Kyle King: [00:00:00] I. And so I felt it again, watching the House subcommittee hearing on the future of FEMA recently.
And if you haven't watched it, you really should. I felt a familiar sinking feeling that comes when you realize brilliant people are passionately debating yesterday's solutions to tomorrow's problems. As witness after witness, including two former FEMA deputy administrators, testified about.
Organizational structures, reporting relationships and grant mechanisms. The disconnect grew more and more apparent. The conversations felt like a return from or even 1995 or even earlier. And basically just a rerun move. FEMA outside of DHS create more block grants, adjust staffing levels, update the Stafford Act, professionalization of the workforce, all while outside the hearing room.
The world of risk transforms at breakneck speed, Hi everyone. Welcome to Crisis Lab Podcast. I'm Kyle, be your host today. And today we're gonna cover an article I recently published on LinkedIn, [00:01:00] which is basically how the same old answers won't solve new problems. We're no longer experiencing discrete disasters with clear beginnings and ends, we're living through what experts increasingly call a poly crisis, the overlapping, interconnected emergencies that compound and amplify each other.
Climate intensified disasters cascade into supply chain disruptions.
Infrastructure failures trigger public health emergencies and social vulnerabilities become forced multipliers for every. Threat. And as this poly crisis is hardening into what may define the next generation of emergency management, what I call, or it's typically called a perma crisis, a state of persistent overlapping emergencies where the quote, return to normal unquote never really arrives.
Where recovery from one disaster blend seamlessly into preparation four or response to the next. And yet our institutional responses remain locked in this paradigm built for a different era. So why do we keep [00:02:00] recycling the same solutions?
The FEMA organizational debate provides a perfect case study in our collective failure of imagination.
Since its creation in 1979, FEMA has undergone multiple reorganizations, independent agency, then absorbed into DHS, now potentially returning to independence or something else Altogether, each transition was presented as transformative. Each ultimately changed far less than promised. So why does this happen?
Why, when facing increasingly complex challenges, do we default to the same set of solutions? The institutional forces are quite powerful. So first, career incentive structures for career professionals proposing radical departures from established frameworks carry significant risk with limited reward.
Innovation means uncertainty and uncertainty threatens funding resources, and career advancement. Our systems reward those who expertly navigate existing structures, not those who question whether those structures serve their intended purpose. The result is a professional class incentivized to [00:03:00] improve.
Rather than reimagine to solve the problems within their authority, rather than questioning whether that authority framework itself creates problems. Second, we have a cognitive limitation of expertise. Expertise itself creates powerful cognitive constraints. The deeper our knowledge within a domain, the more we understand its logic, history and structure, and the harder it becomes to imagine an alternative.
That's why former Freedom administrators naturally gravitate towards organizational solutions. It's why state emergency managers focus on federalism and structures, and that's why professional associations emphasize credentials and standards. Each sees the world through the lens shaped by decades of institutional experience.
Third, there's the bureaucratic gravitational pool. Large bureaucracies develop what organizational theorists call path dependency tendencies to preserve existing processes, even when they no longer serve their original purpose. These path [00:04:00] dependencies aren't just procedural, they're cognitive and cultural.
Fema, like all institutions, doesn't just have processes. It has a worldview, a culture, and an identity built around a particular understanding of its mission. Challenging that understanding requires more than policy changes. It requires identity changes, which institutions resist fiercely. And fourth, we have political time horizons.
Political incentives reinforce these tendencies. The disaster cycle often exceeds political cycles. Solutions that require years or decades to fully implement rarely align with election calendars or budget cycles. So reorganizing FEMA if that truly is the goal, offers the political advantage of immediate visibility, a clear action that can be credited to current leadership.
Even if its effects won't be fully understood for years, positively or negatively, more transformative approaches might address root causes, often lack this political [00:05:00] immediacy. And then we have the expertise trap. The testimonies at the hearing weren't wrong. They were thoughtful, informed by decades of experience and deep institutional knowledge.
Each witness spoke compellingly from their domain of expertise. Former FEMA administrator envisioned a better fema, free and independent from DHS constraint. State representatives advocated for empowering state and local responses through block grants and professional organizations and leaders highlighted the importance of standardized training and certification.
Each perspective contained valuable insights, each reflected legitimate concerns and real world experience, and each remained comfortably within the boundaries of its own professional worldview, the very comfort that may be our greatest vulnerability in an era of unprecedented change. So this is the paradox of expertise, the deeper our knowledge becomes within the domain.
