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Disasters are bad. Good leadership can keep them from becoming worse.

Writer's picture: Doug BabcockDoug Babcock

I’m writing this blog from Florida, where I am supporting the disaster recovery efforts from Hurricanes Helene and Milton. I want to share a few things that have come up so far.  The first is to acknowledge not just the size of the disaster, but the effects it had on the human beings it hit.


I have spoken with hundreds of people, whether picking up food and water at points of distribution, at emergency shelters, wandering around the park in a daze or in the local shops. Every one of them was affected in some way that was unique to them. Just because their house flooded it doesn’t mean their experience was the same as the person in a different neighborhood whose house also flooded. For each person the disaster was unique and personal. Some of them are confronting the loss of everything they had known for three generations, some of them had alligators inside their house. Some made it through the storm without damage and thought they were in the clear until the river rose and continued to rise inexorably over the next three weeks and chased them out slowly.


Joseph Stalin said, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” For most of us, we can see the images on television, hear the numbers on the radio, scroll through the stories on the internet and genuinely feel sorrow and compassion for the people affected. But those stories, numbers and images are mostly filed away as statistics. We are removed from the reality and can choose to move on to the next thing. When you meet with folks face to face, even one after another, you have a choice. Do the same thing or treat each of them as a person rather than an object.


Now, I am not here to take on a whole lot of other people’s trauma. I’ve got enough of my own thanks.  But what I can do is hold space. When I’m talking with someone, I can give them my full attention. I can get the information I need by asking questions inside the story they are telling me, rather than cutting them off and saying, “just answer the question.” I can avoid platitudes and instead let them know I am present with them in the moment. I have told dozens of people what I can do to help, and what I can’t. When I tell them what I can’t do, like make FEMA find a new apartment or house for them today, I can still do it in a way that lets them know they are being seen. One man thanked me for helping him and told me he knew I didn’t have to because he lived in a different county. I told him, “Yeah, but you are still a person.” He replied, “today is the first time I’ve felt like one in a month.” 


Way of being matters.


So does a clear understanding of mission. I have worked with some caring and competent people so far. There are many successes and people working very hard to do the right things. I have also seen some real challenges in accomplishing those right things. I want to offer one.


Define the mission.


I was sent down here to help people. I was assigned to a county because they needed more resources. I was shown some forms and information and told what to do with them. I was sent to some shelters to help them figure things out.


Help people is a noble mission. Support the county is important. Forms and information contain data. What wasn’t clear early enough was what the goal was and what were the waypoints to accomplishing that goal. To be fair, the definition of disaster is an event that overwhelms available resources, and the response is the attempt to impose order onto a situation that was out of control. Also true in this situation, however, was that in some cases no one even knew the right questions to ask. We were too busy doing “something” to do “something effective”. Once we developed an understanding of what resources were available for what populations, and what the goals of the programs available were, we were able to understand where we could be most effective and move the county response forward.


Again, this isn’t an indictment of the people or the system, this is the nature of an emergency or disaster response. When something grows out of control and the system gets overwhelmed, we often don’t, or even can’t, know exactly what we need when we first show up. What it does mean though, is that once we show up, we must take the time to figure out what is going on, what our objectives are and the data we need to get there. Jumping into the middle and just “getting busy” is a start, but we also need to determine strategy, vision and mission so we don’t just stay “busy” all the time.


As a leader, the first thing you do when you show up in a situation is take in information. You must know what is going on before you can manage it effectively. Much like the same disaster is experienced uniquely by each person, each disaster is unique, even if the type of event has happened before. Union strike, supply chain disruption, IT failure, line of duty injury, they’ve all happened before, but this time is unique. So, gather information, determine priorities, identify objectives and waypoints and then SHARE ALL OF THAT with everyone who is part of the response. The perfect plan won’t fix anything if it is kept a secret from the people who need to execute it.


Once you do all of that, rinse, learn, adjust and do it all again. It is an ongoing process.



Stay safe.

 

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