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AFTER THE STORM
The Five Stages of
Crisis Management
Why Katrina will make us stronger.
BY JACK WELCH
Wednesday, September 14, 2005 12:01 a.m.
Our last day in Nantucket this summer, we bumped into a crusty old islander we know, a sea-hand who has seen his share of hurricanes. We asked him about the storm bearing down on New Orleans. "Probably just another overhyped Weather Channel event," he mused. We saw him again the next day, a few hours after the storm's landfall, and he repeated his take, this time with relief. We agreed--the pictures on TV weren't that bad.
Then, of course, the levees broke and all hell broke loose with them.
In the terrible days since then, there has been a hurricane of debate about what went wrong in New Orleans and who is to blame. Mother Nature, perhaps for the first time in the case of a bona fide natural disaster, has been given a pass. Instead, the shouting has been about crisis-management--or the lack thereof. Everyone from President Bush to the police chief in a small parish on the outskirts of the city has been accused of making shockingly bad mistakes and misjudgments. The Katrina crisis, you would think, is unlike any before it.
Unfortunately, that's not completely true.
Yes, there has never been a natural disaster of Katrina's magnitude in our history. An entire city has been devastated, hundreds of lives lost, and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. In terms of impact, only an extended catastrophe like the Great Depression can compare in scope.
And yet, Hurricane Katrina is practically a case study of the five stages people seem to have to go through during severe crises. Over the past 40 years, I've seen these stages unfold in companies large and small, of every type, in every part of the world, and I went through them myself at my own company more than a few times.
New Orleans, of course, is not a company, but like any city, it is an organization. And there can be no denying that New Orleans' crisis is tragic in a way that company crises are not. But contrary to the sound and fury out there right now, the Katrina crisis follows a well-worn pattern.
The first stage of that pattern is denial. The problem isn't that bad, the thinking usually goes, it can't be, because bad things don't happen here, to us. The second is containment. This is the stage where people, including perfectly capable leaders, try to make the problem disappear by giving it to someone else to solve. The third stage is shame-mongering, in which all parties with a stake in the problem enter into a frantic dance of self-defense, assigning blame and claiming credit. Fourth comes blood on the floor. In just about every crisis, a high profile person pays with his job, and sometimes he takes a crowd with him. In the fifth and final stage, the crisis gets fixed and, despite prophesies of permanent doom, life goes on, usually for the better.
We are a way off from the fifth stage in New Orleans, but the first four played out like an old movie.
Denial: In the days and even hours before the hurricane struck, officials at every level of the government demonstrated a lack of urgency about the storm that seems crazy now. No one operated out of malice--that can be said for certain. But the facts reveal the kind of paralysis so often brought on by panic and its ironically common side-effect, inertia. The federal government received hourly updates on the storm, but the head of FEMA, the ill-fated Michael Brown, waited 24 hours, by the most generous estimations, before ordering personnel into the area. The state's governor, in her early communications with the president, mainly asked for financial aid for the city's clean-up efforts. On the local level, the mayor let a critical 12 hours elapse before ordering an evacuation of the city.
Denial in the face of disaster is human. It is the main and immediate emotion people feel at the receiving end of any really bad news. That doesn't excuse what happened in New Orleans. In fact, one of the marks of good leadership is the ability to dispense with denial quickly and face into hard stuff with eyes open and fists raised. With particularly bad crises facing them, good leaders also define reality, set direction and inspire people to move forward. Just think of Giuliani after 9/11 or Churchill during World War II. Denial doesn't exactly come to mind--a forthright, calm, fierce boldness does.
All that was in short supply during the disaster in New Orleans. But it might be argued that denial in and about New Orleans started long ago. New Orleans was a city with more than 20% living below the poverty line, a homicide rate almost 10 times higher than New York, and an intractable tradition of political corruption.
Why did it take a hurricane to reveal these unacceptable conditions?
New Orleans was also well aware that its levee system was inadequate for a major storm and that the economic plight of its citizenry, with their lack of cars and cash, rendered evacuation plans meaningless.
Why did it take a hurricane to prove those points?
In both cases, the only answer is denial, that predictable first phase of crisis, which in Katrina's case, happened before, during, and after the actual storm.
Containment: For this second predictable phase in crises, Katrina was no exception. In companies, containment usually plays out with leaders trying to keep the "matter" quiet--a total waste of energy, as all problems, and especially messy ones, eventually get out and explode. In Katrina's case, containment came in a related form, buck-passing--pushing responsibility for the disaster from one part of government to another in hopes of making it go away. The city and state screamed for federal help, the feds said they couldn't send in the troops (literally) until the state asked for them, the state said it wouldn't approve the federal relief plan, and round and round went the baton.
No layer is a good layer. Bureaucracy, with its pettiness and formalities, slows action and initiative in any situation, business or otherwise. In a crisis like Katrina, it can be deadly. The terrible part is that Katrina might have avoided some of its bureaucratic bumbling if FEMA had not been buried in the Department of Homeland Security. As an independent entity for decades prior, FEMA fared better. But inside Homeland Security, FEMA was a layer down, twisted in and hobbled by government hierarchy. And to make matters worse, its head, Michael Brown, appears to have been an inexperienced political operative--making his appointment an example of bureaucratic inefficiency at its worst.
