Watching Your Own Deadly Crisis Unfold

Most of us realize that, if we were in a deadly crisis, we might only hear what those in charge of the rescue effort wanted us to hear. That might have been the case with the infamous Jet Blue flight to L.A. this past week...but it wasn't.

In this case, the passengers not only had to deal with their own fears about their plane's malfunctioning landing gear, they had to deal with the fears of those on TV who carried the story live -- a story that was also carried live into the circling plane as it tried to burn off fuel before attempting an emergency landing. By all reports, the media speculation about how the experts had never seen this happen and the concern in their reports contributed to even more panic on the part of passengers who, nonetheless, remained remarkably calm.

It brings back bad memories of how, in this age of omnipresent media, people who face deadly peril sometimes spend what could be their last moments watching the rest of the world watch them. It happened on 9/11, it happened earlier with Columbine and it's still happening.

The media seems as unprepared for this new reality as the rest of us, although they shouldn't be. It learned during Columbine not to show where SWAT teams were moving in preparation for an assault. It learned (or says it did) during high-speed LA freeway chases not to zoom in live where dinnertime viewers might unwittingly be exposed to a live shootout in their living rooms.

How will the media regulate itself so as not to cause this kind of collateral damage? In many cases, it won't. But for our purposes, it reminds us of how many different audiences we may be reaching in a crisis. Not just the surrounding community, but also those who love the people who are in danger's way, and even those in danger's way themselves.

We owe it to those audiences not to stay silent "because we don't have all the answers." We owe them whatever reassurance we can bring, even if it is just to say that we have trained for these kind of unfortunate events and are doing everything we can to bring about a satisfactory resolution. And we owe it to them to actually train when times are good so that we can handle the times that aren't.

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Lessons from the Unthinkable

Courtesy NBC
What more can be said about the images from New Orleans that have not already been said? That the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are of Biblical proportions. That the heartbreaking tragedy exposed the desperation of an underclass that many of us either did not know, or did not want to know, existed. That the delayed response will prompt a long-overdue examination of how we ignore the most desperate among us until events force us to confront them.

There's an inherent unfairness in Monday morning quarterbacking. It's so darned easy to know what I would have done if only they had been smart enough to have me in charge. And yet, when we confront the real crises that our businesses face all too often, it's the post mortem examination that keeps us from being condemned to repeat history.

Crisis planning is an indispensable part of prudent corporate and organizational governance. But how often do we nod our heads at the resulting crisis plan...and then immediately set it aside while we tackle those front-burner issues? After all, a crisis may never happen if we're lucky, but we know the board meeting next week will happen all too soon.

That's what happened just a few months ago, in June, when the New Orleans Army Corps of Engineers budget was cut by 44 percent. That meant a study to determine how to protect the Big Easy from a Category 5 hurricane was seen as unimportant in comparison with more pressing needs (see Molly Ivins' column of September 1, 2005).

No one today would even attempt to justify such a study as unessential. But in June, when Katrina was not even a ripple off the African coast, it was. No, actually, it was always essential. We just didn't choose to see it. And that's the lesson for us. We need to plan now, and then go a step further and actually implement the recommendations that will help us to deal with the unthinkable. The possibilities that are most frightening to confront are often the most important.

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