From Plans to Preparedness
As we look up from the LA wildfires and look ahead to future extreme weather events, how might we make sure we are ready for the future? Cities write plans - and when disasters strike, we pull them out. We have plans, but are we prepared?
Extreme weather events are becoming more and more frequent. It’s not just floods and fires, cities face emergencies that require rapid response everyday, from mis-information campaigns and pandemics to building collapses.
Running the Scenarios
What if cities were regularly running scenario games and table top activities that updated as new challenge areas emerged? What if city teams actively engaged in full simulations of increasing complexity? What if governments had access to live role play tools that shifted to varying degrees of difficulty and helped teams reflect? With generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) used as a “practice partner,” city leaders have these powers.
This is a space where GenAI can help government organizations strengthen their response muscles and get ready. As a planning partner, GenAI is often used as a tool to rapidly set up scenarios, run them, and evaluate them. Many are already using GenAI for scenario planning and analysis. As a “practice partner,” GenAI can be a tool to rapidly set up scenarios for teams, run teams through these scenarios with the teams responding to the scenario and the scenario responding to them. These tools can evaluate the team’s responses, provide feedback, suggest alternatives, and prompt reflection. For organizational leaders, GenAI can be used not just to conduct scenario planning, but to run practice sessions for teams that will face these scenarios. For organizational leaders and communications teams, this goes beyond projecting the future - it is strengthening, through practice, their capacity to respond.
Practice Matters
As we know from other facets of life, practice matters. As a wilderness first responder, my practice diagnosing ailments, managing the group, dressing wounds, and evacuating patients means that when an emergency strikes in the woods, I am ready. Athletic teams practice to learn how to work together, how to execute their plans, and how to respond to the unknown. Practice builds muscles. Practice prepares us for the situations we might face in the future. Practice done well - action plus reflective recovery - increases learning. It provides us the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. It gives us the chance to try new approaches and see what works. It makes sure that what we think will work, actually does - and that we can do it. We run the play to see how it works. We put the bicycle in the wind tunnel. Fire and rescue squads, police teams, and hospital emergency groups all drill relentlessly. Actors and stage crews do full dress rehearsals to find all the little hiccups, even in a fully scripted show. Improv troupes practice so they are ready for anything.
For city leaders, such practice exercises have often been too costly or not realistic enough. Before GenAI, it took a lot of work to imagine a whole set of possible paths. Complex scenarios were often reduced to complicated games. In 2018, we ran a tabletop exercise for mayors and their top communications staff to get them ready for potential Census dis and mis information campaigns. The situations quickly got complex but we were limited to a few rounds with canned responses and a limited set of choices. In 2025, as the wildfires raged in Los Angeles, GenAI allowed us to run a stronger live simulation for city managers preparing to step into leadership of their own cities as fires engulfed them. GenAI allowed us to re-create the complexity they would face returning home and get them prepared. City leaders can use GenAI to lead these practice sessions with their teams and ensure they’re ready for the real thing.
GenAI as Practice Partner
When city governments, and many organizations, think about GenAI it is often either a list of concerns for all the risks or imagining the upsides of what GenAI will do for us. Some recognize that it is a tool, perhaps a lever, that complements our strengths. Nimble leaders use GenAI as a “conversation partner” for brainstorming, talking through ideas, and accelerating their thinking.
An alternative way to think of GenAI is as a “practice partner” getting us ready for the future. Our ‘practice partner’ runs us and our teams through dynamic workouts to strengthen our abilities. GenAI can prepare the weights at the gym, run us through the workout, critique our form, and help us adapt our next workout to where we need to grow. As a “practice partner,” GenAI is a sparring partner or scrimmage team, a mock interviewer or a running club. GenAI doesn’t just allow us to think through the future. It lets us play through realistic and dynamic scenarios where we respond as a team, see what happens, and respond to what comes next. GenAI can enable governments to practice and get prepared. Regular use will help organizations become more agile and adaptive.
Replacement vs. Complement vs. Practice Partner
GenAI as a replacement does things for me, for example:
- Chatbot handling inquiries without human intervention
- Books meetings and emails responses without manual input
- Generates a full policy brief with limited input
GenAI as a complement helps me do stuff, for example:
- Analyzes scenarios and presents pros/cons
- Generates first draft from my outline notes
- Prepares an agenda
- Surfaces action items and key themes from a meeting
- Improves clarity of written work
GenAI as a practice partner gets me ready, for example it:
- Engages me in a scenario game and provides feedback
- Quizzes me
- Conducts mock media interviews and grillings from boards or councils
- Acts as a counterparty in negotiations
- Coaches my presentation and public speaking
With GenAI as a Practice Partner, governments can jump in with fewer of the risks generally associated with enterprise use of AI. When it comes to human issues like preparing disinformation campaigns or election interference, these are tools that can and are being used by those who would seek to disrupt. Governments ignore the potential for practice at their own peril.
New futures are emerging rapidly. Some of those futures, like dealing with deepfakes and misinformation, are going to be sped up by GenAI. When futures emerge, cities need not just plans, but to be prepared. We can use GenAI to practice for those situations and be ready.
Practical Matters:
Try it - example prompt below.
Test it - to rapidly test your prompting, enter the response of one GenAI tool into another tool which you have set up to “act like me.” Let the two (or more) tools talk back and forth to see the scenarios rapidly play out. This can help you upgrade your “practice partner.”
Add to it: try adding in your city’s emergency management and continuity of operations plans to add context. Use a multi-modal live mode to enhance the engagement and realism.
Build it: Play with integrating GenAI tools into your response.
Share it: Share your learnings and prompts with us and others.
Example Prompting to set up a practice scenario:
We have a small convening of high level city managers. You are going to run a scenario “table top” like activity to help them better prepare for natural disasters and extreme weather events such as wildfires. First, generate one scenario that we can provide to the teams of city managers...then we will have you run through a live activity with them.
Ok you will now prompt us one by one in a set of questions that we have to respond to. You can help us respond but get us to do the work. Throw in some updates to the scenario that respond to the solutions and plans we provide. By the end of this conversation, you want the city managers (us) to be better prepared for the next extreme weather event, so please make sure to lead us in a debrief retrospective to help us capture and apply learnings for next time.
Learn More In a Free, Online Workshop!
Want to learn how to put these practices into action for your organization explored in this blog post? Sign up for a free, online workshop on “Building Adaptive, Future-ready Organizations: GenAI as a ‘Practice Partner.’”Facilitated by Michael Baskin, in this workshop, participants will get hands-on experience building and executing scenario practice sessions. You will be introduced to using GenAI as a ‘practice partner’ to strengthen your organization’s ability to adapt to emergent futures. Together, we will explore using GenAI to prepare our organizations for future events - from extreme weather events to mis-information campaigns. Designed for public sector executives and communication teams, this workshop will help us use GenAI to shape our organizational readiness. Learn more and sign up here.
Michael Baskin is a coach for public sector executives and Chief Innovation Officer for Montgomery County MD. His work with GenerativeAI focuses on its potential impacts on government organizations and their ability to deliver for those we serve. Connect on BlueSky.
