Why many crisis response plans won't work

by Art Murray and Jeff Lesher

Surely, the lessons of everything from 9/11 to Katrina have taught us the importance of being prepared for emergencies. But preparation means very little if the execution is flawed. Our bookshelves are stacked with plans, policies and procedures, all of which have been reviewed and signed off by people up and down the chain of command. Yet we have seen repeatedly that when disaster strikes, very little ends up according to plan.

There are two main reasons for this:

1. The way a disaster unfolds is always unpredictable.

This is true in war, sports, business, and even chess. Most plans, including the most carefully thought-out war plans, game plans, and business plans, are usually valid only for the opening moves. In reality, such situations are highly complex, involving human judgment, and many other variables we can neither predict nor control. This is especially true when dealing with natural disasters. No plan can account for all the possibilities and all of the variables. A plan can only be used as a guide to make sure the right elements are in place when a disaster strikes. And even that won’t happen unless the plan is accessed by the right people at the right time.

2. Plans set the initial conditions. Execution takes it from there.

Plans are static. Execution is dynamic. Plans are based on past experience. Execution occurs in the present moment. This is why human judgment, expertise and decision making are the most crucial elements to successfully executing a crisis response plan.

The challenge is to build a system that combines the depth of information of a well-researched plan, with streamlined decision processes that apply the right information in the right way. We call those decision processes knowledge. Human expertise, when captured, applied, and enhanced, can mean the difference between success or failure, even life and death, in responding to a crisis.

Of course, no system can contain enough “deep smarts” to automatically make all the right decisions. But we can construct a system that acts as a guide, which helps to ensure that decisions made during a crisis are rational, timely, and consistent. By using technology in this way, we make the best use of human intuition and judgment, combined with the speed and analytical capability of the computer. Training and learning are embedded in the system: training occurs by running simulations; learning occurs by growing the knowledge base through lessons learned from measuring and reviewing performance.

It’s a flat world. Anything can happen. But with the right knowledge, we can respond, evaluate our performance, and pass along the lessons learned as knowledge for future use.