Improvisation

At one of the ranges at Fort Benning, back in 1970, I remember seeing a mock tombstone with an inscription that went something like this:

Here lies private Shorthouse
The pride of the institution
He was killed one night in a firefight
Applying the school solution

It was meant to be funny, but also to get across a point to the soldiers training there to go to Vietnam: All your plans, all your training, every careful calculation of the "right" way to do something, can quickly be made meaningless by the confusion of combat. Leaders have to improvise. Those that are good at it, or lucky, get themselves and their units out alive.

As I look back over the last couple of weeks in Louisiana, it's looking more and more like a tragic confluence of unimaginative leaders. The New Orleans Mayor, the Governor, FEMA, even the President all lost chances to take bold action that might have saved some people. Instead, they went by The Book - or what they believed The Book prescribed - until things had got so out of control that extreme measures had to be taken. It's not surprising, given the immediate and brutal second-guessing that seems to follow every public decision. But it's unfortunate.

It's instructive to look, once again, at the contrast between this event and the World Trade Center disaster of four years ago. There was official confusion about what to do. It was left to a small group of relatively low-level New York City officials, without any real authority, to take over and begin almost immediately to secure the site. They brought in contractors and heavy machinery, shored up the slurry wall, and probably prevented even greater devastation in the weeks that followed. William Langewiesche wrote about these unsung heroes in The Atlantic, and his book American Ground. Had it been left to public officials, working by The Book, they'd probably still be holding hearings to decide what to do.

Improvisation. No matter how many personality profiles you create, or training simulations you conduct, it's a quality of leadership that can't really be tested until it's needed. Too bad.