JOURNAL: Case Study on Open Decision Making

This is a follow up to the brief, "Open Decision Making."

Regional disasters of all types, from natural to man-made, are similar to warfare in that they are:

informationally (low levels of information flow, rapidly changing circumstance, and high levels of novelty),

morally (who should you help first, how far should you go to help, etc.),

and physically (the scale exceeds means) complex.

Therefore, disasters in extremis should provide an excellent opportunity to compare the efficacy of different organizational decision making styles and their applicability to the escalating complexity of modern warfare.

Katrina
So, how well did the respective decision making styles do during hurricane Katrina? Fortunately, Steve Horwitz, from St. Lawrence University, has already done this work with an excellent case study on the topic. He found that organizations with open decision making systems, both public and private, greatly outperformed those that didn't. Across every measure of success (in particular, the feedback from locals) the Coast Guard, Wal-Mart, Home Depot stood in stark contrast to the miserable performance of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency).

NOTE: All three organizations that were successful used Boyd's approach. Strong organizational cultures and training were used to harmonize orientation for local decision makers. This common outlook in turn allowed decentralized decision makers to quickly optimize their actions to meet the requirements of rapidly evolving local circumstances without specific guidance from a centralized leadership or written regulatory framework.

Comments

[Duncan Kinder]

I'm sorry, John, but I found this "case study" to be a cliche' ridden blend of anecdotal stories flavored with libertarian ideology.

Summary for those who have not read it: "The world would be so much better off if we all were left in the hands of benevolent Wal-Mart."

My primary reaction was to conclude that, as an antidote - I finally should sit down and read Naomi Klein's book on _Shock Doctrine_ capitalism.

I am no fan of large scale organizations, bureaucracies, red tape, CYA memoranda, and the like; while I view the nation state as an old gray mare that ain't what she used to be. Yet this "study" reminds us that barnyard fertilizer comes in a variety of flavors, of which the knee-jerk "big government bad" happens to be one.

As applied to Katrina, I might be interested in a study of how a presumptively centralized organization, such as the Roman Catholic Church, responded as opposed to the presumptively less centralized Evangelicals.
Based on solid empirical research, not hearsay or anecdotes. If it blended too well with this ideology or that, that would be grounds for suspicion. We might learn something from such a study.

[rick]

I partially agree w/ Duncan's comments, especially for the desire for a more rigorous methodology when comparing the private and public sector response to emergencies. FEMA's response to Katrina is more of an example of what happens when a response organization is underfunded, marginalized w/in a greater bureaucracy, and provided with no competent leadership than a true representation of what a government response looks like at other times and under other administrations.

All that said, there is absolutely a role for businesses in disaster response, and part of it is based on self-interest. I have done wome work w/ Business Executives for National Security (BENS) [http://www.bens.org/news.html], and they are working to formalize many of the needed relationships between the private and public sectors. And they have some fairly recent examples of the business sector's ability to integrate their efforts w/ the public sector's.

Finally, let me say that I would not like to face a disaster response dependent solely on the private sector's largess and sense of charity.

[Daniel McIntosh]

>>I would not like to face a disaster response dependent solely on the private sector's largess and sense of charity.

Neither would I, but that's probably beside the point. Many of the services that worked seem to have been associated with people looking to make a profit and/or protect a prior investment, and they did it by stepping outside of "government rescue" mindset. On the other hand, one of the first critics of FEMA was the National Guard. At all levels there seems ed to be general impression that government (state, local, and federal) was in the way.

That said, a comparison of charities (and their modes of organization) could be very useful. Both Southern Baptist Disaster Relief and Catholic Charities mobilized quickly. A two-year retrospective by nonprofit managers can be found at http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm/bay/katrina.article/cpid/456.htm.