Michael Watkins
The terrible events we have witnessed in New Orleans are just the latest in a series of failures by our government to prevent predictable surprises. In crises ranging from the lax oversight of public companies that led to Enron, the systemic weaknesses in airline security and intelligence gathering that presaged 9/11, the dismal post-war planning in Iraq, and now the catastrophic damage wrought by Katrina on the Gulf Coast, our leaders have failed to mobilize to avoid well-recognized potential disasters. The resulting crises were surprising to the public; to the experts who saw them coming and sought in vain to get our leaders to pay attention, they were completely predictable.
There is an understandable but dangerous tendency at times like these to focus on the immediate crisis, first weathering it, then diagnosing why it happened, and finally distilling out lessons-learned. This is dangerous because our problems in New Orleans are just a symptom of a much deeper malaise, and the public should have no confidence that we have reached the end of this losing streak (more on this later). It therefore is essential that we focus on the pattern of failure, and not the individual instances. Our leaders can't be permitted to deal with these disasters as if they are not part of a pervasive and damaging pattern. If we don't look on the bigger picture, we will continue to "fight the last war."
Why have we become vulnerable to being predictably surprised? What are the root-causes of our increasing vulnerability? It boils down to ideology, institutions, and interests. Ideology is the triumph of belief over available evidence. This is fine in realm of faith; but when ideology guides public policy, these victories often are pyrrhic. In the long run reality bites. In the interim, ideological beliefs – about dealing with the degradation of coastal wetlands, or the roots of Islamic terrorism, or the regulation of public companies, or the security of the nation’s airlines – can hold sway for long enough to do a lot of damage, skewing priorities and weakening institutions. Ideology permits leaders to exist in a state of denial until (and sometimes even after) the walls come tumbling down. Too often our leaders cry out in the aftermath of disasters that they “didn’t know,” when in truth they didn’t want to know, because knowing would create uncomfortable dissonance with their closely held beliefs.
Public institutions are key sinews that knit our society together and their decline – through loss of capacity, watering down of mandates, and weakening of leadership – are sure leading indicators of predictable surprises. In the aftermath of 9/11, for example, did anyone doubt that our country needed strong institutions to deal with crisis management and disaster relief? So how is it possible, four years later, that FEMA’s response to Katrina was so terribly ineffectual? Much attention has been focused on the subordination of that agency and its priorities to the new Department of Homeland Security and its terrorism mandate. But the real crippling of the agency happened during ritual decapitation of our government that occurs at the beginning of each new Presidency. Experienced crisis managers were replaced by loyal political appointees who lacked, to put it charitably, the capacity to do the job, and their presence triggered a broader exodus of crisis management expertise. If this happened in FEMA, what confidence should we have in our other critical institutions?
Finally special interests fuel the systematic misallocation of resources that lies at the root of many predictable surprises. Were experts pressing for more funding to be devoted to shoring up the levees protecting New Orleans before Katrina, to enhancing SEC oversight of public companies pre-Enron, to strengthening aviation security given the four GAO prior to 9/11, and to sending more troops to control Iraq? The answer in every case was yes. Yet in every case special interests flexed their muscles to challenge expert assessments and distort funding priorities in order to protect their perquisites and favor their constituencies, hobbling efforts to prevent predictable surprises. Even in Louisiana, where politicians were best positioned to understand the risks, available flood control funding was channeled to projects of negligible value.
In the predictable aftermath of the disaster in New Orleans, the public can expect our leaders to commission commissions and initiate initiatives. But absent a concerted effort to deal with the deeper issues – to move beyond ideology to confront reality, to strive for middle-ground consensus about the critical roles of government in our society, to assess and strengthen all our critical institutions and not just focus on the latest failure, and to curb the power of special interests to dilute preventative measures and distort funding priorities – we should expect to continue to be predictably, predictably surprised.
This summer, the author surveyed participants in a program for national security officials held at the Kennedy School of Government, asking them to identify the most damaging predictable surprises that could strike the United States before 2010 and to assess their likelihood. Forty percent of participants (the largest single block) indicated that there was a better than 50% probability that terrorists would successfully launch an attack using weapons of mass destruction on a U.S. city in the next five years. They were fully aware of the enormity of the resulting economic and social consequences. But they openly acknowledged that nothing close to appropriate levels of resources were being allocated to deal with the threat, a harbinger of a future predictable surprise.
Michael Watkins is the founder of Genesis Advisers, a leadership strategy consultancy and was formerly on the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Business School. He is the co-author, with Max Bazerman, of Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming and How to Avoid Them (HBS Press, 2004).
# Posted by Dave Winer on 9/21/05; 12:21:08 PM - --
