas & diesel car by 2035 and be carbon neutral by 2040. In an industry that is copycat at the worst of times, can GM”s peer companies be far behind?
Yes, Winter is coming and the cold may get on your nerves…literally. Thanks to these Nobel prize winning scientists, we now understand how our bodies perceive temperature. The intriguing part is how they used hot capsaican and cool menthol, the active in chilli peppers & peppermint to identify heat & touch receptors. The choice of winners underscores how little scientists knew about how our bodies perceive the external world before the discoveries — and how much there still is to learn. We may need it given our future mercurial planet.
2. Ticking Time Bombs — The AI Gambit, Anticipating Big Society Moves through Technology
News this week that Google Deep Mind is able to accurately predict rains over next two hours. It’s call “probabilistic nowcasting”. We should keep tracking this for introducing such a fabulous term.
The big question is how will human change their behaviour if they knew if you rain in the next 2 hours. Would you avoid driving? Walk the dog earlier? Replan a route? Bring the brolly. It seems that if that can get this to 24 hrs the impact will be broad. Will weather forecasts get more interesting or less interesting as this evolve? What other edges AI nowcasting can provide — the next health outbreaks, harmful human behavior, terrorism “event days” and industrial/workplace safety risks.
3. Post Pandemica — I’m in a Remote Work Frame of Mind
October 10th is World Mental Health Day. We surfaced an article this week on the creative use of Mentimeter to monitor your team’s mental health. We have heard a lot about the consequences of employees feeling trapped in their homes, but 70% of office workers find the reduced commuting time and workplace conflict as key reasons for wanting to work remotely some or all the time.
As winter approaches, two-thirds of businesses were considering redesigning physical spaces to better accommodate hybrid work environments and others are looking at building trust, belongingness and work-life balance flexibility. Remote work is here to stay, we’re glad Incs. are looking at how to be talent-centric in adapting.
The Good 🤩
1. Climate Change — Weather Tribbles and the Non-Basketball Miami Heat
It’s not AI, but it is a method that’s been around for a long time to predict the weather. An entomologist weighs in on caterpillar folklore. Can Farmer’s Almanac wisdom about the colour, stripes and direction of a caterpillar tell something more than conventional meteorological wisdom. Nature has some compelling arguments.
Miami has a basketball team named after it. Now they also have a government official responsible for it. Yes, there is now a Chief Heat Officer in Miami (and it’s not Kyle Lowry or Jimmy Butler). Encouraging to see Miami is taken steps to get ahead of its future, even with 90% of its buildings air conditioned. This is not an isolated phenomenon. The exact same role role now also exists in Athens, Greece & Freetown, Sierra Leone. How long before every city appoints an environmental resilience officer?
2. Ticking Time Bombs — LavaCoin
Literally, a ticking time bomb. A volcano in El Salvador is now powering a bit coin mining operation. Known for being extremely energy intensive, bitcoin mining could get a boost from the tremendous energy harvested from a volcano to mine it. Let’s just hope the volcano doesn’t spew too much carbon into our atmosphere in the process.
3. Post-Pandemica — Employee Mental Health Climbing out of the Grey
One silver lining amid all the disruption and trauma in the era of COVID-19 is the normalization of mental health challenges at work:
- Ninety-one percent of employees believed that a company’s culture should support mental health, up from 86% in 2019.
- Seventy-six percent of respondents reported at least one symptom of a mental health condition in the past year, up from 59% in 2019.
- Nearly two-thirds of respondents talked about their mental health to someone at work in the past year.
The “resource” most desired by workers (31%) was a more open culture around mental health. The importance of a supportive culture is undeniable. “How are you?” should always be followed up with “How can I help you?” especially at the manager level. The importance of empathy and authenticity cannot be overstated. One great example that is providing talent dividends, PwC is leading the way for remote work as it lets most of its most of its staff work from anywhere for the foreseeable future. This could pave the way for permanent change to working for the industry as the war for talent heats-up.
The Bad 😬
1. Climate Change — A Bear of a Winter
The lack of sea ice among other factors, is disrupting the polar vortex, which will blast parts of Asia, Europe and North America with frigid air this winter. This will spike demand for energy to heat our homes and facilities. Much has been written about increased methane being released as Russia’s permafrost melts but there are many other potential impacts, particularly on the oil and gas industries.
