2012London Olympics Security Management DRA 8

7/28/2019 2012London Olympics Security Management DRA 8

1/24

2012 London Olympics Security Management Programme: A Brief Risk Management Analysis J une 2012

David Rubens Associates 20121

2012 London OlympicsSecurity Management Programme- A Brief Risk Management Analysis

June 2012


2/24



David Rubens Associates

David Rubens Associates is a specialist corporate security consultancy offering strategic securityservices to individuals and organisations across the world.

DRA has worked with government agencies, NGOs, international conglomerates and major globalevents, and brings a mixture of strategic vision, operational experience and academic research to allof its projects, however large or small.

David Rubens, MSc FSyI holds an MSc in Security and Risk Management (LeicesterUniversity), and is a Visiting Lecturer and Dissertation Supervisor on their Security, Terrorism andPolicing MSc programme. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Security and Resilience Department,

Cranfield University, UK Defence Academy (2009-10), where he was a Visiting Lecturer on theStrategic Leadership programme, specialising in terrorism & public policy and the management oflarge-scale, complex multi-agency operations.

He has written specialist reports for government agencies in J apan, Russia, Dubai, Nigeria, Liberiaand the Caribbean, and is highly-regarded as a speaker on the international security conferencecircuit. He is currently on the Professional Doctorate programme at Portsmouth UniversityDepartment of Criminology & J ustice.

For further reports, or to discuss the contents, please contactDavid Rubens

[email protected]

David Rubens AssociatesThe Arches,

Maygrove Road

London NW6 2EE

[email protected]


3/24



2012 London Olympics Security Management Programme:A Br ief Risk Management Analysis

Introduction

The awarding of the 2012 Olympic Games to London on 6th

J une 2005 marked the start of what has been

widely labelled as the largest security operation in Europe since the end of the Second World War. As well

as triggering a major construction programme, it was also an opportunity for UK plc to demonstrate a world-

class level of strategic management capability operating at the extremes of operational complexity, whether

at the highest reaches of national and regional government or across the gamut of commercial

organisations, administrative infrastructure and a wide range of security agencies. The unmentioned 300lb

gorilla in the corner of the room was always the fact that UK plc has not been particularly good at large-

scale infrastructural project management Terminal 5 and the Millennium Dome are just two of the more

noteworthy failures to deliver a functioning project in line with demanding and non-negotiable deadlines.

There is no doubt that the scale and complexity of the London Olympics security management programme

is unprecedented, and that it has created challenges that have demanded a level of strategic project

management that has gone beyond anything that has been previously seen in this country. However, froma theoretical and academic perspective, all of the fundamental issues that should have been taken into

consideration and accounted for from the beginning of the project seven years ago were well known, and it

was always part of the responsibility of project and programme managers tasked with creating a unified

security management programme to take on board all of the lessons that have been learned in previous

similar mega-event programmes. Whilst I certainly wish all participants in the management of the London

Games every success, it also seems clear to me that there are major systemic flaws built into the fabric of

the Games management structures that create genuine vulnerabilities and which are almost certain to be

stretched to the limit of their capabilities (and beyond) under the pressures of the delivery of the actual

Games events. I have no doubt that once the Games are over (and hopefully they will be the great success

that we are all hoping for), ) there will be no shortage of people using the clear-sightedness that 20/20

hindsight inevitably brings to highlight those shortfalls in strategic, tactical and operational planning that will

allow any failures that might occur to be seen as being inevitable, but I hope that by putting down some

thoughts before the event, it will be equally clear that neither success nor failure just happens, but are

both no more than the final realisation of a long causal chain that should be clearly visible to those that

have the necessary technical understanding and the eyes to see.


4/24



I have tried to maintain the balance between offering a level of analysis that might not normally be available

to the general reader, with an attempt to make this information as relevant and accessible as possible

without it becoming bogged down in academic citations or footnotes. I believe that the information in this

paper will have relevance for anyone involved in any aspect of project management, whatever its nature,

and I would of course be happy to receive any comments or feedback, and to enter into correspondencewith anyone who might wish to discuss further any of the issues raised. You can also make comments at

my blog at

www.davidrubens-associates.com/DRA/

I am grateful to those people involved in various aspects of the Olympics delivery and management

programmes who have agreed to talk with me, and in order to ensure their anonymity I have used the

information that they have shared with me as background information for this paper, rather than in order to

highlight specific shortcomings in any individual organisation.


5/24



Olympic Secur ity Management: Spectacular vs Mundane

As with all modern Olympic Games, the relevant authorities have been mindful of two distinct but intricately

related responsibilities to avoid the impression that there is an oppressive securitisation of the wholeOlympics experience, at the same time as they need to give respect to what are increasingly seen as

unanswerable threats. The London Olympics has continued the tendency of all recent Olympic Games to

suffer from a security inflation, in that the perceived threats, the proposed security responses and above

all, the cost of each Olympics security management programme has gone beyond what was perceived of

as sufficient in previous Games. Although this tendency has accelerated since the events of 9/11 in 2001

(with an almost ten-fold increase from the $179m security budget for Sydney 2000 to $1.5bn budget for

Athens 2004), there was already at that time a clear awareness that normal security management was no

longer appropriate for the global media event that the Olympics had become, and since the development of

the Atlanta Rules at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 (and even before then since the first political Games in

Mexico City in 1968), the role of Spectacular Security has played a central role in the management and

meta-management of all subsequent Olympic Games.(1), (2), (3)

In recent years there has been a growing academic interest in the impact of securing what have come to be

known as mega events, and there is no shortage of academic articles investigating both the actual

securitising of Olympic Games as well as the implications for other areas of security and social control, but

these have tended to concentrate on seeing security as involving counter-terrorism and the threat of high-

profile major-impact terrorist attacks. Although this is undoubtedly a significant and necessary strand of

Olympics security management, the truth is that since the hostage-taking by eight Palestinian Black

September personnel in the Olympic Village in Munich in 1972, leading to the death of eleven Israeli

athletes and coaches, the only major attack to take place at an Olympics was the bomb set off at an

Olympic concert in Atlanta, which led to the death of two people and the injuring of 111 others, and was

planted by a US domestic terrorist who was captured five years later after setting off other bombs outside

abortion clinics.

