Development of the Community Risk Management Planning Framework, now part of National Resilience Guidance. The design problem was making one framework genuinely usable by any service, from the London Fire Brigade to the Isles of Scilly. Forty-five of the forty-nine services were represented at the launch, with every nation of the UK present — a reach the national body had not previously achieved at a meeting of its own.
In 2001 the music and film industries of New Orleans were convened for the first time in their history to define a shared future. The state’s film incentive followed in 2002 — and, critically, a production company was persuaded to put up $1.5 million as a test case, taking every aspect of the new legislation to judgment in six weeks. An untested statute became a known quantity. One film was shot in Louisiana that year. By 2010, 118. Between 2001 and 2007, employment in the state’s motion picture industry grew 22 percent annually, reaching 6,230 jobs and $763 million in annual economic impact.
Leading cluster strategies across biomedical, music and film, petrochemical, shipping and logistics, ICT and coffee. In petrochemicals, two leaders sitting side by side discovered that one was shipping a material at great expense from the upper Mississippi that the other was producing next door as a by-product. Five warring ports on the lower Mississippi agreed their specialisms and stopped competing for cargo neither was best placed to handle. Coffee importers who had guarded their market intelligence for decades pooled it, found they were not in fact competitors, and built a shared factual case against a rival port’s marketing claims. New Orleans is today the largest coffee port in the United States.
The sector was convened for the first time in its history. There was no funding for anyone to lead the action plan after we left, which is the point at which most strategies die. So a lead was recruited for every pathfinder project, one person at a time — a coffee that became lunch, that became drinks, that became dinner. The strategy document was quietly shelved. It did not matter. Everyone who mattered already had a copy and a project they had chosen. All but two action items were delivered before Hurricane Katrina, and the work became a foundation the industries rebuilt on.
A town that had lost its abattoir and then its clothing plant. The national data centre operator asked a fair question: why would he site an operation there? The answer was not a grant or a tax break. It was that rural Australia is full of well-credentialled, under-employed people who will stay and do solid work, against a revolving door of city temps. A portfolio of resumes was left on his desk overnight. He gave the town the QANTAS ticket reconciliation work — around forty jobs, won against an offshore alternative, on quality rather than price.
One of the first seven facilitators appointed under the Commonwealth programme — a role that pre-dated the Sirolli model — and principal drafter of the national handbook, written from the founding cohort’s field experience rather than from theory.