We’ve seen the high profile climate impact on polar bears, but warming temperatures are waking American black bears from hibernation earlier than ever, and in some cases, preventing them from settling down for the winter in the first place. For every 1°C that minimum winter temperatures rise, bears hibernate six days fewer.
2. Ticking Time Bombs — The Gender Mental Health Clock
Although the pandemic causes worsening mental health crisis for everybody, it may be felt more by woman. As much as gymnast Simone Biles and tennis player Naomi Osaka were high profile female athlete examples of the challenges of mental health, the problem may be much more widespread.
According to recent estimates, 83 percent of women report that the pandemic negatively impacted their mental health compared to 36 percent of men. The pandemic has been an obvious contributor, but social media , post-partum depression, menopause and nutrition have also played roles.
3. Post-Pandemica — Santa May Be Late, or Out of Toys
We are experiencing an “Everything Shortage”. High demand plus limited supply equals prices spiralling to the moon. Before the pandemic, reserving a container that holds roughly 35,000 books cost $2,500. Now it costs $25,000. Test kits, hot tubs, toys, car parts, semiconductors, ships, truck drivers and shipping containers are all affected. If you haven’t already ordered for Christmas, you may be too late.
Global supply chain is still struggling to stabilize as container freight rates skyrocket. The bottom line is that consumers will pay more for goods.
The Ugly 😱
1. Climate Change — 7X More Lifetime Stress
A recent study suggests that children born in the 2020’s are severely threatened by climate change compared with older generations. Younger people are more likely to face more extreme weather events, particularly heat waves, compared with people born in 1960. A child born in 2021 will experience on average twice as many wildfires, between two and three times more droughts, almost three times more river floods and crop failures and seven times more heatwaves. Perhaps it’s why global warming is a much bigger Gen Z political hot button. It may also affect their lifespans and mortality.
2. Ticking Time Bombs — Homicide Return to the ‘80s?
We’ve commented in the past on pandemic impacts to mental health, substance abuse, and suicide. This week a new CDC study reports the largest increase in homicide rates in modern history from 2019 to 2020. This increase parallels recent increases in overall violence. Political polarization, job instability in certain industries, and changing attitudes and policy about police all seem to have contributed.
Overall homicide rates aren’t what they were in the 80s (10 homicides per 100,000 people vs. 7.8 per 100,000 in the latest statistics), but the question is where the trend is headed. Is the increase an anomaly or is there a breach in the wall?
3. Post-Pandemica — COVID Over, Not So Fast
Winter is here and if last year is any predictor, around the world, it may be a difficult one. Thanksgiving, religious and winter holidays will turbocharge the virus. In the northern hemisphere (87% of the world’s population),a retreat indoors from colder weather will spike coronavirus.
There could even be a “twindemic” of higher flus because of lowered immunity and COVID. Research also points to new variants travelling more easily through air. We are not out of the woods yet.
The Grey Zone of Uncertainty 🧐
1. Climate Change — So Much Progress, So Much to Know
Japanese-born American Syukuro Manabe, German Klaus Hasselmann and Italian Giorgio Parisi won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for work that helps understand complex physical systems such as Earth’s changing climate. There were pioneers in identifying which natural phenomena and which human activities leave their mark on our global climate, but even their models suggest a level of measurability that is still chaotic, not easily understood and easily denied.
Manabe asked about how he would address climate change sceptics, he smiled and replied, “That problem is about a million times more difficult than understanding climate change. It is very mysterious to me.”
2. Ticking Time Bombs — Soccer Monopoly Madness or Investment in the Beautiful Game?
We’ve already seen the challenges of spending too much money in European football with the debt-laden FC Barcelona. See also the greediness of a European Super League gambit. Now suspect Saudi funding takes over Premiership club Newcastle United.
It makes one wonder, whether club soccer is sustainable or just the play toys of the rich. And what of the lot of the loyal local fan? But yet we have seen this:
3. Post-Pandemica — Great Resignations or Mass Terminations?
We have head of the Great Resignations over the last year. But now a competing narrative — Mass Terminations.