Security Expenditure for Olympic Summer Games, 1984-2004(4)


6/24



Whilst it is easy to focus on large-scale terrorist attacks, (and the placement of anti-aircraft missile

batteries in various residential areas around London, as well as the deployment of Typhoon fighter jets,

have led to such headlines as Defending the Olympics from terror attack: Fighter planes at Northolt for first

time since WWII as elite RAF say they will shoot down passenger jets to protect London (5)), it seems

more likely that the security management issues that will have an immediate and more significant impacton the Games will be the more mundane issues of day-to-day security management around the venues,

and in particular the integration and management of the vast numbers of Olympic volunteers, short-term

contract security stewards, police and military personnel who have been seconded to the security operation,

as well as the simple fact of moving tens of thousands of people around London on a daily basis. It is this

area of enhanced normality security management, however large-scale it might be, that is most open to

analysis based on traditional risk management frameworks.


7/24



Tame, Loosely Structured and Wicked Problems

From a strategic project management perspective, the initial conception of the delivery of the London

Olympics could be divided into three separate components, each of which falls under a separate section of

the classical risk management triumvirate of Tame Problems, Loosely Structured Problems, and Wicked

Problems(6)

, and each of which has required their own particular development and management framework.

The first, and undoubtedly most straightforward, was the delivery of the built environment stadia, housing,

support buildings, access roads, water, heating, lighting, etc. Although the design and build of the stadia,

and the development of the wider Olympic Park area, were certainly ambitious in scale and scope, and

undoubtedly threw up their own internal problems and challenges, they were, in essence, what are called in

risk management parlance Tame Problems. The fundamental requisites of the delivery of the build project

were well-understood, there were few if any major issues that were outside the control of the planners, and

the overall capabilities required for the delivery of the built environment were not radically different from

similar construction projects that all of the major players had been involved in on different continents acrossthe world. In short, on the day that the contracts were signed, the people responsible for the delivery of that

aspect of the Games probably had a pretty good idea of what it was they needed to do, and how they were

going to achieve it.

If the issues of the built environment could be characterised as Tame Problems, with clearly identified

solutions, underlying skills and a well-developed and widely-accepted professional body of knowledge, then

the issue of the security management of the Games would clearly need a different set of development tools,

with a much higher level of innovation and creative development. The initial stage of the security

development programme, that would see the various agencies working together to create an appropriate

Olympic security management framework, would come under the general heading of what are usually

described as Loosely Structured Problems, which whilst they may each be unique in their own ways, are

also bounded by well-developed and understood principles of large-scale project management.

However, it will be the third and critical stage, the Real Time Management of the actual Games, with all of

the thousands of uncontrollables inter-acting on an ever-changing basis, that will be the ultimate test of the

event managers. (To be pedantic, the security management of the event could then itself be sub-divided in

turn into Left of Bang normal management of the event, including all of the Expected Unexpecteds that

will certainly arise, but which could be considered as coming under Normal Operational Situations, and

finally the Right of Bang responses to fast-escalating potentially crisis situations which could have thepossible consequence of derailing the whole Olympic experience).


8/24



Tame Problems are those that fall within normal working parameters, which are conducive to well-defined

responses, and which we should be able to manage using a range of Standard Operating Procedures. An example

would be a traffic light in central London breaking down. Once that is flagged up in the control room, it should be possible

to send out an engineer who, because of his training and experience, would already have a good idea of what the

potential causes of that problem could be, as well as a range of appropriate solutions. His function would be to arrive at

the scene, identify the problem, fix it, and report back that the situation has been returned to normal operational status.

The root of successful response to Tame Problems are well-understood SOPs that all members of the team are aware

of, and have the ability to implement.

Loosely Structured Problemsare those that dont fit into a tightly-defined scenario, but which are never-

the-less analogous to other similar situations. They call on a higher level of creative response, often involving

coordination and interaction between other agencies , but which still fall within Planned Situations. An example wouldbe all of the traffic light in Piccadilly Circus in London, or Times Square in New York, going out of action at the same time.

Although this would have immediate effects beyond the immediate environment of the situation itself, as an Incident

Management situation it requires the same response framework as a wide range of other comparable scenarios, such

as a serious traffic accident, a major crime scene, a suspected VBIED (car bomb) or a spill of toxic chemicals. There

should be a well-recognised process for creating a multi-agency response that could assess the situation, look at the

various secondary consequences and then develop and implement a response programme that would isolate as much

as possible the specific incident from the wider community, minimising the potential area of disruption, at the same time

steps are put in place to fix the original problem and manage a return to normal operation status. The secret to the

success of the response is not so much specific response plans, but the ability of the representatives of various agencies

to work together, share information and expertise, and create and implement a response programme appropriate to that

specific situation.

