Speaker 1 - David Kaufman

“Confronting Catastrophe: What Happens at the Edge of Government Power?”

As a species, we deal with disasters of all kinds all the time.  Yet, some disasters are clearly different.  When you reach a certain scale, a certain level of complexity, the impacts—be they loss of life, economic, or environmental in nature—grow so large and far reaching that they challenge the ability of even the most capable governments to respond to.  Here, at the edge of government power, lies a murky space where normally efficient systems are badly degraded, the key enablers of everyday life are severely impeded, and second- and third-order impacts become nearly impossible to predict.  This is the landscape of catastrophe, and for the field of disaster management, it represents the leadership challenge of our time:  how do we deliver meaningful outcomes in the face of challenges that grossly outstrip our capabilities?  If we do not confront the disconnect between what we are capable of doing and the outcomes we must achieve in a truly extreme event, than we will find ourselves asking how government could have again experienced such a failure of leadership, a failure of imagination.

Speaker 2 - Mark Crosweller

Director General, Emergency Management Australia, Attorney-General’s Department

Australia has experienced severe to catastrophic natural disaster events for many millennia and they have become commonplace not only in our history, but in our music, art, literature, and our poetry.  There is hardly a long term resident of Australia that doesn’t have a story about a bushfire, a flood, a storm or a cyclone. It seems a little odd then that if these events are so much a part of our history and our own personal experiences, why do we continue to be surprised by them, and perhaps more importantly, why do we continue to see our efforts to deal with them as inevitable failures? The answers have remained elusive.

The reality is severe to catastrophic natural disasters are inevitable in Australia. The only variables are “where” and “when”. And on some days, it won’t be the “when”, just the “where”.

As harsh as it may sound, our propensity as a collective society to not truly accept their inevitability has a number of negative consequences. It exposes in us a degree of arrogance and ignorance of their full potential to adversely affect us and limits our ability to effectively prepare for, respond to and recover from them; limits our ability to learn from the experiences and to use our imaginations, creativity and innovation in preparation for the next inevitable event; and establishes the basis for a blame culture.

However by respecting their nature, accepting both their inevitability and our inability to choose them, we can make wiser choices about how we prepare, respond and recover from them. In other words, we can move our thinking from resistance to acceptance and then be in a position to take more positive, creative, innovative and appropriate actions in anticipation of the next severe to catastrophic event.  

By exercising humility we surrender our own fixed view of the world and we have the opportunity to expand our thinking, genuinely hear the contributions and suggestions made by others, grant ourselves and each other permission to say “we don’t know but we’ll find out”, and perhaps most importantly show a genuine vulnerability that allows for true connection and relationship between people.

Humility also assists us in using our collective imaginations to bring to mind things that are not present to our senses; creativity to develop original ideas that have value; and innovation to put new ideas into practice. These attributes become very important when we realise that the knowledge, skills and experience gained from previous disasters, whilst helpful, will not be enough to prepare for the next disaster which will probably be more intense and have a unique set of characteristics not previously understood or experienced. The culmination of these attributes could be termed our “collective wisdom” and is essential as we need to prepare ourselves for the “next” event, not the “last” event.

Speaker 3 - Peter Weiske

“Surprising Non-routine Events: What the Eggheads Can Teach the Generals”

Today’s complex operations domains demand more of a leaders time, comprehension skills and the ability to act as the causal elements behind events more often than not coalesce to form a complex series of problems which must be met. The most troublesome are non-routine crises which promptly overwhelm routine response activities.

Leaders particularly those within high reliability organisations (HROs) – disaster agencies, military commands, civil defence/rule of law entities and knowledge/intelligence threat investigators can become overwhelmed with the poly-dimensional issues and concurrent events associated with the formation, onset and aftermath of these complex crisis events.

We will discuss the failure to remain mindful over the emergence of particular threat sequences which have led to a number of leadership failures and blunders. We observe failures which were self-induced – the ‘self-inflicted wound’ of systemic vulnerability built into an organisation through its own leadership. On paper preplanning, response programmes SOPs/TTPs and organigrammes are fine however it is the real world of critical decision making where a lack of imagination can best be observed. This is seen in the unsoundness of actionable threat analysis and response activities alongside limitations amongst key decision makers in coming to terms with the scope, scale and tempo complex coalescent emergencies present.  We will illustrate some of the leadership shortcomings in recent complex response operations

We will also take a look at a selection of complex naturogenic and anthropic crisis events and their effect upon decision makers. We will present a simple causal sequence and lay the constituent elements out along a continuum of threat element formation and functional response.  This is termed the ‘far, far left of boom’ (upstream segment) – to ‘boom’ (event onset) through to the ‘right and far right of boom’ (the post-onset recovery, rehabilitation and replanning segment).  As such we will discuss the how, whys and whens of leadership activities found in the context of our exemplar events including a lack of foresight, a failure to attend to early warning analysis and a deficit in mindfulness over how best to tackle complex crises.

High reliability organisations (HROs) such as DRRR/CivMil/Home Land Security entities detest surprises. Often the most surprising of situations were met with a threat multiplying, vulnerability inducing set of surprising leadership responses which added to the problem. 

Likewise key vulnerabilities and failures in imagination were seen in the poor comprehension of novel crises by key leadership particularly in recognising the formulation of complex threat laden problems farther upstream – the ‘far, far left of boom’ segment of our continuum. Additonally, the events were of sufficient magnitude to overcome current routine readiness and response systems throwing up further problems for key leaders unaccustomed to significant novel complex problems. Likewise these events sorely tested command and control structures/ resources - this is the ‘boom’ of the complex threat sequence. We will touch upon these challenges also.

Moving along, the rights, to far right of boom segment covers the recovery, rehabilitation and re-plan efforts undertaken in response to the long shadow effects brought about by these complex crises often requiring extensive leadership efforts at the far, far, right of boom.

In today’s world the coalescence of natural and manmade threats (naturogenic and anthropic threats) is becoming more common and requires a revision of current thinking amongst key decision makers, strategic planners and operational cadres. We hope to prompt the discussion further with this take on events, the response activities observed and the failure in imagination some HRO leaderships exhibited.

Summary from Chair

Q&A Session