Unforeseen disasters and unheeded warnings

Enabling Collective Intelligence in Response to Emergencies (Part #8)

Various strong cases have been made for attention to unforeseen disasters and disruptive surprises:

Karen A. Cerulo. Never Saw It Coming: cultural challenges to envisioning the worst. University of Chicago Press, 2006
Jared M. Diamond. Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed. Penguin, 2005
Charles Handy. The Age of Unreason. Harvard Business School Press, 1990
Thomas Homer-Dixon. The Upside of Down: catastrophe, creativity, and the renewal of civilization. Island Press, 2006
Paul Ormerod. Why Most Things Fail: evolution, extinction and economics. Wiley; 2005 [extracts].
Joshua Cooper Ramo. The Age of the Unthinkable: why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it. Little, Brown and Company, 2009
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable. Random House, 2007 [contents]
John Ralston Saul. The Unconscious Civilization. Free Press, 1995

One of these authors, has also focused on the requisite human ingenuity, in which so much hope is placed in developing remedies to disasters as they emerge (Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap. Knopf. 2000). The recent disastrous United Nations Climate Change Conference (Copenhagen, 2009) suggests the possibilities of many learnings of relevance to future issues -- whether biodiversity, water, energy, food, population -- as previously discussed (Insights for the Future from the Change of Climate in Copenhagen, 2010).

The concern here is how are collective learnings to be elicited, most notably in immediate response to emergency, and where are they to be stored for appropriate consideration and comment. As illustrated by the limited transparency of the welcome initiative of the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command, is a healthy collective response to be inhibited by hidden agendas?