Wicked Problemsare those problems that because of their scale, complexity and inter-connectedness with other

factors, are not conducive to solutions in the classic sense of the word. It was originally used to describe problems of

urban planning, where simple (and simplistic) solutions continuously failed to solve the problems they were tasked with

resolving. An example of a Wicked Problem would be if, for whatever reason (technical malfunction, human error, cyber-

terrorism), every traffic light in London simultaneously turned to green, and stayed there. Within one minute, the

consequences of that would bring the whole city to a stand-still, and any Response Options that might have been on the

table would immediately become inoperable. Within one hour, there would be a range of problems created by the original

situation that could easily cause a breakdown in the social control of the city, and which would be beyond the scope of

any normal Incident Response Management programme.

TameProblems

WickedProblems

LooselyStructuredProblem

Stage 1:Built

Environment

Stage 2: Development ofSecurity Management

Frameworks

Stage 3:Management ofOlympic Event


9/24



The effective delivery of the Games themselves, from the Opening Ceremony on 27th

J uly to the closing

ceremony of the Paralympics on 9th

September 2012, will be dependent on the ability to move hundreds of

thousands of people from place to place , to get their tickets to them (a total of 11 million tickets in all), to

feed them, and allow them to enjoy the Games in a safe, well-structured and socially acceptable manner

at the same time ensuring that an Incident Response and Crisis Response capability is on hand that willallow event managers to respond speedily and effectively to those unexpected challenges that will

inevitably arise. This ability to create on-the-spot solutions to problems that will undoubtedly have

numerous secondary effects given the high-level of inter-connectedness and systems-dependence of the

whole Olympic project will be the ultimate test of the seven years preparation of the events strategic

planners and managers.

It should also be remembered that, despite the fact that these are officially The London Games, events will

in fact be taking place across the country, either as one-off events (such as football matches at football

stadia in Glasgow, Cardiff, Manchester, Newcastle and Coventry, besides Wembley Stadium in London), or

as on-going events such as the sailing, which takes place in a small town on the south coast of England,

120 miles away from the main Olympic stadium, and which continues for almost the whole of the Olympics.

Whether it is for the potential protester, the problem of traffic and access management or any of the other

administrative problems that are likely to beset these venues, it will be necessary to have the same range

and level of response capability available for these events as it is for the main events in the Olympic Park.

From 2012 Olympics UK Venues Map www.golondon.about.com


10/24



Creating Appropriate Capabili ties

The fundamental difference between the Tame Problem stage of the stadia build and the Loosely

Structured Problems of the capability development stage is that whilst all of the skills, resources and

professional frameworks to build the Olympic stadia already existed, and had been tried and tested on

similar projects across the world, the operational frameworks and capabilities required to deliver the

London Olympics did not exist, and in a very real sense had to be created from scratch. Whether it was the

development of the traffic management system (including the creation of Olympic Routes and the

management of four thousand cars provided by BMW for the use of the Olympic Family), the recruitment

and training of tens of thousands of people, from different backgrounds and with different capabilities, who

would be integral to the successful delivery of the Games in their roles as Olympic Volunteers and short-

term contract security personnel, or the integration of blue (police), green (military) and civilian personnel

into a unified security management framework, these Loosely Structured Problems, even though they may

be unique each in their own way, are also bounded by well-understood principles of large-scale multi-agency project management. (The fact that each of the different organisations would come to the table with

their own culture, world-view and in some cases active antagonism to other agencies, only added to the

necessity to create an effective conceptualisation of a possible delivery framework from the start of the

project).

In fact, the basic principles of creating project management capability within a framework of multi-agency

organisational complexity is so well understood, that it would have been feasible to identify the handful of

issues that would be most likely to have a significant impact on the ability of the project managers and

strategic developers to create a fully integrated and functional project delivery framework on the first day

that the project was founded, as well as to identify the likely fail points that would cause greatest problems

and potential failure.

The first critical issue would be the fact that the London Olympics would require the integration of a

massive number of organisations, each of which had specialist knowledge in a particular area of

significance to the over-all success of the Olympic delivery project. The issue of multi-agency integration is

one that has been well-studied at the highest level of strategic capability development, especially in terms

of security and crisis management, and is a subject which would have real significance in the creation of an

effective Olympics delivery framework.

The two competing paradigms of project management are Instructionalist and Innovative, and both are

represented in the over-all Olympic design programme. Instructionalist project management is extremely

effective when all aspects of the project are well understood, and the general working environment is under

the control of the managers. The construction of the Olympic Park would fall under this label, in that all

participants in the project would have clearly identified roles, and it would be their function to use their skills

and experience to fulfil those roles according to the Master Plan, which to a large extent would have been

reasonably well-developed even before the first digger arrived on the first site. If, however, the nature of the

project is such that it is moving into unknown territory, and requires as a fundamental part of its remit the

development of new frameworks and working procedures, then it is clear that the project will demand a

high-degree of in-process learning and selectionism, ie the creation of effective problem-solving strategies

whilst the on-going project delivery process is already in action. (An example of this on-going process was


11/24



the decision to include military personnel in the Olympic security programme, a decision that was only

made public in December 2011. This major change in the Olympic security management design clearly had

significant implications for integrated command and control, roles and responsibilities, lines of

communication, legal responsibility and chain of command, all of which would need to go through many

levels of fine tuning before an operational management system could be developed). This openness to thecreation of innovative solutions to problems that cannot be predicted when the project is initiated is of

paramount importance. Within this understanding of innovative project management, it is clearly not the

role of the project managers to develop and deliver a well-defined project management outline from the

outset, telling the individual units what to do, but rather to create the space and opportunity for the different

expertises held within the different specialist agencies to be brought together in order to create appropriate

and effective solutions to what are in essence unknown problems. This free jazz model of framework

development is hardly revolutionary, being recognised as early as the 1960s:

