Learning for the future

This article will seem anti-climactic since the events and reactions to the events of the 2015 Apec Summit seem dated already. I am presenting them nonetheless because of lessons for the future that we must learn.

Making mistakes can be beneficial, as long as they are honest mistakes and their effects are not lethal to anyone. We can learn important lessons from them and avoid making similar ones in the future.

One important dictum in management is that we need to define the parameters of a problem or challenge adequately. Define it too broadly and we find ourselves overwhelmed and solving nothing. Define it too narrowly and we produce more undesired unintended effects that alienate many who suffer needlessly.

Another important dictum to remember is that even when we have defined a problem or challenge very well, we always need to drill down and ask several important questions about our plans. These are:

1. Have we taken everything into account? What might have we missed?

2. What can go wrong?

3. Who will be inconvenienced, not benefit or get hurt? and,

4. How do we minimize if not neutralize the ill effects?

In several venues, I said that our government planners and implementers met two challenges presented by the likes of the 2015 Apec Summit with care and competence. These were the challenges of the security of the delegates, their places of temporary residence and the venues of their meetings; and the challenge of transport security, smoothness and speed. Many Filipinos, foreign observers and the summit participants were one in applauding the results.

As a management practitioner and teacher, I have to add that our planners had seemed to not define their challenges completely and fell short of a thoroughly satisfactory response to the other challenges presented by the Summit.

They seemed to have missed looking more carefully, if at all, into two other challenges. These were the challenges of thinking out what undesired effects the security and transport plans would produce; and how we could best minimize if not negate these ill effects.

The media coverage of the events, starting with the dry runs several days before the actual summit, and the reactions to the unforeseen negative effects that became evident—as colorfully expressed in social media—are known to us all too vividly. They should have served as “red flag,” warning signals, that demanded closer attention.

The palpable lack of appropriate responses to most of the ill effects that emerged could only be interpreted as meaning that the planners had not adequately anticipated these effects. They also seemed to lack the initiative, the imagination and the nimbleness to respond creatively and decisively to these unforeseen circumstances as they became evident.

The resulting gridlock in many places that caused long hours of delay, missed appointments, visits to the doctor, a baby delivered in a car, low-income employees having to check into cheap hotels and motels because walking home tens of kilometers was too daunting were some of these effects. And it affected not a few but tens of thousands. I know because my family and I and many of our colleagues and friends experienced these in part.

The impact of the decision to close roads (reducing the roads vehicles could travel on) and reroute traffic (taking people to unfamiliar and lesser known ones) is already well known because we have prior experiences with those—during the Papal visit, and by force of circumstances during natural and man-made disasters.

We have the needed information on Metro Manila (MM) vehicular population (we know the road system of MM is already grossly overloaded) and human population (we know we have more people in the MM than what it was planned for) in whatever temporal cycle we choose to plan for. We know, roughly, the amount of available road surface theoretically available to these two populations, what the current reductions in travelable surface already is because of road repairs, pedestrian and parked vehicle spills-over, etc., and what the road surface reductions would be according to Apec plans. More thorough preparations would have resulted in lesser difficulties for the general public. Asking people to stay home was a necessary but insufficient step because many could not stay home because they had work!

Here is a partial list of what should have been done.

1. Identify and publicize all possible alternative routes through multimedia, including large tarpaulins placed along major thoroughfares and in malls identifying these alternative routes.

2. Our traffic enforcement system, well briefed and trained for the event, should have been out in full force, with volunteers mobilized within barangays. The volunteers should have included the single-side band radio enthusiasts to help provide constant flow of information.

3. The system and the enforcers should have been beefed up throughout the period with constant radio updates via the volunteer groups and commercial stations to inform people where traffic was clogged and where it was not.

4. This should have been further aided with clearly visible directional signs along the designated routes.

5. Given the care and competence with which the transport arrangements for the delegates and their parties were planned, a Gantt chart surely existed that identified the low or no official traffic movements periods within these dedicated routes of substantial distance.

At those times, official government trucks and buses manned by security personnel should have ferried, for free, pedestrians within those routes at minimal or no security risk and gained some public goodwill.

6. One transport system that should have been mobilized was water transport across the Pasig River at points where these intersect with major transport routes.

People could have been ferried, for free, to these places, and ferried further, for free, across the river where they would be closer to their destinations.

Another important fact to bear in mind is that MM, indeed our national infrastructure for big conferences and summits, is grossly inadequate.

If we wish to have better-run international fora, we need to refurbish these infrastructure and build more ahead of time.

For me, the costliest oversight was in not informing and educating our people adequately, over a longer period prior to the summit, what Apec is all about and what it could mean for us as a people and as a country, using appropriate media and languages.

The fact is, only a small percentage of our people, even in the business community and the government, know what Apec, or for that matter Asean, is all about.

The two are abstract entities that they do not see touching their lives positively. The only effect most of them felt was terrible inconvenience.

There are critical lessons to be learned and learn them we must in preparation for the looming effects of Apec and Asean integration and for the many other conferences and summits that we wish to attract to our shore.

(This article reflects the personal opinion of the author and does not reflect the official stand of the Management Association of the Philippines. The author is a professor at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM). Feedback at [email protected], maglopez @gmail.com and [email protected]. For previous articles, please visit )