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| Map of the path of the White House intruder |
I spent five years of active duty in the Navy bouncing
around the Atlantic Ocean practicing for things that were unlikely to happen
and, in fact, never did. I was Chief
Engineer and later Executive Officer of a minesweeper. If the Soviets had laid mines in Chesapeake
Bay, we could disarm them. Or, if a
German U-boat had popped up in the Savannah River, we could help track it down. Those things never happened; but, if they
had, we were ready.
Does that seem foolish to you? Well, not to me. Readiness is critical to responding correctly
when a crisis occurs.
Perhaps it’s my military background that has caused me to
have a common reaction to what many are calling institutional failure at every
level of government.
When a policeman shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson,
MO, my first thought was…
… training and culture.
When an intruder made it into the White House despite five
layers of Secret Service security, my reaction was…
… training and culture.
When two nurses who had treated an Ebola patient in Dallas,
TX contracted Ebola themselves, I wondered about…
… training and culture.
What kind of training did Ferguson police officer Darren
Wilson go through before someone pinned a badge on his chest? Was it like we have seen on a TV show or movie? You know, the trainee is tiptoeing through a
faux urban landscape doing his or her best to separate the real threats from
moms with baby carriages in a split second.
React incorrectly and you either kill the mom or get killed by a pistol
toting drug dealer.
Did Darren Wilson go through that kind of training? How did he do?
My impression of the Secret Service has always been aligned
with my view of an elite force, like the Navy SEALS or the US Marshall
Service. Longstanding tradition
reinforces habits that lead to near flawless execution. So, how does anyone hop a fence, run across
the White House lawn and get halfway to the President’s living quarters before
someone catches up with him?
Those trained for these professions go through some sort of
thought reform aka brainwashing to reprogram the way they respond when faced
with a deadly threat. I am not engaging
in hyperbole. Our central nervous system
is geared to trigger a fight or flight response when facing a threat, real or
imagined. Our adrenal glands secrete
cortisol, causing us to react according to nature’s programming. To overcome the instinct, we practice and
drill until our brains are rewired to respond differently. Brainwashing requires isolation and control,
an environment found in boot camp or a police academy.
Nurses don’t all work for the same organization
obviously. However, their training
requires the same kind of rigor. Their
effectiveness is the result of how well they absorbed their training and how
well they are supported and enabled by the institution for which they
work. So, when the head of the Centers
for Disease Control says we’re “rethinking” our response to Ebola and nurses say they’re not ready, we should be concerned.
That’s tantamount to going to war when soldiers haven’t been trained to
fire their weapons.
Maintaining a strong institutional culture requires
ritualistic behavior; a concisely worded, well-understood, oft repeated mission
statement, and respect for the long-standing traditions of an
organization. It requires that leaders
tell compelling stories that are repeated in the ranks. It is essential that people at the top
solicit the opinions of people at the bottom to ensure they are getting the
right training and the right support to perform the mission. As Colin Powell put it, “Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers
stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They
have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care.
Either case is a failure of leadership”.
Addressing these challenges requires a military approach to
training and the visible presence of a credible leader with the authority to
get the job done. Imagine if the
President had appointed the right person to be the “Ebola Czar”, he or she
would have been on TV that day calming our nerves by telling us what will
happen and how. His or her mere presence
and bearing would give us confidence. We
saw small samples of the impact of physical and visible presence when New York
Mayor Bill DeBlasio visited the same restaurants and the bowling alley as Ebola
patient Dr. Craig Spencer and when US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power visited West Africa.
Imagine if the Ebola Czar (what’s his name?) evoked the
power of those images.
WHO WILL LEAD?