Organismic systems are adapted to unstable conditions where new and unfamiliar problems and

requirements continually arise which cannot be broken down and distributed amongst specialist

roles within a hierarchy.. Responsibilities and functions and even methods and powers have to

be constantly redefined through interactions with others participating in common tasks or in the

solutions to common problems

Burns, T Mechanistic and Organismic Structures

New Society, January 1963: 17-20(7)

The problem in creating such ad hoc groupings, as is clearly required in the Olympic project, is that it is

dependent on a high-level of non-hierarchical interaction between many different organisations, each ofwhich is prepared to throw their own knowledge and expertise into the pot for the sake of the greater good.

In case of process innovation, what is learned is often tacit, intangible and context-

dependent.Such learning is not only difficult to measure and evaluate, it is also difficult to

capture in explicit forms, in ways that can be captured and understood in new contexts.In such

circumstances, the challenge may not be so much to make tacit knowledge explicit, but to work out

how social practices are organised, and to find ways of aligning them

Bresnan et al (2003:160)

Social Practices and the Management of

Knowledge in Project Environments (8)

However, a related issue associated with a high-level of process innovation is that an integral component of

the development of a management framework as complex as that required for the Olympics would be a

high degree of test and improve, in that operational protocols that were developed on a multi-agency basis

would by their very nature be best approximations, and would need to be checked and revised as part of

the over-all development process. This iterative decision making involves a continuous loop of constant

self-monitoring, assessing changing situations and then creating new decision-paths, which in turn are

monitored, assessed and adapted . The nature of such capability development can be gauged by the

language used to describe it: a probe and learn methodology, where the project itself is seen as a


12/24



learning, reflective process, progressing through a series of failures and improvement and where

managers can do no more than grope along(9)

.

Although it is possible to conceive of a programme of extreme complexity that does deliver First time and

every time, (the NASA moon landing programme was the outstanding example of that concept, wheredespite the cutting-edge nature of what was at the time the most complex technical development

programme in history, each new stage in the progression to putting a man on the moon was tried out for

the first time when they did it for real), in reality the lack of appropriate testing time is a clear indication of

potential (and, some would say, inevitable) failure(10)

.

From talking with people involved in many of the organisations participating in the Olympics delivery project,

it seems clear that they are, in the main, happy that they have the capability and expertise to deliver the

necessary level of support and logistical management as required. Whether it is the Metropolitan Police

Olympic Command, the people involved in City Hall or the support teams around them, it is very much a

feeling of Enhanced Normality, in that the required services are similar to what they do every day, just on

a greater scale. The problems come in, however, when organisations are tasked with doing something that

is completely new, and for which they have little experience or corporate knowledge. The two organisations

that are suffering most under this burden, though for different reasons, are G4S and LOCOG itself.

The significant difference between LOCOG and the other agencies and organisation involved in the

delivery of the Olympics is that whereas all of the other organisations have created a corporate knowledge

base over many years, and therefore have a strong bank of shared experiences and expertise as well as a

well-developed operating culture, LOCOG is an artificial organisation that has been created specifically for

the London Olympics, and which to a large degree has little if any unifying corporate ethos or identity thatcould act as the underlying foundation on which policies can be developed and decisions made.

Although a private company (originally supposed to be funded by sponsorship, ticket sales and

merchandising, though the economic downturn has meant that it has been funded by the government by

around 300m), LOCOG is responsible for the organising of the Olympic Games on behalf of the IOC,

which means that it has come to be seen as the enforcement arm of the Friendly Games. Whether it is

threatening small shop-keepers with criminal charges for using the Olympic logo, initially denying Hamden

Park in Scotland the right to fly the Scottish flag during the football matches to be held there, managing the

allocation and distribution of Olympic tickets or arranging traffic programmes for the duration of the Games,

LOCOG has been the interface between The London Olympics and all of the various organisations that

are actually working towards the success of the Games, whether it is government ministries, private

companies, transport officials, public health and safety managers or the hundreds of companies that are

involved as sponsors. As such, LOCOG is both the public face of Olympic management as well as the

private company that makes demands on all of its various partners.

G4S, the company that has won the contract to supply all non-governmental security services to the

Games, is suffering because the nature of the operation and the scale of the number of personnel involved

means that its existing organisational experience and corporate wisdom are neither robust nor

sophisticated enough to deliver the capabilities and protocols appropriate to the London Olympics. Having

originally won the contract on the basis that they would require 10,000 stewards (2,000 paid personnel and


13/24



8,000 unpaid volunteers), and a budget of 86m, by the start of 2012 it was clear that that was going to be

completely inadequate, and the figures rose to 23,000 stewards and a budget of 284m(11)

. The problems

faced by G4S are intrinsic to the nature of the recruitment, training and deployment programme, and their

implications can be judged by the fact that even six weeks before the Opening Ceremony, they were still

advertising on LinkedIn for front-line security personnel as well as Team Leaders and even Olympic VenueSecurity Managers (12).

