"We are fully prepared"; or why plans fail By mark chussil
On Sunday, August 28, 2005, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, President Bush was briefed by Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, and Michael Brown, then director of FEMA. They warned him about what could lay ahead. A subsequent videotape, said the Wall Street Journal on March 3, 2006, shows the president assuring local officials that “we are fully prepared.”
As events demonstrated, we were not fully prepared. Yet the president was willing to go on record saying we were. Politics, perhaps. Being misunderstood or misinformed, maybe. However, presumably at least some of the people involved genuinely believed that we were fully prepared.
We often ask (especially after a disaster) how we can hold people more accountable or get rid of those awful incompetents who failed to implement the plan. But maybe, as Fortune ( December 12, 2005 ) quoted former Intel CEO Andy Grove, “That is not the right question.” Maybe the right question is why people believed we were fully prepared when we weren’t.
Mark Chussil is a Founder and Senior Director of Crisis Simulations International, LLC He is also Founder and CEO of Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc. Mark designed CSI’s DXMA™ crisis simulator (patent pending) and ACS’s award-winning ValueWar® business simulator. He has published extensively, and he has lectured and consulted on six continents. He earned his B.A. from Yale and his M.B.A. from Harvard.
