4 FORTUNE APRIL 2020ON SEPT. 17, the U.S. Naval War College
and the National Center for Disaster
Medicine & Public Health began a war-
game simulation they called Urban
Outbreak. Benjamin Davies, a researcher
and game designer at the college, gathered
50 experts in disaster response from the
government, military, academia, and the
private and nonprofit sectors for two days
of exercises at Johns Hopkins University’s
Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md.Game TheoryThe aim, Davies told me, was to see how people would
respond in real time to “a profoundly dangerous and
complex problem set”—the sudden arrival of a deadly
pathogen in a dense metropolis. The question, in short:
Would we be ready?
Within three months of that exercise, the first cases
of illness from a novel strain of coronavirus were being
identified in Wuhan, China, a city of 11 million people. In
the three months since then, the virus has spread to more
than 100 countries, overwhelmed governments and health
care systems in cities as far-flung as Seoul and Seattle, and
forced the quarantine of an entire European nation more
than 5,000 miles away from the disease’s epicenter.
Just as with Davies’s simulated outbreak in the fictional
city of “Olympia,” the real-life coronavirus outbreak has
revealed a striking, if not unexpected lesson: We weren’t—
and still aren’t—ready.
As Davies explained, that takeaway from the Septem-
ber simulation was a mark of success. The exercise, after
all, was designed to reveal the resource gaps and com-
munication failures among the players—the biases and
confusions, the inevitable confrontations and areas where
leadership and revised strategies are badly needed. The
goal was to learn from all that and be ready the next time.
“Games have a wonderful tendency to raise hidden criti-
cal issues that remain just under the surface of a problem
or interaction,” said Davies, who is also the operations spe-
cialist for the Naval War College’s humanitarian response
program. “When you get all those people in the sameroom, and they lay out their plans in front
of each other, suddenly all new issues
arise: What time of day will the shipment
arrive? By truck or helicopter? Where will
the helicopter land? What will the military
do if desperate people approach them?”
Each question can spiral into confusion
or uncertainty, he says, and confound play-
ers as they chart the best course of action.
Which brings me to this issue of For-
tune. Consider the pages that follow as our
version of a war game for a crisis that may
pose an even greater threat to civilization
than the current spread of the coronavirus:
the warming of the planet. (Please see our
package of stories that begin on page 46.)
The platform here may be two-dimen-
sional, but the goal is the same: to raise
critical questions about our readiness to
respond; and to shine a light on the gaps
and ineffectiveness of the business com-
munity’s current efforts on these fronts
so that, perhaps, we can mount a more
robust response moving forward.
To be sure, global industry—and yes,
those of us who rabidly consume the
products and services these businesses
provide—caused many of the climate and
environmental problems we face today.
But then, as deputy editor Brian O’Keefe
writes in his introduction to the package,
business is also in a position to try to fix
them. There’s even a $26 trillion market
opportunity for those who do, according
to one estimate.
The alternative to acting boldly, it
should be emphasized, isn’t “business as
usual.” It’s “game over.”CLIFTON LEAF
Editor-in-Chief, Fortune
@CliftonLeafFOREWORDILLUSTRATIONBYSAM^ KERRFWD.W.0420.XMIT.indd 4 FINAL 3/10/2020 8:28:17 PM