Despite the fact that the government has consistently claimed that there is a real and significant threat of

terrorist activity around the Games, and that the front-line stewarding staff will be the people primarily

responsible for policing the events, ensuring the smooth flow of people into and out of the venues, and

acting as an option of first-response in the event that anything untoward happens around the stadia, the

truth is that the vast majority of the people involved will have had inadequate training, inadequate

orientation of the venues that they are working in, and an inadequate understanding of the various roles

that they are supposed to be fulfilling. The scale of the recruitment - up to twenty thousand short-hire

personnel - and the lack of time for structured training or the creation of an effective graduated start-up

process, means that it will not be possible to have a fail and learn period where the problems that will

inevitably arise can be identified, countered and then solved, with those solutions then being progressively

embedded into future processes and protocols. It will also mean that the very people who will be at the

critical inter-face with the public, responsible for ensuring speedy access to the events and venues as well

as a fast response to any incident that might occur, will lack the skills and experience necessary that will

enable them to act responsibly and respond effectively in the event that something does happen. Rather

than being responsible for Olympic security, it is more likely that the stewards will be responsible for

policing the general Olympic environment on behalf of LOCOG (and indirectly, the IOC) in matters

pertaining to the protection of sponsors brands and advertising, and the prevention of guerrilla advertising,as was seen at FIFA World Cup in South Africa in 2010. (It has already been announced that it will be

forbidden to bring water, picnic hampers or food coolers into the Olympic venues, an issue that is likely to

be contentious as people are forced into leaving such goods at the entrance to the venues, and then

queuing at sponsors stalls to buy what has been widely criticised as over-priced meals and water)(13)

.

Although there have certainly been test events in the final run-up to the Olympics, and a number of

simulated security management scenarios involving a wide range of government and other agencies, the

fact that the vast majority of the ground-level personnel are only going to be recruited immediately before

the Olympics, and will have had little if any time to go through effective training, means that the likelihood is

that the lack of effective planning and preparation will cause major problems at the very start of the

Olympics that will not have been accounted for, and which will demand a high level of fast-response

decision-making from event managers for which they may well lack the necessary skills, resources and

training.

Traffic management in London isnot a modern problem


14/24



Pathways to Disaster

If there is one thing that can be categorically stated in risk management, it is that nothing Just happens.

Every Incident is only the final stage of a long period of gestation and development, whether the time that

process has taken to be triggered, escalate and then come to fruition can be measured in terms of minutes

and seconds or months and years.

The concept that the transition from Incident to Crisis is a process that is based not so much on the

nature and scale of the outside event, but rather is a function of the lack of response or management

capability within the specific organisation, is well recognised (14) .

The development process from potential vulnerability to actual full-blown crisis (which can be defined as a

state which threatens an entire systems collapse) can be encapsulated in the following six steps. It is these

simple statements that can be used to judge any major meltdown, whether it is BP and the DeepwaterHorizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the collapse of the western banking system, or the continual failures

on the London public transport system which will almost certainly have some effect on the London

Olympics at some stage during the coming weeks.

Statement 1:The cause of the systemic failure is due to an in-built fault within the system itself, not

any particular outside event. Whether it is a lack of training, high turnover of personnel, lack of clear

responsibility and chain of commands, cutting back on safety and oversight procedures or any other reason,

it is these intrinsic weaknesses that create the the environment and opportunity for a crisis situation to

develop.

Statement 2: There will be a series of Normal Accidents that will highlight the existence of the in-built

systemic weaknesses but they will be ignored. It is highly unlikely that any crisis is a unique event, but

rather is the result of the escalation of a minor event that has happened repeatedly before.

Statement 3: When the Normal Accident does begin to escalate into a true crisis situation, there will

be an Awareness Lag before the organisation becomes aware of the new status of the situation, and a

further lag whilst time is taken to decide what to do about it. This will allow the escalating Normal Accident

to reach Crisis Status, which in turn will mean that the solutions that are finally suggested will no longer be

appropriate.

Statement 4:When the situation is finally recognised as a crisis, there will be a significant lack in three

specific areas: manpower, resources and, most importantly, effective management skills. This time lag will

allow the escalating Normal Accident to reach Crisis Status, which in turn will mean that the solutions that

are finally suggested will no longer be appropriate.


15/24



Statement 5: When the management teams do finally take action, the situation will not respond as

planned. Their actions will create unintended consequences, which will in turn become serious issues that

will become potential crisis situations in their own right.

Statement 6: None of this is unknown. When something does go wrong, it will be clear that it was not a

random event, but an inevitable result of inbuilt weaknesses. The reason that the crisis will happen is that

previous lessons will not have been learned.

Predictions.

President George W. Bush made a Category Error, when he confused the successful achievement of theTame Problem stage of the invasion of Iraq with successful completion of the entire mission. Thesuccessful delivery of the built environment of the London Olympics, plus everything that takes place in thebuild-up to the Games, is important, but the Mission Objective by which it will all be judged is the successfuldelivery and management of the Olympics and Paralympic Games themselves.

Although it is always easy to second-guess the management from the safety of the stands, it seems clear

from a number of statements from both London Olympic managers and IOC spokesmen that they are

making the same category error that was made over Heathrow T5, namely that the successful construction

of the built environment (which is undoubtedly impressive) can be mistaken for the effective delivery of a

fully functioning operation. If, as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said in 1960, the main problem

with politics was Events, dear boy, events, then the fundamental problem with a major public event, and

especially one as complex as the Olympics, is surely People, dear boy, people.

That fact that something will go wrong (in fact, many things will go wrong), is not the problem. That is

something that is inevitable in an operation as complex as the London Olympics. The question that needs

to be asked, and which will undoubtedly be answered unambiguously by the 9th

September, is whether the

fundamental appropriate management systems were in place to respond to those problems, and if not, why

not and who will be held responsible.


