Katrina at 20 Exposes the Cost of Failed Crisis Leadership Once Again
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this article:
Why government failures in disaster response, from Katrina to Texas floods, reveal the high cost of poor crisis leadership.
How effective crisis management begins with operational action and stakeholder trust, not just public relations.
The essential questions leaders and communicators must ask to avoid reputational collapse during a crisis.
The twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall is upon us. It proved to be a turning point in the presidency of George W. Bush, the moment when his popularity plummeted and did not recover.
Crises follow predictable patterns. And patterns have two kinds of power: explanatory power, to help us make sense of the past; and predictive power, to help us anticipate what will happen next in similar circumstances.
As they say, history may not necessarily repeat itself, but it rhymes.
And the similarities with the “heck of a job” the federal government is doing in disaster preparedness and response are chilling.
Take, for example, the flooding in South/Central Texas in early July.
The floods came after the gutting of early-warning agencies of the federal government, including the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It included reprioritizing the work of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to mass deportation duties. And as in Katrina, the current head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is not an emergency operations professional. He told his staff he was not even aware there is a hurricane season.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem imposed a rule that she alone had to approve any expenditure over $100,000. But Noem was not available to give approvals in real time. This resulted in delaying FEMA search and rescue contractors from deploying by 72 hours.
Also, FEMA call center contracts expired July 5, after the floods began. It took five days for the contracts to be renewed. As a result, FEMA call center capacity fell by 99% between July 4 and 7. For the entire crisis, FEMA did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line.
The result: the death toll exceeds 135, including 27 at a church-based girls camp.
And as in Katrina, the administration praised its work. The FEMA chief called it a “model response.”
If all of this sounds familiar, it is because it is. We have seen and heard it before. Twenty years ago.
Katrina floods New Orleans
I won’t recount the whole history of the botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina day by day here. There are plenty of special reports and documentaries that help us see the horror as it unfolded.
The bottom line is that the federal government’s response to Katrina was bumbling, disorganized and dishonest. It cost hundreds of lives. Many of the nearly 1,500 deaths in New Orleans alone happened in the days following the flood. Many of those were preventable.
And the bungled response cost President George W. Bush his reputation. Until Katrina, Bush had enjoyed a job approval rating above 50%. He had won re-election in a tough campaign just 10 months earlier. But after Katrina his job approval fell below 50% and never recovered. It fell first to 42% and a month later to 38%, and was below 30% the following year. Bush finished his presidency with the lowest approval ratings of any president. Until now.
That loss of trust and reputation was preventable. Because most of the bungled response was preventable.
I monitored the hurricane and flood and then deployed to New Orleans in the second week as part of a corporate response to the disaster. I saw firsthand the consequence of the government’s ineffective handling of the crisis.
Effective crisis management is a leadership discipline
Crisis management is the management of choices — the decisions leaders make when things have the potential to go very wrong. There is a rigor to effective crisis management that is equivalent to the rigor found in other business processes. That rigor includes a systematic way to think in a crisis.
But that rigor is often unknown, ignored or misapplied by many leaders, to their own and their organizations’ misfortune.
Many leaders who otherwise are gifted managers throw rigor to the wind when a crisis emerges. Then they either make up a response on the fly or cobble together bits of knowledge from other parts of their experience. Or they ignore the crisis until it is too late. Or they think their problem is one of public relations that can be rationalized away.
All of these things happened in Katrina. From the president to the secretary of Homeland Security to the director of FEMA, there was lack of situational awareness, ineffective and dishonest assurances of an imminent response, and denial of their own missteps. They focused more on saying what sounded good but were singularly unable to deliver on the assurances they made.
Every crisis is a business, safety or operational problem before it is a communication problem
Crisis management is far more than skillful public relations. Seeing PR as the solution to a crisis is a recipe for failure.
Every crisis is a business, safety or operational problem before it is a communication problem, and you cannot communicate your way out of a business, safety or operational problem.
The government set the bar very high early in the Katrina crisis.
The day before the hurricane made landfall, President Bush went on television to reassure the citizens of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. He said:
“We will do everything in our power to help the people and the communities affected by the storm.”
FEMA Director Michael Brown also reassured the public:
“FEMA is not going to hesitate at all in this storm. We’re going to move fast, we’re going to move quick, we’re going to do whatever it takes to help disaster victims.”
These were the right things to say.
But simply saying them was not enough.
Regrettably, both FEMA and the larger U.S. government, having set those expectations, spent the next week dramatically under-delivering. As the horror New Orleans experienced unfolded over the next few days, the government’s lack of effective action, and the disconnect between the rhetoric and the work, defined the president and his administration.
Principles of effective crisis response
Effective crisis response consists of a carefully managed process that calibrates smart actions with smart communication.
The key to making smart choices is to use the right decision criteria — the proper basis for choice. And that means asking the right questions.
In my experience working on and studying thousands of crises over 45 years, the most effectively handled crises were the ones where leaders asked the right question. Ask the right question, and the solution can become clear within minutes. But asking the right question requires mental readiness — a readiness to shift perspective and think differently.
The leadership discipline of mental readiness
Most counterproductive crisis responses begin with leaders asking some version of “What should we do?” or “What should we say?” The challenge with this kind of question is that it focuses on the “we” — on the entity or leader in crisis. This results in options that may make the people in crisis feel good, but that fail to consider stakeholders’ expectations.
Hence, such crisis whoppers as BP CEO Tony Hayward’s “I’d like my life back,” or United CEO Oscar Muñoz’s “I apologize for having to re-accommodate these passengers.”
What is needed in a crisis is a different kind of thinking that begins with the stakeholders who matter to the organization. That’s where trust comes in. Trust arises when stakeholders’ legitimate expectations are met. Trust falls when expectations are unmet.
Therefore, the right question to ask when determining the appropriate course of action in a crisis is: “What would reasonable people appropriately expect a responsible organization or leader to do when facing this kind of situation?”
Framing decisions in light of stakeholder expectations leads to smarter choices faster and maintains trust.
Nine lessons for leaders and communicators
The anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is an opportunity to reflect on foundational principles of effective crisis management. These include:
Leaders are judged based on how they deal with their most difficult challenges.
Crisis management is the management of choices — the decisions leaders make when things have the potential to go very wrong.
There is a rigor to effective crisis management. But that rigor is often unknown, ignored or misapplied by many leaders, to their own and their organizations’ misfortune.
Every crisis is a business, safety or operational problem before it is a communication problem, and you cannot communicate your way out of a business problem.
Effective crisis response consists of a carefully managed process that calibrates smart actions with smart communication.
The key to making smart choices is to use the right decision. And that means asking the right question: What would reasonable people appropriately expect a responsible organization to do in this situation?
Trust arises when stakeholders’ legitimate expectations are met. Trust falls when expectations are unmet.
Framing decisions in light of stakeholder expectations leads to smarter choices faster and maintains trust.
In a crisis, all stakeholders expect a responsible organization or leader to care. The single biggest predictor of loss of trust, reputation, and operational harm is the perception that the organization or leader does not care.
