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The Tower of Babylon

Developed by:Dirk Boldeheij, Dennis Meadows,Stefan Rometsch, Simón Schwarz,Joanna Srednicka, Stanislav Vavilov

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Play The Tower of Babylon

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Team Goal

Your team will build the structure that best meets your goal using only the provided blocks and not more than 5 minutes.

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Rules• After I say “START,” take up to two minutes to decide

which goal and general strategy you will use to guide your design of the structure. Stop when you have written 1 or 2 sentences that describe your goal. During this discussion, do not touch the blocks.

• When all teams have finished their strategy session, I will say “GO!” Then take up to five minutes for construction. Build your structure on the plate provided using only the blocks. Stop when you are finished. Then I will ask you to measure your structure and I will plot the results

• You can communicate with your team members by drawing or talking during the entire exercise.

• No communication and no trading of blocks is permitted between teams.

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Construction Results

Team #1

Team #2

Team #3

Tower Height (cm)

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“START!” You have up to 2 minutes to decide on the goal and the general

strategy you will use in designing your structure. During the discussion, do not touch the blocks. Stop and raise

your hand when you are finished with your discussion.

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When I say “GO!” You will have up to 5 minutes to build your structure on the plate provided. Use only the blocks. Use the aluminum plate as a base for your structure. You do not need to use all the blocks. Stop when you are finished.

Then you will measure your structure, and I will plot the result. (At this point I will lay a ruler on each team’s table)

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Useful Vocabulary

• Resilience is the ability to absorb a shock and quickly regain the ability to perform essential functions.– If a resilient system continues to perform without

pause, we say it is durable. – If a resilient system quits performing briefly and

then resumes, we say it is flexible.

• If a system is not resilient, we say it is brittle.

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Main Lessons of the Game

• There are many possible goals when deciding how to build something new. But normally they try to maximize some concrete measure of short-term results.

• When first they build something, normally they do not expect there will be a big shock to reduce your results.

• There is normally a conflict between building for short-term results, versus building for long term resilience.

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Trade-off between Resilience and Short-term Results

Resilience

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Family, City,Company, State,

or Country

Essential Inputs

Essential Outputs

energy, information, clean water, raw materials, manufactured parts, labor,income

wastes, reputationInformation, products,payments

Determining the resilience of a system

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Evaluating for resilience

• What types of shocks could occur?• What is the probability of the shock over the

lifetime of the structure?• How large might the shocks be?• How long would the shock possibly last?• Could there be synergies among shocks?

• Interruption of essential outputs could be :– unnoticed, minor irritation, serious problem, lethal

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Five Ways to Increase Resilience

• Improve Efficiency: – Efficiency is the ratio (output/input) You an increase efficiency by improving

the conversion process (technology change) or by preferring different outputs (cultural change)

• Raise the Barrier: – Increase the resistance against shock (stronger or higher barriers)

• Increase Redundancy:– Internally by building alternative technical systems– Externally by making social networks stronger

• Create more Buffering: – Decouple inputs from outputs (build bigger buffers)

• Develop better Predictions:– Identify new variables to measure. – Reduce the delays in measuring– Reduce the errors in measuring.

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TB Lessons applied to Climate Change

• What are the short-term goals for the Austrian economy?

• What possible shocks might climate change bring that would prevent achieving the goals?

• How resilient is the economy today?• What could you do to increase the resilience

of the country vis a vis future climate change shocks?

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Within your team discuss the following :

• What were the possible goals that you could use in judging your structure?

• What goal did your team choose?

• Why did you pick that goal?

• How did you feel when the shock occurred?

• If you were to build a structure again, would you change the goal? If yes, how?

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Team Goal

Your team will build a stable structure using only the provided blocks and not more than 5 minutes.