Presentation at the 3rd Homeland Defense and Security Education Summit, Washington, D.C., March 2009

1. What Critical Incidents
Can Teach Us About
Crisis Avoidance
Zen and the Art of Crisis Leadership
Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

2. Where Everybody
Knows Your Name
 Hierarchy makes leaders visible
 Technical skill promotes advancement, expectations
 Administrative and policy problems not technical
 Leaders can appear “trigger-happy” or “gun-shy”
 “Professionalization” has not helped
Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

3. Developing a Synthesis
 High reliability organizations
 Naturalistic decision-making
 Leadership theory
 Public value
 Social capital
Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

4. High-Reliability Organizations
 Preoccupation with failure
 Reluctance to simplify
 Sensitivity to operations
 Commitment to resilience
 Deference to expertise
Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

5. Expertise and Human Error
 Experts rely on complex schemas, intuition
 Schemas are shortcuts, but not simplifications
 When stakes are high, optimum is unlikely
 Mistakes: conflicts between outcomes and
expectations
 Even experts learn from mistakes
Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

6. What’s in a Name?
 Crisis
 Critical incident
 Emergency
 Disaster
 Catastrophe
Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

7. Individual Decision-making
 OODA loops (Boyd)
 Recognition-primed decisions (Klein)
 Contingency theory (Vroom-Yetton-Jago)
 Garbage can theory (Cohen-March-Olsen)
 Bounded rationality (Simon and Kahnemen)
Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

8. Group Decision-making
 Public participation continuum (IAP2)
 Appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider)
 Scenario planning (Schwartz)
 Collective intelligence (Bloom, Pór & Atlee)
 Discursive democracy (Habermas)
Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

9. Critical Incident Management
 Emergency management requires teams
 Incident command is less about direction and
control than it is about organization
 Teams must coordinate, cooperate, or collaborate to
perform complex tasks
 Managing the technical environment is only part of
the job
Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

10. Public Value and Social Capital
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Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

11. Co-production
Model of Public Service
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Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

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Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government

13. The Tao of
Loose-Tight Coupling
 Leadership is about change, not control
 Giving others control helps facilitate change
 Beneficial change devolves along process and
outcome dimensions but ideally involves both
 Co-production occurs when both changes occur
 A commitment to co-production yields increases in
human and social capital that promote resilience
 Agile adaptation is a form of crisis avoidance
Center for Public Service
Mark O. Hatfield School of Government