Caveat: not fully thought through but based on digesting information passively over one week since Katrina hit.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever blogged about a public issue before, but the US response to Hurricane Katrina at the federal level touches on two areas that I have strong opinions on in the business world: these are roles of operations and leadership. There is another level to this that I am always at a heightened sense of awareness to – notably cases when an organization tries to effect change to both operations and leadership at the same time.
Operations structure plays a crucial role in the ability of an organization to respond. If there are too many layers or too many players that need to be involved, the cycle-time to respond will surely go up. Sometimes the response time can be part of an organization’s product or service by design. As an example in the business world, take Pearle Vision versus a high-end glasses manufacturer. Pearle Vision markets one-hour turnaround times from order until the customer has glasses. As a consequence of a strategic goal of a one-hour turnaround time, the operations are designed to facilitate speed. Put every type of glasses frames, lens, etc. (all the inventory and lab equipment) in all of the outlets so that everything can be done on the spot. This type of operations looks quite different from a high-end, customized glasses manufacturer that may have to send things out to a centralized laboratory with centralized, high-grade inventory and lab equipment. The high-end manufacturer will unlikely be able to service one-hour turnaround times.
What has been disturbing to me about the initial response to Katrina, while it has been truly a very difficult thing to respond to (no question), is that I cannot understand regardless of the operations structure as to how the initial response could have been so poor. Thousands of people in immediate need. Chaos everywhere. Looting. Shootings. Then, after what seems like an unacceptance response time later, the federal government sends in one boat. Surely you must be joking. Maybe I’m ignorant about how military responses would be off of our homeland, but it seems if this type of situation would have happened in a war zone, we would have been much quicker to respond. But even if we weren’t able to respond more quickly, surely we would have sent more resources in than one boat, right?
Now, as my wife reminds me, there are laws that separate military forces and the National Guard to prevent the occurence of coups, whereby a general could use the military to take over the US. OK. Let’s presume that operations and structure weren’t in our favor then. One has to fall back on the role of leadership. Only leadership and communication are left, right? So maybe that’s where the breakdown occurred.
But it seems like by the recent news to dismantle FEMA and turn things over to the Department of Homeland Security, we are changing both the operations structure and leadership. Sure. Maybe both are broken. I don’t know. But when you change both variables as opposed to changing one variable and holding the other constant, there’s an increased level of risk, risk that we’ll never know what was wrong about the past, or whether we are moving to something that is more right.
Sometimes when things are broken, you need to change everything. Gut the thing, change all the parts, etc. There’s little time for engineering. Get out the machette and triage. Desperate times call for desperate measures so to speak.
In business situations, before a team ever suggested something like a full changeout either in a management consulting engagement or with an internal management situation, we made sure to think things through (even with the Board) and that that process was transparent to the parties that needed to know. This becomes even more important if the person to be delegated to is not a proven rock star.
Hopefully we will be moving in the right direction with the forthcoming changes, but I have to say that as an outsider to this and whether the new steps are right, it seems like we may be skipping some steps in our appetite for change.