16/24



A basic understanding of project and security management would suggest that despite of, or even because

of, the sophistication of the Olympics management system, beyond the ever-present danger of terror attack,

the most likely crisis scenarios are exactly those situations that could have been highlighted on the same

day that the Olympics were awarded to London seven years ago.

The ability to identify potential fail-points, and then reinforce them so that in fact they become one of the

strongest links in the over-all operation, thus creating a Virtuous Spiral of continuous improvement, is a

fundamental skill for all operation managers. It is hoped that in the event that the situations listed below do

develop, all of which could be considered as High Likelihood / High Impact on a classical Risk

Assessment matrix, there will be a clear and well-managed series of contingency options in place.

1. Traffic Management

Both road transport (including Olympic Routes) and public transport are critical components in the

delivery of hundreds of thousands of people across the city each day including stadium staff, security

staff, journalists, athletes, event administrators, sponsors and the tens of thousands of visitors

attached to the Olympic Family. Any breakdown, or even mild interruption, in the free-flow of the

traffic management system will have secondary effects that will affect the whole of the Olympic

programme. The London tube system is subject to a high level of interruptions at the best of time, but

the Olympics will put a completely different level of pressure on the entire system. Besides the

technological problems, the sheer weight of numbers could mean that station infrastructure is over-

loaded, leading to closure of stations whilst the over-load of passengers is cleared.

The delivery of Olympic personnel to the various stadia is based on use of the Olympic Route

Networks, and the 4,000 vehicles supplied by BMW. Anyone who has ever run a security operation

knows that the pick-up and drop-off is always a tense time, and open to any number of potential

mishaps. On a basic calculation, 4,000 vehicles making two return journeys a day (pick-up in the

morning, drop-off at the venue, pick-up and drop-off on the return journey, then the same for evening

activities), are going to generate 32,000 separate stages. With even three messages per stage, that

will create a hundred thousand separate messages a day even if every single one of those

operations goes without a hitch. Given the likelihood of misunderstandings, lack of coordination at the

venues themselves and last-minute changes of plans, this is an area where any operations manager

would be seriously worried. The fact that the BMW drivers are Olympic volunteers who have in all

likelihood never worked commercially before, never used a radio and have received only half a days

training each, only adds to the likelihood that this is an area where something could go seriously wrong.

2. Security Personnel

The sheer numbers of personnel involved in the Olympics security project, coupled with the lack of

time to run effective training programmes or orientation of their specific venues and locations, means

that the deployment of the security / stewarding teams requires a well-managed process of low-skilled

but high-volume personnel with high-skilled (and hopefully well-trained) Team Leaders and

Operational Managers. The on-ground personnel will be charged mainly with creating a presence on

the ground, giving an impression of ownership of the territory that they are covering to all visitors and

guests, together with the provision of general public support and direction. It will be at the level of

Team Leaders and Operational Managers that the critical skill levels will come in,


17/24



allowing them to adapt to changing situation as required, and to respond to the range of problems that

will undoubtedly be thrown up.

The problems associated with the stewards and security personnel will be as much of a logistical

nature as a security management one ensuring that the correct people are in the correct place at theright time; that they have been fed and watered, and given necessary rest breaks; that they are briefed,

equipped and prepared effectively for what will be a low-profile but high-impact role. The overall

significance of the general security and stewarding programme can be gauged by the fact that a

friendly, helpful and supportive stewarding and security presence will make a greater and longer

lasting impression on the visitors and guests to the Olympic venues than all of the government

announcements in the world.

3. Communications, Information Transfer and Decision Making

It is a truism in all security operations that as soon as something goes wrong, communications and

transfer of information is found to be the first casualty in managing the response. Given the highly

intricate nature of the Olympic security management programme, as well as the interconnectedness of

the traffic management, venue management, technology and other aspects of the Games, it is highly

likely that at some stage the inability of different sections of the operation to communicate effectively

with each other will create a significant systems failure, which in turn will trigger a domino effect

creating secondary consequences beyond the scale of the original problem.

Given that any situation that does occur, however minor and innocuous it might seem at the time, will

require real-time solutions to be decided and implemented on an immediate basis, the ability to create

effective solutions to minor problems and to ensure that they are transmitted to various teams, ,

understood by them and implemented as directed, is in fact a highly-complex and systems-critical

process. The success of such responses, which will undoubtedly be needed on an on-going and

continuous basis, will be dependent on the ability of all participants, from the tactical decision-makers

to the operators on the ground, to transfer information speedily and accurately, and to work together in

a tightly-integrated yet loosely managed framework. If they do succeed, showing an ability to be

creative, adaptable and highly disciplined, it will be a clear indication of the skill, professionalism and

effective planning of all of the people involved in the operation.

4. Breakdown in Technology

Given the high level of dependency on technology, it is highly likely that at some stage technological

systems will fail to deliver that which they promised, causing immediate high-impact consequences

that will cascade into other areas of operation. As any operations manager knows, it is likely that not

only will the technological systems on which the management of the Games are dependent ticket

identification, access control, security management systems fail to deliver what they have promised,

but they will do so at the most awkward of times. The failure of technology is not something

unfortunate that happens out of the blue, but is something that should be factored in to every level of

the project management. These are the What if. scenarios that should have been modelled and

tested to destruction.


18/24



5. Something Else (UNK- UNKs)

Anyone who has any experience of operations management will know that however wonderful the

management plans are when they are discussed in detail on the PowerPoint presentation, once the

operation actually kicks off, the Unknown Unknowns start to fly in from all angles. It will be the ability of

event managers at every level of operation to adapt and respond to the unexpected Unknown

Unknowns that will be the foundation of a successful London Games.

