When faced with a complex, fast-moving crisis, leaders must constantly adapt their mental models and create a “unity of effort,” says Admiral Thad Allen, USCG (Ret.), the national incident commander for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Allen, an admirer of Warren Bennis and Peter Drucker, spoke with HBR’s Scott Berinato about the challenges of leading when an anxious nation is counting on success. Listen to the interview this piece is based on. Download this podcast HBR: You get the call: We want you to be the commander of the oil spill response. Is your first thought to approach it as a military operation? Allen: You can’t. In the military you have total unity of command. As soon as recruits go into boot camp or service, they have to memorize their chain of command, from themselves clear on up to the president. In what I would call a “whole of government response”—to a hurricane, an oil spill, no matter what it is—that chain of command doesn’t exist. You have to aggregate everybody’s capabilities to achieve a single purpose, taking into account the fact that they have distinct authorities and responsibilities. That’s creating unity of effort rather than unity of command, and it’s a much more complex management challenge. Did you come to the oil spill with a template for how you’d manage the situation, based on your experience in previous crises? Yes and no. My first oil spill response was in 1980. A barge full of 3 million gallons of heating oil ran aground in a wildlife refuge on the central Jersey shoreline, where I was the local Coast Guard commander. So I’ve done these before. And the structure for the Deepwater Horizon response—the authority, obligations, and ability to use money and resources—was dictated by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. But the expectations of the country were well beyond what’s required or even allowed by law. The challenge of creating unity of effort involves dealing with issues that you’re not statutorily allowed to pay for, but that still need to be done for the public. In the Gulf we had to deal with things like seafood safety and behavioral health problems; there were socioeconomic issues in play that were never anticipated by the response doctrine. Those were the problems that required the most leadership. What about the challenges of working with a private company—in this case, BP—that’s deeply invested in image and damage control? Our biggest challenge in dealing with BP was that the public did not understand how the company responsible for the event could play such a large role in the response. But because they’re going to have to write checks for buying booms, buying skimmers, to catering companies, and all that other kind of stuff, they have to be on location with you if you’re going to be effective. We’re used to working that way—it’s how the U.S. has organized oil spill responses for 20-plus years—but I don’t think that was well understood by the public or a lot of the political leadership. When you’re dealing with the competing interests of government entities, businesses, and an anxious public, how do you go about creating unity of effort? I’m a big fan of Peter Senge, at MIT, who talks about learning organizations and the use of mental models. You have to understand at a very large, macro level what the problem is that you’re dealing with and what needs to be done to achieve the effects you want—and you have to be able to communicate that. You also have to create a set of shared values that everybody involved can subscribe to. For example, with Hurricane Katrina it was clear to me after about 24 hours in New Orleans that we weren’t dealing only with a natural disaster. Had the levees not collapsed, ground zero for Hurricane Katrina would have been Bay St. Louis and Waveland, Mississippi, which basically got wiped off the map. But when the levees were breached and New Orleans flooded, it became a different event, and I’m not sure we recognized that as a nation. We were still treating the entire issue as if it were just a hurricane. Under the hurricane response model, resources are provided to a local government, which applies them and runs the response. But we had lost continuity of government: There was no functional local government that could take the resources and apply them to the mission. So the mental model became more like the response to a weapon of mass effect. When I realized that, things started happening. I sat down with Russel Honoré, who was leading the military forces down there, and we divided the city into sectors and assigned each sector to one of his units. We focused on providing security and creating the capacity of local government to do its job—dewater the city, do the house-to-house searches, and so forth. Is what you’re describing the decision to go “off book” and depart from protocol—a move that has been lauded as helping to turn the tide of the Katrina response? Yes. There were times when we needed immediate action, and I went off book and gave some direct orders, which is not normally done under the hurricane response model. But the fact that we’d changed mental models to a different kind of disaster made us all understand we couldn’t rely on standard hurricane response. Do you go so far as to create a mission statement to achieve unity of effort? Actually, for the oil spill I did. But not for Katrina? The challenge of putting together a response without continuity of government required me to take a little different tack. I got to New Orleans on the fifth of September—Labor Day, a week after the storm came ashore. Friday, the ninth, I was called to Baton Rouge and was told by [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary [Michael] Chertoff that I would be relieving Mike Brown, and we had a press conference. A very difficult thing to do. When the press conference was over, I was in the huge command post in Baton Rouge, which was this Dillard’s [department store] warehouse that we had taken over, and we had about 4,000 people assigned to this place. My military aide asked, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to have an all-hands meeting.” She looked at me like I was crazy, because there wasn’t a place in the building where we could put 4,000 people. I said, “Well, find the biggest open space you can and get as many people there as you can.” And we found a space on the bottom floor and crowded about 2,000 people into it. I got up on a desk, with a loudspeaker, and told everybody that I was giving one order: They were to treat anybody they came into contact with who had been affected by the storm like a member of their own family. Their mother, father, brother, sister, whatever. And I said, “If you do that, two things are going to happen. Number one, if you make a mistake, you’re going to err on the side of doing too much, and that’s okay. Number two, if somebody has a problem with