For the past nineteen months I’ve been writing about how leaders can make bad, even disastrous, decisions. I’ve suggested that institutions, including the Roman Catholic Church and the intelligence community can exist in a state of denial. In this morning’s Michael Grunwald and Susan B. Glasser paint a broader picture of societal failure to prevent a flood that everyone knew was coming. The canvass is broader than the one used by Sidney Finkelstein in his Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes.
Finklestein, a business professor at Dartmouth, examined numerous business failures and concluded that there were four common factors:
• a flawed mindset that distort a company’s perception of reality
• delusional attitudes that keep this inaccurate reality in place
• breakdown in communications systems developed to handle potentially urgent information.
• leadership qualities that keep a company’s executives from correcting their course.
The first two of these are analogous the denial process that takes place in an individual. The second two can persist in social systems that are relatively self contained – such as the Catholic hierarchy, the intelligence community and private corporations.
The political system painted by Grunwald and Glasser is broader. It is not so easy to characterize the entire system as being in denial. They identify several individuals who knew what a category five hurricane would do. Some tried to stimulate preventative action. Others knew but found reasons for postponing actions that they knew they should take. Some extracts and comments on this story:
For years, it was common knowledge in Louisiana and Washington that New Orleans could be destroyed by a hurricane. But decision makers turned away from the long-term investments that might have averted a catastrophe, pursuing instead projects with more immediate payoffs. Some of those projects made the city more vulnerable.Saving New Orleans from the inevitable storm was a priority. But it was rarely the top priority. "I don't think anybody threatened to hold their breath until they turned blue about it," recalled lobbyist Jan Schoonmaker, an aide to former representative Lindy Boggs (D-La.).
…
Congress and the Corps were "playing the odds game," as former senator John Breaux (D-La.) put it.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to point fingers, but Breaux said it's unrealistic to expect government officials to focus on events unlikely to occur during their lifetimes.
"San Francisco sits on an earthquake fault," Breaux said. "So do you say: Move 'em all out of there?"
The former Senator makes a legitimate point: there are tradeoffs. As one of my engineering buddies said about a proposed revision to the Virginia building codes: “I can design houses that will withstand an earthquake that occurs once every 1,000 years – but I can’t do that and give people affordable housing.”
The political system functions to set the tradeoffs. Most of us would settle for affordable houses even if they less robust against earthquakes.
These tradeoffs become less rational when they are clouded by the need for congressionally earmarked funds for local projects – aka federal pork. As Grunwald and Glasser portray it:
At the junction of the Mississippi and the Gulf, a city long knew that a powerful hurricane was inevitable. As development robbed the region of natural defenses, man's fight to hold back nature would ultimately fail.The story is one of conflict between reasonable tradeoffs and the need for pork. The Army Corps of Engineers is caught in the middle.
In the 1950s , after a series of storms battered the Atlantic coast, Congress directed the Corps to get serious about hurricanes, and the agency began devising the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project for New Orleans. This was also the height of the postwar era of big infrastructure spending, and Congress put the Corps to work digging the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a shortcut to the Port of New Orleans.Attempts to minimize impact on the federal budget by requiring localities to share the cost of flood prevention ran into another difficulty.Water projects were becoming a form of currency in Congress, a way to steer money to constituents and contributors, and the Corps was becoming a quasi-congressional agency, building the projects desired by its legislative patrons. In different ways, these two projects would help set the stage for Katrina.
"When there's no cost share, everyone wants their project to be a Cadillac," said G. Edward Dickey, a former Corps chief of planning. "But when there is a cost share, important projects don't always get the support they should."
Several politicians issued warnings:
Word was starting to spread about the vulnerability of New Orleans. Weatherwise magazine dubbed the city "The Death Valley of the Gulf Coast." A direct hit by a Category 4, Ted Steinberg wrote in his 2000 book "Acts of God," would "turn New Orleans into a huge lake 20 feet deep." Articles in Scientific American and the New Orleans Times-Picayune essentially forecast Katrina. And in his book "Bayou Farewell," Mike Tidwell conjured the image of a Category 4 flattening Louisiana cities "like a liquid bulldozer." (Governor Mike) Foster bought 1,500 copies of the book, sending one to President Bush, every member of Congress and every state legislator.
There are always reasons for tradeoffs. Disaster preparation is expensive and costly. Politicians are elected to serve their constituents. This service includes “bringing home the bacon” in the forms of jobs, business and construction projects. Disaster prevention can easily be postponed in exchange for immediate benefits. Politicians can easily be seduced into venial, corrupt and selfish spending patterns. This is, at root, a spiritual problem affecting individuals and the entire political culture.
The first remedy is truth telling. Grunwald and Glasser have made a good start.
At first I thought this entry was going to give me something to argue about, but the more I read the more balanced and reasonable I discovered it to be. Blame is easy to spread around, and human beings seem to have a need to blame somebody for a large disaster like this. However, the truth is usually incredibly complex. The same was true for 9/11.
It is very interesting to note the quote
"When there's no cost share, everyone wants their project to be a Cadillac," said G. Edward Dickey, a former Corps chief of planning. "But when there is a cost share, important projects don't always get the support they should."
The people of New Orleans need to use this as an opportunity for some soul searching as well. I understand that the levies were built by private contractors (part of the pork you refer to?) rather than the Corps of Engineers. Of course, the projects would go to the lowest bidders rather than the contractors who could do the best job.
Would you come check out my blog? It is not quite at the high level of political intelligence that yours seems to be. It is intended to be more of a folksy theological/catechetical reflection blog. But I hope you might find something of interest on it. http://faith-matters.blogspot.com
Posted by: Jeffrey Arrowood | October 10, 2005 at 09:43 PM