6. And finally.

Despite what we might hear before and during the Games, as in most parties, if something does go

wrong, expect a high level of finger-pointing and responsibility-evading once they are over and the

guests have gone home. It is in the nature of multi-agency operations that internal tensions can be

covered up when things are going well (though those tensions will still most certainly be there), but

once things start going wrong, it will not take much for the equivalent of shouting, slamming doors and

the throwing of crockery to take place. It is during this process that fundamental flaws in the planningprocess will come to light, flaws that created the vulnerabilities that led to an almost inevitable

breakdown in service delivery at the exact moment when it was required.


19/24



Appendix 1:

Learning f rom Experience: Heathrow T5 and a National Embarrassment

In case anyone thinks that my comments are small-minded and driven by a desire to fail, it is worthwhile

looking at a similar (though much smaller scale) national event that suffered from almost exactly the same

problems, as well as similar underlying systemic weaknesses that are almost certain to figure in the

management of the London Olympics.

As an example of a situation where lack of appropriate preparation in a major national project causedsignificant failures both operationally on the day, and reputationally across the world, one needs look no

further than what happened during the opening of Heathrow Airports brand new Terminal 5 in March, 2008.

Widely lauded as an example of the best of British technology, and a gateway to a new, modern UK, T5

was an interface between highly complex IT systems and the need to move tens of thousands of people

through a highly-managed through-flow system, including check-ins, security checks and separate parallel

systems for baggage management. Although the failure of the baggage management system to stand up to

the pressures of the workload made the biggest headlines, leading to a situation where 20,000 bags were

unprocessed and the entire baggage handling system had eventually to be suspended, the problems

actually started much earlier than that and are an indicator of some of the problems that could be

expected at the Olympics. Both staff and passengers arriving at the airport had difficulty in finding their

respective car-parks, and in some cases the staff that were meant to have opened them up had not arrived,

leading to a significant breakdown in the very first link of a highly intricate and tightly-bounded chain. This

meant that there was a delay in opening up and manning check-in desks, resulting in additional pressure

on both staff and systems before they had even got into the rhythm of their first working day.(17)

Given that the London Olympics are dependent on exactly the same combination of high levels of staff who

are working in a complex environment for which they have not received adequate training, compounded by

a high level of technological dependency in all aspects of access control into the stadiums, Olympic

managers are no doubt fearing similar headlines to those that met T5 managers in a parliamentary

6t

May, 2012

No Border Control: UK Border Chiefwarns of Summer Chaos at Airport(16)

8th

May, 2008

BA ch ief Willie Walsh b randsHeathrow's Terminal 5 a 'nationalembarrassment'

(15)


20/24



transport committee report that stated that [W]hat should have been an occasion of national pride was, in

fact, an occasion of national embarrassment.(18)

Arrival at the Olympic Park is in itself a highly complex and systems-critical operation, consisting as it does

of public transport which is dependent on a tube line that is notorious for breakdowns at the best of times,or by private car, which in itself is dependent on a single access road into the Olympic Park area, and

which then leads into a highly-restrictive one-way system that means that if people miss their drop-off

points they will have to remain in the one-way system until they have completed a complete loop of the

Olympic Park. Based on the T5 experience, there is a high possibility that difficulties in getting staff to their

respective positions on the first morning of the Olympics could create a chain-reaction that it is highly likely

will cause high levels of disruption to both staff and visitors, which in turn will have a significant impact on

the ability to adhere to projected rates of flow-through into the stadia.

Going back to the basic principle that the causes of such failures are often simple to identify, and are in fact

symptomatic of endemic management weaknesses, it is worth taking note of the official report by the

House of Commons Transport Committee into the opening of T5, which highlighted the lack of effective

preparation: [M]ost of these problems were caused by one of two main factors: insufficient communication

between owner and operator, and poor staff training and systems testing(19)

. In fact, reading through the

official government report, one has the feeling that the outline ofOlympic Report has already been written:

Staff Training(p5)

We found that the programme of training for many workers had been inadequate. There were high levels

of staff participation in, and completion of the training courses. However, [a British Airways employees

spokesman] argued that training was insufficient. He told us that: People were taken to a hotel and shown

some sort of film or slides and were told this is what it looked like. They were then given familiarisation

training for three days to cover an area as big as Hyde Park. That was not sufficient at all. For that reason,

people were totally confused. Two days out of three were devoted to putting them into a coach to show

them x, y and z, and where to enter and exit and so on, but what was missing was hands on training as to

where the spurs were, where the bags would come in and so on. For baggage in particular it was still a

building site. You cannot start to train people there unless you have on a hard hat and all the rest of it.

Therefore, the only time available to show these people around was the very last few weeks.

Public Trials (p6)

Prior to the opening of T5, 15,000 volunteers took part in 66 public trials, creating 50,00 passenger profiles

and 400,000 bags of various shapes and sizes. The failure of the testing process to recreate a realistic

simulacrum of the range of problems facing handlers in actual operation was admitted by BAA: [D]espite

the rigorous tests that took place, it was inevitable that once real passenger bags were introduced into the

system, there would be bedding-in issues. As Colin Matthews, Chief Executive of Heathrow Airport said in

his evidence to the committee, It may have been that the baggage we were testing was too uniform.

[M]aybe the reality of the baggage that people put into the system was more diverse than our test

represented .


21/24



Communications between Staff and Management(p7)

Trade union representatives gave evidence to the committee that based on their experience in working in

similar conditions in various airports, they were convinced that management projections as to the efficacy

of baggage handling systems were inaccurate, and that there would be inevitable failures of the system.