what you’ve done, their problem’s not with you; their problem’s with me.” After I said that, a cheer broke out, because there had been so much stress from the pressure that had been exerted on the response and the perception that it wasn’t going well. Just a simple set of core values—a North Star to steer by—was, I think, what they were looking for. When you’re on location in a crisis, you can get a nuanced view of what’s happening on the ground. When you lead from headquarters or an incident response center, you’ve got the whole picture. In major crises like the oil spill, do you feel it’s more important to lead from the front or from the back? I think you have to lead from everywhere. A typical week during this oil spill has had me split my time 50/50 between Washington and downrange in the Gulf. You’ve got to be present with members of Congress, the administration, the media. You’ve got to talk to people and brief the White House press corps here in Washington. At the same time, if you’re not visible to your people out on the boats who are trying to pull a boom in Barataria Bay in 110-degree heat, then you’re not a credible leader, because you don’t understand what they’re going through. You have to manage your schedule to make sure that you’re where you need to be, and come back on a routine basis to reinforce what you’re trying to do. If you’re not visible to your people out on the boats in 110-degree heat, you’re not a credible leader. With every new crisis response you’ve led, the amount of publicly available real-time information has increased. Every citizen could access live video footage of BP’s leaking well 24/7. Has this affected how you lead? Social media and the 24-hour news cycle are part of a fundamental change in our sociological structure. John Holdren, who’s the science and technology adviser to the president, says that there are three ways to deal with climate change: Adapt, manage, or suffer. I believe that what’s happening with information is no less profound and challenging, and therefore the same options apply. We all have to understand that there will never again be a major event in this country that won’t involve public participation. And the public participation will happen whether it’s managed or not. We’ve chosen to try to adapt and manage. Before the oil spill, I had already started blogging and tweeting. With social media and the 24-hour news cycle, there will never again be a major disaster that won’t involve public participation. You mentioned Peter Senge and John Holdren. Where else do you turn for leadership wisdom? Warren Bennis and Peter Drucker. And I like Steven Sample, the former president of USC. He wrote a book called The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, which I love. In general, do you think military-trained personnel make good business managers? Does the training translate? I think it can, as long as you’re not too doctrinaire about anything. If you’re too caught up in military protocol, you won’t be flexible in dealing with folks who are not in the military. On the other hand, if you’re so captivated by the private sector and running everything against a balance sheet, you can become too much of an ideologue. Good leadership requires flexibility, agility, and curiosity. If you have those, I think it’s possible to cross over both ways. What have you learned about leadership, and yourself, from this decade of managing crises? I’ve learned that leaders are responsible for their own morale. The boss doesn’t come in and sit down and say, “How are you doing today?” And I wouldn’t say I haven’t lost my temper on occasion, but at least I haven’t done it publicly. These are terrible tragedies that befall our society. The human toll is significant. A lot of people are dealing with personal grief; their ways of life are threatened. You need to understand and account for that, but you’ve also got to keep a steady focus. If you become too caught up in the emotion of the situation, you’re not going to be as effective. The calmer you are, the more you’re going to get done. I talk to a lot of senior leaders about this. We’ll have a cup of coffee or a drink, and I will ask them how they manage this. You know, who do you call? Who do you talk to? Who do you get feedback from? And then how do you manage the times when you’re really frustrated? Because the last thing the country wants to see is you frustrated. One of the more heartwarming things that’s happened to me during this oil spill response is that every couple of weeks the phone will ring, and it’s Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I did a lot of work with him before I retired as the commandant of the Coast Guard. He’ll say, “I’m just calling to see how you’re doing.” That’s pretty neat. Have you been able to mentor anyone in these situations, or are they just too fast-moving and complex for that? You’re always in a teachable moment. There’s always somebody watching you, and you’re mentoring without knowing it. When I got the call to go down for Katrina, first I had them get a plane ready for me, and then I called four or five people who had worked for me before in very tough situations. One was a public affairs officer who had worked for me in Miami when we had some very significant issues with the Cuban immigrant community and when Elián González came ashore. I got somebody who used to run a command center for me, and I got the person who led our forces to help evacuate New York Harbor after 9/11. I basically said, “Meet me in New Orleans.” And they all showed up. I created a nickname for them. I call them the Dogs That Hunt. You’ve heard that old saying, “That dog don’t hunt.” Yeah, well these are dogs that hunt. Everybody should keep a list of dogs. Do you think you were born a leader, or do you think it’s something you’ve learned through decades of experience? I would side with my good friend Warren Bennis, who says that everybody can be a better leader. You should focus on trying to optimize what you can do with the skills and talents you’ve got. The more you’re a lifelong learner, and the more intellectually curious you are, the bigger the base of potential you’ll have to build on when the opportunity presents itself. It also makes you better at recognizing opportunity. Will you take the call if there’s another opportunity to lead the country through a major crisis? Well, my wife and I talked about whether or not I would accept the request to go to New Orleans. We discussed the very distinct possibility that it would not be successful and that I could not appreciably change anything. But I reminded her that over the past 20 years I have been preaching to people that my favorite definition of leadership is the ability to reconcile opportunity and competency. It would be a little irresponsible on my part not to respond, when the opportunity was provided, with whatever competency I could bring.
