Katrina and Institutional Resiliency

In the aftermath of Katrina, the only thing more discouraging than the sad images of people struggling to cope with the devastating impact of a natural disaster is the finger-pointing that overwhelms our media.  The search for the guilty is well under way.  Our national instinct appears to be that individuals are to blame and they need to be exposed and held accountable.  No doubt at this level there is a lot of blame to go around – I have a feeling that few of the decision-makers in the various government agencies from local parishes in New Orleans up to the federal government will escape unscathed.

But I also have a feeling that this search for guilty individuals is missing the real point. It assumes that if we can just find the guilty parties and remove them, everything will be OK.  Perhaps this natural disaster will serve as a wake-up call to reassess the systems we put into place to deal with such unforeseen events and, even more basically, to challenge the assumptions that shape these systems.

John Robb points to an NPR radio interview with Yossi Sheffi, a professor of engineering systems at MIT, who contrasts the proactive actions of a number of companies in dealing with this natural disaster with the bureaucratic response of the government.  Sheffi, who is about to publish a book on The Resilient Enterprise, highlights a number of elements required to respond to unforeseen disruptions:

• push decision-making to the periphery
• instill a culture of communication throughout the organization
• create a sense of urgency in responding to events before they become even more damaging.

Sheffi also emphasizes the importance of standardization, modular design and collaborative relationships with other institutions as important tools to build resiliency. These themes help to explain why global process networks are becoming more prevalent in the global economy.

Now, to be clear, few companies have successfully implemented these elements. But it seems that our government, if anything, has moved in the opposite direction, adding more layers of decision-making in new bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security, rather than exploring ways to push effective decision-making to the periphery. As part of this institutional reassessment, the government might also want to figure out more effective ways to harness and amplify the many examples of spontaneous order that emerged both within and outside New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, rather than seeking to suppress or limit these efforts. Katrina provides an expensive lesson that our public institutions are still ill-equipped to handle unforeseen disruptions.