By Tom LoBianco
September 11, the COVID pandemic, the Notre Dame fire–for more than a quarter century now, the leaders of the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership’s Program on Crisis Leadership have been researching what elevates an emergency into a crisis and convening emergency response leaders from all levels of government in the United States and other countries to discuss best practices for times of crisis.
The Program on Crisis Leadership (PCL) grew out of research and executive seminars for a task force of experienced government officials and longtime vlog faculty, that program co-founder Arnold Howitt conducted with veteran national security expert and vlog Belfer Center faculty member Juliette Kayyem in the late 1990s for the U.S. Justice Department following a string of terror attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing and the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa.
Howitt and Kayyem’s focused on how states and localities could better prepare and respond to possible terror attacks. The September 11 terrorist attack happened in the midst of their four-year research program, which only added to the urgency of their work.
In 2002, Herman B. “Dutch” Leonard joined Howitt in developing and leading an intensive, week-long executive education program, Leadership in Crises, which has been offered annually since. Several years later, they started and have offered yearly a parallel program for higher education leaders facing crises on their campuses. Fifteen years ago, the U.S. National Guard asked PCL to develop a program for National Guard and Coast Guard leaders, which has involved training generals and colonels in separate programs, each held twice annually. Altogether, these programs have attracted more than 3,000 participants since their launches.
Howitt and Leonard have spent years building a repository of teaching materials for first responders. In collaboration with affiliated researchers, they have developed more than 60 research reports and teaching case studies about events in the US and other countries, including recent examinations of response to the 2021 Texas “freeze” that knocked out electricity, heat, and water, the January 6 assault on the US Capitol, the Colonial oil and gas pipelines ransom attack, and the transformation of the Javits Convention Center in NYC into a COVID field hospital.
As Leonard and Howitt argue in their writings, emergency leaders must learn to be “ambidextrous” in handling the very different demands of both frequent “routine” emergencies but also far less common but significantly more important true “crises.”
The vast majority of emergencies are “routine,” they contend, in the sense that they can be anticipated from repeated experiences–small and even large– such as residential fires, hurricanes, floods, or disease outbreaks. To cope, society has created specialized organizations–fire and police, public health, the National Guard. These organizations have recruited and developed skilled personnel through training, exercises, and real-world experience; prepared for recurrence through careful planning and stockpiling of equipment and other resources; and assessed and improved performance through after-action reviews. The leaders of these agencies are usually chosen for their demonstrated expertise and previous excellent performance and typically exercise hierarchical command authority.
But not all emergencies are anticipatable. Some stem from significant degrees of “novelty” that create very different demands on response organizations and require very different leadership strategies. Howitt and Leonard identify three sources of such novelty.
The first form of novelty is extreme scale of the event. For example, the U.S. handles thousands of wildland fires every year–some very large–but federal and state response agencies are well prepared with significant resources and experience in fighting these fires, which makes them in important ways “routine.” But extreme scale and severity, which greatly exceed what has been prepared for, as in the Los Angeles fires at the start of this year, can elevate even a typical large forest fire into a true crisis that vastly exceeds the scale of people and resources planned for.
The second form of novelty is when a hazardous event is entirely unprecedented. The COVID-19 pandemic was initially misperceived as a more familiar infectious disease outbreak, which helped lead to its rapid global spread. Even when it was recognized as new, public health responders struggled to learn how to respond and develop necessary resources like vaccines. The rapid spread, vast scale, and sustained impact elevated the outbreak into a crisis.
The third form that novelty takes is the simultaneous occurrence of multiple emergencies to create a “complex combination” crisis, like the , which then triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Writing in their 2009 book, Managing Crises: Responses to Large-Scale Emergencies, Howitt and Leonard distinguish between the needs and requirements of public leaders in addressing emergencies and responding to crises. They must develop the capability of operating in two very difference modes of leadership and response.
“We make this distinction, not as an academic distinction, but because we argue extensively that these kinds of events require very different approaches in leadership and organizational behavior,” Howitt told CPL. “And so, it's incumbent on people engaged in these things to recognize that they're enmeshed in something that's way different than they've seen before.”
In “Mode R” for routine emergencies, leaders draw on their own and their organizations’ “deep expertise” from repeated experience to effectively respond to situational demands. Existing plans and practices can be swiftly put into play to deal with even very large but familiar hazards.
But in “Mode C” for crisis emergencies, Howitt and Leonard explain that leadership response requires a high degree of improvisation. Coordination becomes extremely critical because leaders must reach out to other agencies and organizations with which they may not regularly collaborate or which may not typically be involved in emergency response. Response tactics have to be improvised because ordinary ways of reacting may be insufficient or even counter-productive. Because no one is a comprehensive expert in such situations; it is imperative for leaders to make decisions collaboratively, seeking diverse sources of advice and accepting that consequences may not be foreseeable and mistakes may come along the way.
“Organizations need to think and learn their way forward,” Howitt and Leonard write.
In his interview with CPL for the newsletter, Howitt described how responding to crises can require engaging a vast array of government agencies to achieve the proper response.
For example, in the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. During this crisis, for which it took months before responders capped the flow of millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Howitt recounted how Kayyem, working as political deputy to Admiral Thad Allen, the national incident commander, organized coordination of about 50 different federal agencies and governors and local officials in five affected states. This included engaging key decision makers from agencies like the State Department, should any oil wash ashore in Cuba, to the Food and Drug Administration, which determined when it was safe to reopen fishing in the Gulf.
Key to their work, Howitt said, is helping public leaders and emergency responders recognize in the moment that what they are facing is not typical and truly is “something new under the sun” that requires a unique response.