NAVAL COMMAND CHAPLAIN BRIAN WAITE would tell you that he is troubled by the rate of suicides among the submarine force, a figure that is three-and-a-half times higher than other communities of the Navy.

He would also tell you that this rate is still below figures found in the civilian population, but, unlike the civilian population, enlisted men and women are a select group, one that has gone through extensive screenings and training to cope with the work ahead of them.

“Chaplains in the military are usually at the tip of the spear when it comes to crisis management,” says Waite, who works at the Department of Defense in the Naval Submarine Support Center in Norfolk, Virginia. “When there is a crisis — whether this crisis be individual suicides or a situation such as the attack on the World Trade Center — it is usually chaplains who are with the ‘first responders’ as one of their own. It is chaplains who are getting their hands dirty and working with the issue, with hopes of making recommendations to the command…while also assessing needs and issues that are perpetually arising, whether they are personal or systemic.”

It is for these very reasons that Waite was counted among the 37 participants who came to the Kennedy School in September 2005 for the sixth executive session of “Crisis Management: Preparation, Performance, Leadership.” A five-day course offered by the Kennedy School’s Executive Education Department, the program draws an eclectic crowd, ranging from mayors to city managers; firefighters to police personnel; and leaders of the university, military, nonprofit, and corporate worlds.

Led by the Kennedy School’s Arnold Howitt and Herman “Dutch” Leonard, the seminar was built for the post-9/11 world to review case studies and prompt discussion of major national and international crises with an eye toward what went wrong, what went right, and, in retrospect, what could have been handled better. In a year where 26 named storms — including 13 hurricanes — ravaged portions of the Atlantic basin — with some handled well, and others, like Katrina, still being debated on the national stage — Howitt and Leonard stress that their course does not focus on the ordinary, but rather the extraordinary crisis situations, going as far back as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and constantly evolving to include present-day crises such as Hurricane Katrina, with a focus on giving attendees the tools needed to create systems that will make a difference in their day-to-day work.

“There is a distinction between routine emergencies and crisis emergencies, and most professional emergency organizations are pretty well designed to handle routine emergency management situations,” says Leonard, a professor of public management and professor of business administration. “‘Routine’ doesn’t mean these emergencies are good, or that they’re small, but simply that we have routines to handle them. We have built crisis teams equal to the task.

“When we have a crisis with a significant departure from the routine, with combinations of one thing or another we were not prepared for, that’s a crisis emergency situation with novelty, and that requires a different approach…so we talk about that, and we ask what you need to succeed in both of these circumstances, and how you get prepared to handle both.”

“In the evolving media driven world we live in today, organizations cannot afford to be without a crisis management capability,” says John Strazzo, a September 2005 participant and vice president of Banco Popular Dominicano. “The effectiveness with which organizations deal with crisis can make the difference between life and death for both people and the organization.”

“In a situation of significant novelty,” continues Leonard, “a central question is, What do we do when no one knows what to do?”

The Seminar

The Crisis Management seminar may have been born out of the brunt of the post-9/11 world, but it was also a progression from a four-year research program at the Kennedy School on domestic terrorism — supported by the U.S. Department of Justice — which is where Howitt, executive director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, who directed that program, came into the picture in 1998.

“We started to think about what we needed to do in the face of a terrorist attack,” said Howitt, “which was a considerable concern in the federal government.”

After 9/11, Howitt and Leonard joined forces, integrating crisis case studies such as the Los Angeles riots of 1992, the Chicago heat wave of 1995, the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, and the multiple instances of California and Montana megafires into an executive session designed for federal, state, and local officials; deans of colleges and directors of public safety; and leaders of industry and operations on every conceivable scale. “I was involved through the terrorist path,” says Howitt, “and Dutch through the natural disaster path.”

For five, consecutive, nine-plus-hour days in the Crisis Management Program, participants pore over the cases, most of which were created at the Kennedy School and are often accompanied by frontline responders who openly tell their own extraordinary tales.

