The Same Old Answers Won't Solve New Problems

I felt it again watching the House Subcommittee hearing on "The Future of FEMA" recently, and if you haven't watched it - you should. I felt a familiar, sinking feeling that comes when you realize brilliant people are passionately debating yesterday's solutions to tomorrow's problems.

As witness after witness—including two former FEMA deputy administrators—testified about organizational structures, reporting relationships, and grant mechanisms, the disconnect grew more apparent. The conversation felt like a rerun from 2005, or 1995, or even earlier. Move FEMA out of DHS. Create more block grants. Adjust staffing levels. Update the Stafford Act.

All while outside the hearing room, the world of risk transforms at breakneck speed.

We're no longer experiencing discrete disasters with clear beginnings and ends. We're living through what experts increasingly call a "polycrisis"—overlapping, interconnected emergencies that compound and amplify each other. Climate-intensified disasters cascade into supply chain disruptions. Infrastructure failures trigger public health emergencies. Social vulnerabilities become force multipliers for every threat.

And this polycrisis is hardening into what may define the next generation of emergency management: permacrisis. A state of persistent, overlapping emergencies where the "return to normal" never quite arrives. Where recovery from one disaster blends seamlessly into preparation for—or response to—the next.

Yet our institutional responses remain locked in paradigms built for a different era.

Why Do We Keep Recycling the Same Solutions?

The FEMA organizational debate provides a perfect case study in our collective failure of imagination. Since its creation in 1979, FEMA has undergone multiple reorganizations—independent agency, then absorbed into DHS, now potentially returning to independence. Each transition was presented as transformative. Each ultimately changed far less than promised.

Why does this happen? Why, when facing increasingly complex challenges, do we default to the same set of solutions?

The institutional forces are powerful:

1. Career Incentive Structures

For career professionals, proposing radical departures from established frameworks carries significant risk with limited reward. Innovation means uncertainty, and uncertainty threatens funding, resources, and career advancement.

Our systems reward those who expertly navigate existing structures, not those who question whether those structures serve their intended purpose. The result is a professional class incentivized to improve rather than reimagine—to solve the problems within their authority rather than questioning whether that authority framework itself creates problems.

2. Cognitive Limitation of Expertise

Expertise itself creates powerful cognitive constraints. The deeper our knowledge within a domain, the more we understand its logic, history, and structure—and the harder it becomes to imagine alternatives.

This is why former FEMA administrators naturally gravitate toward organizational solutions. It's why state emergency managers focus on federalism structures. It's why professional associations emphasize credentials and standards. Each sees the world through lenses shaped by decades of institutional experience.

3. The Bureaucratic Gravitational Pull

Large bureaucracies develop what organizational theorists call "path dependency"—tendencies to preserve existing processes even when they no longer serve their original purpose. These path dependencies aren't just procedural; they're cognitive and cultural.

FEMA, like all institutions, doesn't just have processes—it has a worldview, a culture, and an identity built around a particular understanding of its mission. Challenging that understanding requires more than policy changes; it requires identity changes, which institutions resist fiercely.

4. Political Time Horizons

Political incentives reinforce these tendencies. The disaster cycle often exceeds political cycles. Solutions that require years or decades to fully implement rarely align with election calendars or budget cycles.

Reorganizing FEMA offers the political advantage of immediate visibility—a clear action that can be credited to current leadership—even if its effects won't be fully understood for years. More transformative approaches that might address root causes often lack this political immediacy.

The Expertise Trap

The testimonies at the hearing weren't wrong. They were thoughtful, informed by decades of experience and deep institutional knowledge. Each witness spoke compellingly from their domain of expertise.

Former FEMA administrators envisioned a better FEMA, free and independent from DHS constraints. State representatives advocated for empowering state and local responses through block grants. Professional organization leaders highlighted the importance of standardized training and certification.

Each perspective contained valuable insights. Each reflected legitimate concerns and real-world experience. And each remained comfortably within the boundaries of its own professional worldview—the very comfort that may be our greatest vulnerability in an era of unprecedented change.