It could be due to vaccine mandates, unemployment claims up, working women not being able to address life challenges of back to the office , jobless aid going away , spotty economic outlooks , youth despair , travel industry and digitalization. Don’t be so sure we will all be flocking away from our main jobs.
The Tapestry
The collection of images, videos and chart delivered by the zeitgeist that is the internet and the news cycle.
Image of the Week — Ottawa Winter Rule #1:
In keeping with our theme.
Image/Chart/Map of the Week — Global Freight:
The cost to ship things has just gone up. Implications? — Stock outs, higher prices, re-shorting, 3D printing, supply chain automation, autonomous fleets.
Lexicon/Word of the Week — “Involution”:
There’s even a word for this sense of sped-up purposelessness today — an arcane, academic term that has exploded on Chinese social media: Involution.
The opposite of evolution, a process of involution spirals in on itself, trapping its participants. Originally used by anthropologists to describe the dynamics that prevent agrarian societies from progressing, the term has become a shorthand used by people from all walks of life: tech workers clocking long hours at the office, delivery workers hustling from one gig to another, high school students toiling over college entrance exams. Technological progress has humanity caught in an inward-turning shell.
Data of the Week — The 2021 Doomsday Clock:
Resting at 100 seconds to Midnight.
“Winter is Still Coming” New Teaser
George R.R. Martin is up to his old tricks with his Game of Thrones prequel — House of the Dragon.
Meme of The Week:
Photo of the Week — Facebook Outage:
Music/Movie/TV Show of the Week — Squid Game
Poll of the Week
Poll of the Week. When things change, what communications matter. Note… The poll audience are all linked users. But seriously, did 1 day without FB affect you and your business? WhatsApp is a different story.
Infographic of The Week — (Mental Health MindShare study)
The Forum — Clubhouse, Sunday October 10th:
Have your say and engage on our topic “Winter is Coming” with some of your favourite Grey Swan Guild Wrap Editors: Agustín Borrazás, Antonia Nicols, Ben Thurman, Doyle Buehler, Esmee Wilcox, Geeta Dhir, Gina Clifford, Howard Fields, Lindsay Fraser, Rob Tyrie, Scott Phares, Sean Moffitt, Su McVey and Sylvia Gallusser.
Here is our link Sunday at 11am ET: https://www.clubhouse.com/event/M61zANoE
The Atelier — Swans and Nests — Speed Sensemaking
Come join us October 14th for an entirely new type of event —12 people, 12 conversations, 12 outcomes. Pre-register here: https://bit.ly/gsgatelier7
About Us:
This week is edition #38 of a compendium of stories and headlines we’re tracking in the Grey Swan Guild’s Global League of Sensemakers’ Newsroom. Imagine a newsroom that went deeper, had little bias and didn’t have to get their points across in 40-second sound bytes or linkbait headlines. That’s us.
You can make Submissions to The Wrap any time on The Grey Swan Guild’s LinkedIn page with the hashtag #TheWrap. Be pithy, be wry, be relaxed and make some sense of the news with us. It’s a place we hang out during the week too. Join the conversation there and share your ideas, hopes, and worries with us. We are in this together for a reason.
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This month our Feature Guild City of the month is Boston . If you know of passionate leaders, thinkers or change agents from Beantown, get you Southies, Northies, Westies and Easties in and have them join our Guild and our Boston Guild Town Hall October 27th.
We have opened up another Medium and Clubhouse flank to the Grey Swan. Based on the pioneering successes of our Grey Swan News Wrap effort we have created “The Futures & Sensemaking” Series with an array of articles forthcoming about the why and how of making sense of the world. Our first well-attended session happened this Friday on “How to Sense the Future?” Next up Episode #4 is “How to Make Sense of the Now & Past ” on Friday, October 22nd. Join us as we peel back the curtain on how the best among us make sense of the world.
Join us October 22nd: https://www.clubhouse.com/join/grey-swan-guild/dgjC4LI1/PAXnvO0O
Next week is Grey Swan News Wrap #39 — “Tales from The Crypto ” authored by lead editor Agustin Borrasas and supported by editor Esmee Wilcox with the theme of Exploring Decentralization, Bitcoin, Blockchain, NFTS and Crypto.
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