The Checklist Manifesto_ How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande [30]
By then, 80 percent of the city was flooded. Twenty thousand refugees were stranded at the New Orleans Superdome. Another twenty thousand were at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Over five thousand people were at an overpass on Interstate 10, some of them left by rescue crews and most carrying little more than the clothes on their backs. Hospitals were without power and suffering horrendous conditions. As people became desperate for food and water, looting began. Civil breakdown became a serious concern.
Numerous local officials and impromptu organizers made efforts to contact authorities and let them know what was needed, but they too were unable to reach anyone. When they finally got a live person on the phone, they were told to wait—their requests would have to be sent up the line. The traditional command-and-control system rapidly became overwhelmed. There were too many decisions to be made and too little information about precisely where and what help was needed.
Nevertheless, the authorities refused to abandon the traditional model. For days, while conditions deteriorated hourly, arguments roared over who had the power to provide the resources and make decisions. The federal government wouldn’t yield the power to the state government. The state government wouldn’t give it to the local government. And no one would give it to people in the private sector.
The result was a combination of anarchy and Orwellian bureaucracy with horrifying consequences. Trucks with water and food were halted or diverted or refused entry by authorities—the supplies were not part of their plan. Bus requisitions were held up for days; the official request did not even reach the U.S. Department of Transportation until two days after tens of thousands had become trapped and in need of evacuation. Meanwhile two hundred local transit buses were sitting idle on higher ground nearby.
The trouble wasn’t a lack of sympathy among top officials. It was a lack of understanding that, in the face of an extraordinarily complex problem, power needed to be pushed out of the center as far as possible. Everyone was waiting for the cavalry, but a centrally run, government-controlled solution was not going to be possible.
Asked afterward to explain the disastrous failures, Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security, said that it had been an “ultra-catastrophe,” a “perfect storm” that “exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody’s foresight.” But that’s not an explanation. It’s simply the definition of a complex situation. And such a situation requires a different kind of solution from the command-and-control paradigm officials relied on.
Of all organizations, it was oddly enough Wal-Mart that best recognized the complex nature of the circumstances, according to a case study from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Briefed on what was developing, the giant discount retailer’s chief executive officer, Lee Scott, issued a simple edict. “This company will respond to the level of this disaster,” he was remembered to have said in a meeting with his upper management. “A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level. Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and, above all, do the right thing.”
As one of the officers at the meeting later recalled, “That was it.” The edict was passed down to store managers and set the tone for how people were expected to react. On the most immediate level, Wal-Mart had 126 stores closed due to damage and power outages. Twenty thousand employees and their family members were displaced. The initial focus was on helping them. And within forty-eight hours, more than half of the damaged stores were up and running again. But according to one executive on the scene, as word of the disaster’s impact on the city’s population began filtering in from Wal-Mart employees on the ground, the priority shifted from reopening stores to “Oh, my God, what can we do to help these people?”
Acting on their