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Government Leader home > news stories
04/17/06
Government leaders suffered 'paralysis by analysis' in crisis
By John L. Guerra
Special to Government Leader
Hurricane Katrina helped to increase the American public’s sense that the federal government lacked the leadership and decision-making skills to prepare for a major disaster and respond quickly to save lives. The White House and Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) response to Katrina was, in the words of a select congressional committee on Katrina, “a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare.”
Failure to understand priorities and deploy available tools and personnel led to loss of life and property days after the storm. For example, firefighters were attending FEMA-ordered sexual harassment and community relations training in Atlanta, 500 miles from the burning warehouse district in New Orleans. At FEMA’s staging area, drinking water failed to move for days because truck drivers didn’t have the proper paperwork. Meanwhile, thousands of residents remained stranded at the New Orleans convention center without food, water or medicine.
Jeff Snipes, founder and CEO of Ninth House Inc., a San Francisco company that teaches government executives, corporate managers and others how to make critical decisions during extreme events, has seen the kind of confusion that paralyzed FEMA’s leaders and thus emergency and relief workers.
“Government hierarchy tends to reinforce a fear of making mistakes in leaders,” Snipes said. “This fear of making mistakes causes you to try to build consensus when making decisions, to ensure you’re following the rules. It prevents you from being results-oriented. You get paralysis by analysis.”
Snipes’ company (the “ninth house” describes personal growth, one of the 12 Sumerian stages of life) specializes in training government, corporate and civilian leaders to make decisions in the most physically, psychologically and industrially demanding environments. Using a technique Snipes and his colleagues created, known as the “blended process,” Ninth House teaches competency with five stages of decision-making: to plan, learn, apply, sustain and measure.
Snipes reviewed the final report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina and gave his thoughts on how government managers could have prepared and responded better. Among them:
- Don’t rely entirely on procedural manuals, doctrine or printed guidelines when events spin out of control. “You can’t overcome the gap of leadership by throwing technical skills at it,” Snipes said. “While leadership manuals are valuable, none of that teaches a leader how to take action in a crisis.”
- “Leaders should be prepared to innovate and take initiative during trying circumstances,” he said. “Agencies should be populated by leaders willing to take initiative and make creative decisions.”
- Leaders should give their employees in the field decision-making power. Foot soldiers can’t wait for orders when storage tanks start exploding. “Let troops take things into their own hands. While there is rank and order, there’s no time for them to send a request up the chain of command,” Snipes said.
- Create a sense of teamwork and inspire your team long before your organization is tested in the crucible of disaster. FEMA was a changeling in the months and years before Katrina, not quite on its feet before the New Orleans disaster.
- Prepare. The select congressional committee called the leadership vacuum during Katrina a “failure of imagination.” Snipes said: “There were plenty of corporations that had a perspective and insight into what was coming and took action beforehand. They shifted supplies, water and employees. Wal-Mart, for instance, “shifted what they sent to local stores so they’d have stuff for the people. As the storm approached, they inspired their employees to take vacation.”
Snipes, whose company has contracts to train Navy and Air Force personnel, Justice Department managers and other government staffers to maintain their cool and make the right decisions during intense crises, said the federal government should create a Homeland Security University to teach people to handle national emergencies. It would operate much like the FBI Academy, which hosts police officers from small towns and cities alike and trains them in hostage negotiating, investigative techniques and other skills.
But the university should be more than buildings and a campus to send leaders to—that might not always fit busy managerial schedules. He suggests the university also use distance learning via the Internet to supply on-demand training courses.
Ninth House uses role-playing with managers, interactive software and high-powered simulators backed by banks of servers to put managers in the middle of virtual crises. The trainers then watch how a manager responds during programmable and quickly changing scenarios. Company coaches and analysts then teach managers new ways to organize thoughts and prioritize decision-making, among other skills.
“It’s like a flight simulator,” Snipes said. “A customer can play it off a CD-ROM or install a server at the site where the trainee is.”
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