This is the paradox of expertise: the deeper our knowledge becomes within a domain, the harder it is to see beyond its boundaries. The frameworks that help us make sense of complex problems can eventually become constraints that limit our ability to reimagine those problems.

The Pattern Repeats

This pattern of domain-constrained thinking isn't unique to emergency management. It's visible across every complex system failure we've witnessed in recent years.

When Boeing's 737 MAX door tore away at 16,000 feet, investigators found a trail of engineering decisions made in isolation from broader safety considerations. When Texas's power grid failed during winter storms, the disaster revealed regulatory choices made without adequate integration of meteorological, infrastructure, and social vulnerability factors. When Flint's water supply was poisoned, the catastrophe emerged from siloed decisions across environmental, financial, and public health domains.

Each disaster reveals not just failures of execution, but failures of imagination—failures to see beyond the boundaries of established expertise and conventional thinking.

In Lahaina, where hurricane-force winds drove a devastating fire through the heart of a historic town, the subsequent investigation revealed a fragmented approach to risk. A State Fire Marshal position had been abolished in 1979. Vegetation management responsibilities were unclear. Weather warnings, evacuation protocols, and emergency communications operated in separate systems rather than as an integrated whole.

Now granted, this is probably the first of many hearings. But the hearing on "The Future of FEMA" largely missed this deeper pattern. While discussing important operational (or organizational design) improvements, they didn't fundamentally question whether our emergency management model—conceived in the Cold War, formalized in the 1970s, and incrementally adjusted since—remains adequate for the challenges of the 2020s and beyond.

Breaking the Cycle

If the same institutional forces that constrain our thinking also shape our solutions, how do we break free?

The answer may lie in deliberately designing processes that counteract these forces:

1. Cross-Domain Integration

The most promising innovations often emerge at the edges between domains—when insights from one field illuminate problems in another. Emergency management might find transformative ideas by looking to:

Human-centered design for reimagining how communities experience and navigate disasters

Complexity science for understanding how interconnected systems behave under stress

Distributed technologies for creating resilient, self-organizing response networks

Behavioral economics for designing incentives that shape pre-disaster decisions

2. First Principles Thinking

True innovation requires stripping away accumulated layers of institutional knowledge to ask fundamental questions: What are we actually trying to accomplish? What constraints are truly fixed versus self-imposed? What would this system look like if we designed it today?

This approach—associated with innovators from Aristotle to Elon Musk—forces us to distinguish between essential functions and historical accidents. It asks us to separate what we do from how we've always done it.

3. Learning from Adjacent Fields

When healthcare faced a crisis of medical errors a decade ago, the breakthrough came not from within medicine but from aviation—specifically, checklist systems that had dramatically reduced errors in that high-stress environment. Similarly, emergency management might find transformative models by looking outside its boundaries.

4. Embracing Productive Failure

Innovation requires tolerance for failure—not catastrophic failure that harms communities, but productive failure that generates learning. This means creating safe spaces to experiment with new approaches, measure outcomes, and adapt rapidly.

Finding New Paths Forward

True transformation requires the courage to reach beyond the boundaries of our expertise—to recognize that no single domain holds the keys to resilience in an interconnected world.

What might a genuinely reimagined approach to emergency management look like?

Embedded resilience - Design communities where disasters have less impact in the first place

Distributed capabilities - Build response capacity across communities rather than concentrating it in specialized agencies

Integrated governance - Embed disaster considerations in all decision processes rather than treating them as exceptional

Adaptive learning systems - Create institutions that evolve continuously rather than reforming episodically after failures

None of these innovations require moving FEMA's organizational box on a chart. But they might require something more challenging: setting aside the certainty of expertise for the humility of exploration.

The witnesses at the House hearing weren't wrong. They were experts speaking truthfully from within their domains of knowledge. But as polycrisis evolves into permacrisis, the solutions we need may increasingly exist beyond any single domain—in the creative intersections where different perspectives meet.

The most powerful question isn't "How do we fix FEMA?" It's "How do we create communities that thrive even when traditional systems are stressed beyond their design parameters?"

That question demands more than expertise. It demands the courage to say "We don't have all the answers"—and the creativity to find them together.