“It’s pretty intense,” says Howitt. “A few years ago, we had 13 senior people from Palm Beach County, including the head of the hazardous materials unit, the health director,
a police chief, the sheriff, and the elected prosecutor. They were the county where the first anthrax attack occurred (in 2001)…and they had just gone through Hurricane Floyd as well, so half of our participants had lived through some of the cases we were discussing…. A good deal of the evolution of the course has come from participants…and we are constantly updating the curriculum as a result of recent events.”

Both Howitt and Leonard cite their fellow faculty members and guest speakers as one of the strongest components of their program, a notable list that most recently included TV analyst and former presidential advisor David Gergen IOP 1984, public service professor and director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School; Max Baserman, a professor at Harvard Business School; Richard Hackman, a professor at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Hannah Riley Bowles MPP 1984, a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School; and guests like Arlington County Fire Department Chief Jim Schwartz CM 2004, who served as the 9/11 incident commander at the Pentagon; Theodore Sorensen, former special counsel and advisor to President John F. Kennedy, who speaks directly about the Cuban Missile Crisis; and Jerry Williams SEF 2002, the retired director of fire and aviation management for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, an agency that both Howitt and Leonard tout as being among the most effective in handling crisis management.

“There are five federal fire fighting agencies that have come together and voluntarily formed an organization…one that operates as a collection of agencies working together,” says Leonard. “When an event happens, they set up a center in two hours, and they will have an operations group, a planning group, and a working headquarters for field operations. They will know how many people they’ve deployed, where they are, and a whole set of organizational processes flows naturally — including how many lunches to order for the next day.

“Fire fighting, in general, lends itself to this kind of structure. Firefighters never show up alone — they always deploy with ‘overhead,’ — that is with supervisors. This isn’t natural for police — they almost always deploy in groups of one or two…in fire fighting, you can always aggregate up, built out of that tradition and the tradition of ongoing wildland fire fighting…FEMA says that everyone has to develop this kind of structure, and this is part of what we are criticizing. In the midst of a major disturbance, these structures are supposed to be in place, but often are not.”

The Importance of Plan B

As the participants will tell you, one of the greatest values of the program is the opportunity to think “outside the box,” as Brian Waite explains, a term commonly used — and embraced — in the business world, but not so common in the realm of the military and law enforcement.

“When I returned from Harvard and began examining the issue of suicides in the submarine force …. I realized we needed to do something of concrete action,” says Waite. “It was at this point that I, with my religious ministry team, formulated a plan for taking instruction to the individual submarines, with the hopes of specially training and certifying two sailors on every submarine as suicide prevention/awareness specialists…. Secondly, we are looking at our systemic reactions to potential large-scale crises, particularly in regards to the ongoing network of support we are using. In other words, we are trying to think more creatively about our use of resources — not just militarily, but those who are experts in certain fields we may not have used heretofore.”

Leonard says either we are paying more attention to crises or we are simply seeing more of them, citing last year’s series of storms to the possible pandemic like an avian flu as ongoing examples of crises with novelties “that are a challenge to the standard apparatus.”

“A central question is, What do we do when no one knows what to do? In a true crisis, there is, by definition, no comprehensive expert,” says Leonard, “but the tendency in a crisis is still to ask, Who are the experts? What we probably need to do is find a broader collection of people who can contribute even if they don’t know everything. Crisis emergencies invalidate the scripts we’ve made in advance, and as a consequence, in the face of novelty, what do you need? You need improvisation — you need to rapidly invent and improvise your way through the situation…under intense stress.

“If you say, ‘Tell us what those novelties are going to be and we’ll prepare for them,’ that misses the point,” says Leonard. “We can prepare for specific emergencies — like an LNG tanker accident in Boston’s harbor, but the point is, whatever you have prepared for, there will be things that you haven’t. Our view is that you have to be ready both for what you know might happen and for what you never imagined could happen.”

Mary Tamer is a freelance writer living in Boston.