Session I: Situational Briefing & Possible Futures: Mastering the Managerial Tool of Scenario Planning

Overview

In the first session, Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, Director of the Prevent Epidemics Team at Resolve to Save Lives, provided a briefing of critical public health information on COVID-19 in Latin America and Africa, and introduced the Adaptive Response Framework, a public health tool to guide pandemic response decision making. Rawi Abdelal, Harvard Business School Professor and Faculty Co-chair of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, facilitated a discussion on crisis leadership—providing mayors with a tool for imagining and working through the implications of various plausible futures, and strengthening their capacity to respond and learn as they go. Jennifer Musisi, the former executive director of Kampala, Uganda, and City Leader in Residence at the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, moderated the session. Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies, and three-term mayor of NYC, welcomed the mayors.