know the enemy
“If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”[i]—Sun Tzu
It could be anything—widespread and all-encompassing, like a natural disaster, or focused and devastating, like an active shooter. Whatever kind or variety of crisis you find in the parallel universe, it’s useful to understand what the crisis is not.
The crisis is not an incident. It is not a concept, not inanimate. It is not random, and it is not benign. It is a being, inhuman and flawed, with thoughts and intentions. None of those thoughts are good, and all of those intentions are bad.
The crisis is a dragon that must be slayed—because it wants to destroy you.
It puts you into its crosshairs the instant you enter the parallel universe. It knows that when you get there, you will need to think,[ii] so it starts with sabotage. It sends an electric charge through your body, triggering your lizard brain and releasing a hormone cocktail of dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol that shuts down your prefrontal cortex.
As your higher-level thinking slows, the crisis floods your brain with agonizing thoughts and painful emotions. It takes over the voice in your head: “You can’t handle this,” the crisis says. “No way can you figure this one out.” Or, “Life as you know it is over and it’s never coming back.”
Leonard Marcus and Barry Dorn at Harvard call this amygdala-controlled state the “emotional basement.”[iii]
As you stumble around in your dark and musty emotional basement, you are overcome with a jumble of negative emotions: grief, fear, anger, regret, hate.…You grieve for so many things, starting with lost loved ones or friends and extending all the way to lost birthday parties with your kids or lost family trips to the beach.
You fear the ordeal. You know you will be hit with one painful problem after another. Some you will be able to solve, but not all—at least not immediately. These will burn white hot in your lap until they are resolved.
You fear the work, because you know that you won’t be working like you worked yesterday or had planned to work tomorrow. You will be working twice as hard, possibly harder than you have ever worked in your life.
You feel anger and regret for things you did or didn’t do to prepare for this situation.
You hate your life. You hate the world and everything in it.
This is your moment of truth.
This is the fateful moment when you must decide to engage or to disengage. Do you step down and fade into the background? Or do you step up?
Even though the crisis has transformed your brain into mush—has turned your orderly and intelligent thoughts into white noise—you know there is no turning back, no running away from this. You steel yourself, set your jaw, and take that first step; in the desperate hope that step one will eventually lead to step two and maybe even to steps three, four, and five.
In the absence of complete information, in the presence of dozens of unanswered questions, in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, in the presence of danger and risk, you turn and face the dragon.
murphy’s addendum
In the run up to the crisis, you were confident. You really didn’t give it much thought, but had you been asked, you would have agreed that someday a crisis would come and that you would have to face it. You were pretty sure that you were up to the challenge. These things happen in this life, you figured, and you had been in tough spots before. You were confident that with a little luck and a lot of hard work, you would get through it.
Once you were inside the parallel universe, that confidence was shattered—when those things that always worked for you stopped working and the people who were always there for you were gone.
But the crisis did not stop there. It took aim at your most important asset. It messed with your time. It slowed things down and then, in those first moments, brought things almost to a standstill. Then it cranked the dial and suddenly time began to race: days became hours; hours became seconds.
And all the while it conspired against you, contradicting your every attempt to figure it out. Just when you are thinking A, the crisis throws out Z.
you can’t get big enough fast enough
The crisis is deliberate and methodical. It bides its time, gathering strength and power, and building its unique chaotic mix. And, at just the right moment, it unleashes its most fearsome weapon, an avalanche of impacts we call surge. Everything happens at once—everything, that is, except what we want to happen.
Think about what it might be like to be working a widespread and all-encompassing disaster—like the manager of the City of New Orleans EOC during Hurricane Katrina, for instance. Through the long, hot days of late August, the crisis had been biding its time, waiting patiently to hit New Orleans with a torrent of chaos. What do you think that surge in human needs looked like on the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005?[iv] How many issues did the crisis bring on that day—twenty? Two hundred? Twelve hundred? How overwhelmed do you think you would be dealing with all of them?
Unfortunately for the affected community, in those early hours, the response community[v] was essentially flat-footed.
Its ability to to meet the need across the entire affected area—to put response teams into the field, pump out the water, get the power back, and clear the streets—was days, in some cases weeks, away.
This unhappy condition is little changed today. We call it the “speed to scale” challenge, and it remains government’s biggest problem. For people in the disaster business, such as myself, it means failure and humiliation. For the affected community—the seniors, individuals with disabilities, children, and families—it means suffering on a grand scale.
The crisis understands this. Its surge is a chaotic mix specifically designed to disrupt critical infrastructure—power, water, food, medicine, sanitation, housing, you name it—in unique and unprecedented ways.
To counter this, it’s not enough for us to do a lot of things at the same time. Human needs cannot wait, so we have to be able to do everything all at once.[vi]
Because the crisis surges, we must surge too. We need to get big enough fast enough to manage a tsunami of issues in its early hours.
Let’s be clear about something: Surging doesn’t mean doubling down on Starbucks so that everybody can work harder and faster. It doesn’t mean calling in your crisis team and rolling up your sleeves, so that with a little luck you will get through it. Surging means getting fifteen times more people on your team than you have now. It means getting fifteen times more resources than you currently have on hand. It means turning your crisis team into fifteen crisis teams, each with a different mission, focused on a different human need.
Are you starting to get the picture?
Now some will disagree with me on this point. They will say “Hold on, let’s not go off all half-cocked here. We need to gather first and get organized. Until we get a ’damage assessment’ we can’t really do much of anything. It’s not prudent to move a lot of people or equipment or to spend a lot of money before we get a clear understanding of the situation on the ground.”
The people who say these things are under the spell of the crisis (you will hear many of these kinds of excuses inside the parallel universe). If you should ever find yourself within earshot of this kind of talk, this is what you should say: “As a matter of fact, what we need to do now is get as big as we can as fast as we can. Not only do we need to get a lot of people and equipment into the field, we need to reach back and get everybody we know, and everything we can get our hands on, on its way to us.”
so close you can smell dragon breath
After climbing out of the emotional basement a few times, you learn a few things—things like what to do and, more important, how to think, especially about how we must consider that the crisis is our enemy. And the more we know about that enemy, the better things will go for everyone. The mission of emergency management is to get big enough fast enough to find and fix the surge in consequences that the crisis brings. What does your surge plan look like? Is it ready to face the dragon?
Excerpt from Moment of Truth: The Nature of Catastrophes and How to Prepare for Them
[i] Sun Tzu, Art of War, William Collins, 2018
[ii] In the parallel universe, the most important tool in your toolbox is your mind.
[iii] Leonard J. Marcus, Ph.D.; Isaac Ashkenazi, M.D.; Barry Dorn, M.D.; Joseph Henderson, M.A.; and Eric J. McNulty, Meta-Leadership: A Primer, 2010
[iv] The day Hurricane Katrina made landfall.
[v] This excludes first responder services such as firefighting, law enforcement, search and rescue, and emergency medical services who are in the field 24/7.
[vi] We call this extreme multitasking.