However, the response from management was that [N]o, it was a state-of-the-art building and everything

would work and be all right.

Communications between BAA and British Airways (p7)

Colin Matthews, Chief Executive of Heathrow Airport, told the committee However well the airport operator

and the airline operator, BA, are working it is also vital that the two are absolutely integrated and together. I

think that during the construction of Terminal 5 that appeared to be the case. Around about or just prior to

the opening of T5 it seems that that togetherness deteriorated. It is that togetherness that allows you to

cope with the issues that varies on the day. He added that, if he had his time again, he would focus

resolutely and determinedly on keeping British Airways and BAA in the same room tightly together.


22/24



Notes

1) For an insightful academic consideration of the increased risk aversion across major public events

(as evidenced by the positioning of anti-aircraft missile batteries across London), see Boyle and

Haggertys Spectacular Security: Mega-Events and the Security Complex, International Political

Sociology (2009, 3:257-274)

2) See From Olympic Massacre to the Olympic Stress System, Andreas Selliaas, International

Review for the Sociology of Sport, (2012), 47:379-396 for a review of how Olympic security

demands have increased in response to significant world events: (Munich 1972 Black

September killing of Israeli athletes;Atlanta 1996 Response to urban terrorism of New York

WTC (1993), Oklahoma Bombing (1995) and Tokyo Subway Sarin attack (1995);Athens 2004 -

International CT cooperation in response to 9/11 and global terrorist threat; and Beijing 2008

Total security control against both internal (domestic) and international terrorism).

3) See Governing Security at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games by Ying Yu, Francis Klauser and

Gerald Chan, in The International J ournal of the History of Sport, (2009), 3:389-405 for a detailed

investigation of how the Beijing authorities used the excuse of the Olympics to create a sterile

area, completely under their control, within which it would have been virtually impossible to carry

out any terrorist acts, which in Chinese eyes were more concerned with Xianjing independence

groups, East Turkistan terrorists, Tibetan separatists and the Falun Gong religious group. It is also

interesting to note the extent to which the Beijing Olympics security management programme was

supported by western governments and private corporations, despite the public criticisms of

Chinas record on human rights and its lack of openness to free and democratic protest.

4) Wall Street J ournal, August 22nd

, 2004, in Boyle & Haggerty Spectacular Security: Mega-Events

and the Security Complex, (p 261)

5) Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2138488/Typhoon-fighter-planes-stationed-

RAF-Northolt-Olympics-military-build-up.html#ixzz1y9KmB1C9

6) See Rittel and Webbers Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Policy Sciences (1973) for

the classic introduction to Tame and Wicked Problems

7) Burns, T Mechanistic and Organismic Structures

New Society, J anuary 1963: 17-20

8) Bresnan, M, Edelman, L, Newell, S, Scarbrough,H and Swan, J (2003) Social practices and the

management of knowledge in project environments nternational J ournal of Project Management

(2003), 157-166

9) Pich, Michael, Loch, Christopher and DeMeyer, Arnold (2002) On Uncertainty, Ambiguity and

Complexity in Project Management Management Science,

Vol 48, 8:1008-1023


23/24



10) For an in-depth introduction into the concept that increased complexity creates an inevitability of

systems breakdown, which in turn creates a domino effect of cascading failures, see Charles

Perrows seminal Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (1984), Princeton

University Press.

11) London 2012 Olympics: G4S blame 283 million security costs on Government and Locog

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/9288289/London-2012-Olympics-G4S-blame-283-

million-security-costs-on-Government-and-Locog.html

12) G4S are looking for someone with excellent leadership skills, who has managed over 20

operation staffs in the security industry or Military or the Police force at the Olympics. Application

ends soon! The hourly rate is approximately 14.00 per hour with the possibility of being

considered for a more senior role. If you are interested please send your CV to

[email protected]) G4 LinkedIn Olympic posting (Accessed12/06/2012)

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=2909014&type=member&item=109149324&qid=a

cc6e9f9-681c-47c5-9fd8-10ce0c9938ff&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-

ttl&goback=%2Egmp_2909014

13) Olympic security ban on your bottled water: But you can buy it in the stadium - at inflated prices

Mail Online, 7th

May 2012 (accessed 20/06/2012)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2140568/London-2012-Olympics-security-ban-bottled-

water.html

14) See Turner, BA and Pidgeon, NF Man-Made Disasters (Butterworth-Heinemann,1978), and Toft,

B and Reynolds, S Learning from Disasters (Perpetuity Press, 1994) for the classic introduction

to these concepts.

15) Mail Online, 8th

May, 2008

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-564523/BA-chief-Willie-Walsh-brands-Heathrows-

Terminal-5-national-embarrassment.html#ixzz1yVfGkAXG

16) Daily Mirror, 12th May, 2012

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/uk-border-chief-warns-of-summer-822130

17) IT failure at T5: What really happened (07/04/2001) (Accessed 14/06/2012)

www.zdnet.com/blog/projerctfailure/it-failure-at-heathrow-t%-what-really-happened/681

18) The Opening of Heathrow Terminal 5 p3 House of Commons Transport Committee, Twelfth

Report of Session 2007-08 (Stationery Office, 2008)

19) ibid, p3


24/24


David Rubens Associates

The Arches,

Maygrove Road

London NW6 2EE

[email protected]

www.davidrubens-associates.com

2012London Olympics Security Management DRA 8

Documents

Transcript of 2012London Olympics Security Management DRA 8