...and exhale

I haven't had time to breathe the past few days, let alone blog. But I'm back at
it now, and ready to finish my thought from the other day.

This editorial frim the Times-Pic discusses FEMA's new (and hopefully improved) "National Response Plan." The piece goes through the expected rants about the quality of the plan that was in place before the storm hit and the praise for creating something better. (Why it's taken two years and five months to get a new plan remains in question.)

The most interesting aspect of the editorial, to me, is the fact that the 427-page report has been whittled down to 90 pages and stresses the importance of change and flexibility in responding to disasters:

It also allows state and local officials to make changes, as needed, while
responding to a disaster. Mr. Chertoff called it a "living document" that will
emphasize change in response to lessons learned.

Coincidentally enough, I started reading "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell on the plane ride to New Orleans. One chapter discusses a U.S. military war game simulation that happened after the first Gulf War but before Sept. 11, in which a renowned officer from the Vietnam War was recruited tolead the (imaginary) opposition forces. The U.S. "team" created detailed strategies and an alphabet's worth of acronyms for systems and scenarios and plans. All decision-making was pre-planned or had to go through a vertical system of power. The enemy team found ways to combat all of the U.S. strategies by thinking quickly, adapting to moves the U.S. made, being flexible and improvising. The enemy team won, defeating the most powerful military in the world, mainly because the military was bound by too many rules and regulations to be efficient or effective. Leaders lost the ability to make decisions on the fly.

Fast forward to 2008. A new, shorter, more fluid system of responding to disasters seems to be right in line with Gladwell's argument. I don't know if the editors at the Times-Pic read "Blink," buttheir reasons for favoring the new plan -- aside from their firsthand experience with the futility of the previous plan -- are very reminiscent of the point Gladwell made in that chapter: Leaders must be able to lead in a time of crisis.