Hi <<First Name>>,
From Syria to Seoul. It's been an eventful month.
My name is Grant Rayner, and I'm the founder of Spartan9. We provide consulting and training services designed to enable you and your organisation to operate safely, securely, and successfully in complex and higher-risk environments.
This is our monthly newsletter for February, which we use to keep our clients, partners, and friends updated on what we're up to. If this isn't your thing and you'd like to unsubscribe, you can click on the link below.
PROJECT UPDATES
What we've been doing, where we've been travelling to, and what's next.
After projects in Tokyo and Colombo to start the year, we were hoping to regroup in February and prepare for our OCE Masterclasses in March and April. That didn’t happen. Instead, we’ve literally moved from Syria to Seoul.
COVID-19 Response
I'm currently in Seoul, South Korea, embedded within a client organisation as a crisis manager to support them through the COVID-19 crisis. The situation is intense, and we're rapidly ramping up mitigation and response procedures. We're learning a lot along the way, and I've published an article to share some of our initial experiences and lessons learned. Hopefully it's useful to you as you spin up your own response.
On the sidelines of this project I've developed playbooks and templates that can be used by organisations who require some structure to their processes, or simply a head start. These templates include mitigation checklists, daily meeting templates, suspected case reports and questionnaires, confirmed case reports and questionnaires, contact tracing templates, home quarantine guidelines, communications templates, and more. If you think these would be useful for your own organisation, please email me for full details and pricing.
Project SAFE HAVEN
Project SAFE HAVEN is our initiative to conduct assessments of hotels in higher-risk locations and provide recommendations based on the hotel's level of protection against terrorism and other risks. So far we've assessed 33 hotels in 5 cities.
In January we updated most of the hotels in Colombo, Sri Lanka. This was our fourth review since the Easter Day terrorist attacks last year. As the security situation is stabilising and many of the interim security measures are now permanent, we updated several of our recommendations.
If you are interested to learn more about our hotel reports, or would like to see a demonstration, please email me.
Project ARGONAUT
Earlier in the month we visited Lebanon and Syria to tie up a few loose ends for Project ARGONAUT, which is our initiative to develop highly detailed and localised evacuation plans for complex and higher-risk locations. These plans are unique, incorporating highly detailed procedures for ground movement, border crossings, and long-term secure accommodation.
During our time in Syria, we were able to get to Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo, with a short side-trip to Maaloula. You can read the PG version of the trip here. I’ll be discussing the more interesting aspects of this trip as part of our OCE Masterclasses next month.
If you'd like to know more about Project ARGONAUT, please let me know.
Homs, Syria. 35mm film (Kodak Tri-X).
TRAINING UPDATES
Training workshops, retreats, and customised training solutions.
Operating in Challenging Environments Workshops
Our Operating in Challenging Environments (OCE) Masterclasses are fast approaching (assuming I'm not trapped in South Korea due to travel restrictions or because of Syria visa stamps...). You can learn more about the OCE Masterclasses here. I also wrote my first ever LinkedIn article to promote OCE. Times are a changin', as they say...
Later in the year we'll be holding an OCE retreat in Umm Qays, in northern Jordan. The OCE retreat provides the perfect opportunity for anyone with an innate sense of curiosity about the world, and who wants to explore their own boundaries. You can learn more about the retreat and register here.
Maaloula, Syria. 35mm film (Kodak Tri-X).
Map the Afghan Pamirs Expedition
In July and August 2020, Studio D is running a series of expeditions to Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor and the Big and Small Pamir mountain ranges. The goal this year is to map six trekking and one bikepacking routes, which will be published in a guidebook in 2021.
I've been providing risk management and evacuation planning advice to Studio D over the past few months, and will be leading the High Peaks Basecamp expedition.
If you're up for a bit of walking in an incredible part of the world, you can learn more here.
GEAR AND TECH
Useful gear and technology for operating in challenging environments.
Gnarbox 2.0 SSD. This seems useful (but very expensive). If you know of a portable SSD with similar features, please let us know. Details here.
SDR Traveller D3 Duffel. This bag is an absolute workhorse. Mine has been dragged around everywhere from Karachi to Aleppo. Details here.
If you find anything interesting out there, please let us know.
USEFUL LINKS
Topical links to useful tools.
WHO Rolling Updates. The WHO has set up a web page providing rolling updates on coronavirus disease (COVID-19), showing events as they happen.
COVID-19 Tracker. This tracker provides the number of cases and deaths from novel coronavirus by country, the trend in case and death counts by country, and a global map showing which countries have cases and deaths (drawing on WHO data).
CSSE Dashboard. Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) has released the 2019-nCoV Global Cases Dashboard. Updated article with more data here.
Probable more likely than probably. This article visualizes the responses of 46 Reddit users to "What probability would you assign to the phase: <phrase>" for various statements of probability (e.g. highly likely, probably, highly unlikely etc. If you're a risk assessment geek, you'll love this.
That's it for this month folks. Travel far, travel safe.
Grant Rayner
Spartan9
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