The harder it is to see beyond its boundaries, the frameworks that help us make sense of complex problems can eventually become constraints that limit our ability to reimagine those problems.
[00:06:00] And so the pattern repeats. This pattern of domain constrained thinking isn't unique to emergency management. It's visible across every complex system failure we've witnessed in recent years. When Boeing's 7 37 max door tore away at 16,000 feet, investigators found a trail of engineering decisions made in isolation from broader safety considerations, when Texas's power grid failed.
During winter storms, disaster revealed regulatory choices made without adequate integration of meteorological. Infrastructure and social vulnerability factors. And so when Flint's water supply was poisoned, the catastrophe emerged from a siloed decision making process across environmental, financial, and public health domains.
Each disaster reveals not just the failures of execution, but failures of imagination, failures to see beyond the boundaries of established expertise in conventional thinking.
In Lahaina where hurricane force winds drove a devastating fire through the heart of a historic town, the subsequent investigation revealed a fragmented approach to [00:07:00] risk. A state fire marshal position had been abolished in 1979. Vegetation management responsibilities were unclear. Weather warnings, evacuation protocols, and emergency communications operated in separate systems rather than as an integrated whole.
Now granted, this is probably the first of many hearings, but the hearing on the future of fema. Largely missed this deeper pattern while discussing important operational or organizational design improvements, they didn't fundamentally question whether our emergency management model conceived in the Cold War, formalized in the seventies and incrementally adjusted since remains adequate for the changes of the 2020s and beyond.
So how do we break the cycle if the same institutional forces that constrain our thinking also shape our solutions? How do we break free? The answer may lie in deliberately designing processes that counteract these forces. So first cross domain integration. The most promising innovations often emerge at the edges between domains, where insights [00:08:00] from one field illuminate problems in another.
Emergency management might find some transformative ideas by looking into human-centered design for reimagining how communities experience and navigate disasters. Or complexity science for understanding how interconnected systems behave under stress or even distributed technologies for creating resilient self-organizing response networks and behavioral economics for designing incentives that shape pre-disaster decisions.
I. Second, the first principle thinking idea, which we've discussed before, but is really about true innovation, requiring the stripping away of accumulated leaders of institutional knowledge to ask fundamental questions. What are we actually trying to accomplish? What constraints are truly fixed versus self-imposed?
And what would this system look like if we designed it today? First principles thinking associated with innovators from Aristotle to Elon Musk force us to distinguish between essential functions and historical accidents, and asks us to separate what we do from how [00:09:00] we've always done it.
Third is really learning from adjacent fields when healthcare faced a crisis of medical errors a decade ago. The breakthrough came not from within medicine, but from aviation, specifically checklist systems that dramatically reduced errors in the high stress environment. Similarly, emergency management might find transformative models by looking outside of its own boundaries.
And then fourth, we have embracing productive failure. Innovation requires tolerance for failure, not catastrophic failure that harms communities, but productive failure that generates learning. This means creating safe spaces to experiment with new approaches, measuring outcomes, and adapting rapidly.
So how do we find a new path forward? True transformation requires the courage to reach beyond the boundaries of our own expertise, to recognize that no single domain holds the keys to resilience in an interconnected world. And so what might a genuinely reimagined approach to emergency management look like?
For example, there could be embedded resilience designing communities where disasters have less impact in the first place, [00:10:00] or distributed capabilities, building response capacity across communities rather than concentrating it in specialized agencies or integrated governance. Embed disaster considerations in all decision processes rather than treating them as exceptional or adaptive learning systems, creating institutions that evolve continuously rather than reforming episodically after failures.
None of these innovations require moving FEMA's organizational box on a chart, but they might require something more challenging. Setting aside the certainty of expertise for the humility of exploration. The witnesses at the house hearing weren't wrong. They were experts speaking truthfully from within their domains of knowledge, but as a poly crisis evolves into perma crisis, the solutions we need may increasingly exist beyond any single domain and the creative intersections where different perspectives actually meet.
And so the most powerful question isn't really how do we fix fema? It's how do [00:11:00] we create communities that thrive even when traditional systems are stressed beyond their design parameters? And so that question demands more than expertise. It demands the courage to say, we don't have all the answers and the creativity to find them together.
Thanks again for listening to the Christ Lab podcast. If you have any questions or comments and you wanna share, you can find me on LinkedIn and love to hear your thoughts.