AFTER THE STORM
The Five Stages of
Crisis Management
Why Katrina will make us stronger.
BY JACK WELCH
Wednesday, September 14, 2005 12:01 a.m.
Our last day in Nantucket this summer, we bumped into a crusty old islander we know, a sea-hand who has seen his share of hurricanes. We asked him about the storm bearing down on New Orleans. "Probably just another overhyped Weather Channel event," he mused. We saw him again the next day, a few hours after the storm's landfall, and he repeated his take, this time with relief. We agreed--the pictures on TV weren't that bad.
Then, of course, the levees broke and all hell broke loose with them.
In the terrible days since then, there has been a hurricane of debate about what went wrong in New Orleans and who is to blame. Mother Nature, perhaps for the first time in the case of a bona fide natural disaster, has been given a pass. Instead, the shouting has been about crisis-management--or the lack thereof. Everyone from President Bush to the police chief in a small parish on the outskirts of the city has been accused of making shockingly bad mistakes and misjudgments. The Katrina crisis, you would think, is unlike any before it.
Unfortunately, that's not completely true.
Yes, there has never been a natural disaster of Katrina's magnitude in our history. An entire city has been devastated, hundreds of lives lost, and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. In terms of impact, only an extended catastrophe like the Great Depression can compare in scope.
And yet, Hurricane Katrina is practically a case study of the five stages people seem to have to go through during severe crises. Over the past 40 years, I've seen these stages unfold in companies large and small, of every type, in every part of the world, and I went through them myself at my own company more than a few times.
New Orleans, of course, is not a company, but like any city, it is an organization. And there can be no denying that New Orleans' crisis is tragic in a way that company crises are not. But contrary to the sound and fury out there right now, the Katrina crisis follows a well-worn pattern.
The first stage of that pattern is denial. The problem isn't that bad, the thinking usually goes, it can't be, because bad things don't happen here, to us. The second is containment. This is the stage where people, including perfectly capable leaders, try to make the problem disappear by giving it to someone else to solve. The third stage is shame-mongering, in which all parties with a stake in the problem enter into a frantic dance of self-defense, assigning blame and claiming credit. Fourth comes blood on the floor. In just about every crisis, a high profile person pays with his job, and sometimes he takes a crowd with him. In the fifth and final stage, the crisis gets fixed and, despite prophesies of permanent doom, life goes on, usually for the better.
We are a way off from the fifth stage in New Orleans, but the first four played out like an old movie.
Denial: In the days and even hours before the hurricane struck, officials at every level of the government demonstrated a lack of urgency about the storm that seems crazy now. No one operated out of malice--that can be said for certain. But the facts reveal the kind of paralysis so often brought on by panic and its ironically common side-effect, inertia. The federal government received hourly updates on the storm, but the head of FEMA, the ill-fated Michael Brown, waited 24 hours, by the most generous estimations, before ordering personnel into the area. The state's governor, in her early communications with the president, mainly asked for financial aid for the city's clean-up efforts. On the local level, the mayor let a critical 12 hours elapse before ordering an evacuation of the city.
Denial in the face of disaster is human. It is the main and immediate emotion people feel at the receiving end of any really bad news. That doesn't excuse what happened in New Orleans. In fact, one of the marks of good leadership is the ability to dispense with denial quickly and face into hard stuff with eyes open and fists raised. With particularly bad crises facing them, good leaders also define reality, set direction and inspire people to move forward. Just think of Giuliani after 9/11 or Churchill during World War II. Denial doesn't exactly come to mind--a forthright, calm, fierce boldness does.
All that was in short supply during the disaster in New Orleans. But it might be argued that denial in and about New Orleans started long ago. New Orleans was a city with more than 20% living below the poverty line, a homicide rate almost 10 times higher than New York, and an intractable tradition of political corruption.
Why did it take a hurricane to reveal these unacceptable conditions?
New Orleans was also well aware that its levee system was inadequate for a major storm and that the economic plight of its citizenry, with their lack of cars and cash, rendered evacuation plans meaningless.
Why did it take a hurricane to prove those points?
In both cases, the only answer is denial, that predictable first phase of crisis, which in Katrina's case, happened before, during, and after the actual storm.
Containment: For this second predictable phase in crises, Katrina was no exception. In companies, containment usually plays out with leaders trying to keep the "matter" quiet--a total waste of energy, as all problems, and especially messy ones, eventually get out and explode. In Katrina's case, containment came in a related form, buck-passing--pushing responsibility for the disaster from one part of government to another in hopes of making it go away. The city and state screamed for federal help, the feds said they couldn't send in the troops (literally) until the state asked for them, the state said it wouldn't approve the federal relief plan, and round and round went the baton.
No layer is a good layer. Bureaucracy, with its pettiness and formalities, slows action and initiative in any situation, business or otherwise. In a crisis like Katrina, it can be deadly. The terrible part is that Katrina might have avoided some of its bureaucratic bumbling if FEMA had not been buried in the Department of Homeland Security. As an independent entity for decades prior, FEMA fared better. But inside Homeland Security, FEMA was a layer down, twisted in and hobbled by government hierarchy. And to make matters worse, its head, Michael Brown, appears to have been an inexperienced political operative--making his appointment an example of bureaucratic inefficiency at its worst.
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