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Keep The Circus Under The Tent – At Your Peril

September 12, 2010 By 4 Comments

Reflections on September 10, 2001

On September 10, 2001, I delivered a presentation on terrorism and interagency coordination to an audience of American and Mexican military and government officials in Mexico City.  My slide-deck, as it is known in military parlance, included images of the World Trade Towers and details of the 1993 truck-bomb attack, as well as open-source information on Osama Bin Laden.  I had no special insight into the prophetic timing of my presentation, or of the magnitude of the events that would prove the resolve of both the perpetrators and targets of this infamous attack.   There was, however, a foreshadowing regarding   problems leading up to September 11th and which are present in most crisis events: the factors of trust and its impact on effective communication and coordination.   I look back with a mix of emotions on the events of the following morning, because lack of unity and the silo-effect were contributing factors that plagued U.S. efforts to effectively develop a collaborative strategy of threat mitigation.

One legacy of this lesson is the development by the New York Police Department (NYPD) of an intelligence service which operates beyond the borders of the United States. The thin blue line of NYPD has determined that federal intelligence agencies failed to serve the City of New York, and the police have therefore taken matters into their own hands.  This strategy, in the eyes of some, negates reliance by the City of New York on others for the most critical information concerning threats to the city.  I suggest this model also highlights the underlying problem: trust. Trust, or its lack, is often mentioned as the reason that critical information is not shared among individuals and across organizations. Fragmented or broken communication, based in part on lack of trust, remains a threat to success.

How can any leader build or, more delicately rebuild, trust in order to foster the open and free exchange of information?  One method is confidence-building-measures.  This involves agreements between individuals and organizations in which each party agrees to take steps up an escalating ladder of good-faith gestures. Sadly, establishing or restoring trust and communication often occurs in the face of a breakdown, not as a standard business practice. Hindsight bias notwithstanding, I wish my presentation on September 10, 2001, had focused less on the pedantic protocols of interagency relations and more on the process of developing confidence-building-measures.

What will it take to move toward a model of trusted communication and away from fragmented and dysfunctional silos?

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About Phillip Van Saun
Phillip Van Saun is a Visiting Professor of crisis management at the Centre for Advancing International Management at Saint George’s University and is Director of Continuity and Emergency Services at the University of California San Diego. He can be reached at: pvansaun@ucsd.edu

  • Gmacpherson

    I have experienced the difficulties of not having important relationships that promote communication and trust in place prior to disasters and having them. The latter results in a far more efficient response and recovery period that is both obvious and defensible to constituents. Given our country’s experience over the last decade with terrorist events and natural disasters, the population at large has become less tolerant of organizations that fail to communicate openly with others before, during, and after disasters. Lastly, establishing trusting relationships before these events is much easier and productive than if we wait until the air is filled with smoke, the ground starts to shake, or explosions occur. It’s time we being if we have not already received this message.

  • Pvansaun

    Thanks for sharing your viewpoint, Garry. As you clearly articulate, developing and nurturing trusting relationships is a key factor to effective leadership. Informal relationships, formed over meals and other low-pressure settings, help to counter the negative impact that decentralized and distributed communication has on the development of trust. Ironically, the sense of the urgent seems to trump the need for what is most urgently needed: strong bonds built upon trusting relationships.

  • Mike Waugh

    I was with Phillip Van Saun on the trip to Mexico City and gave the same briefing to other senior members of the Mexican Government a day or two after the infamous 911 attack in Spanish. My career in intelligence some years earlier showed me that the lack of sharing information between agencies had several factors at hand. Trust was certainly an important issue, but so was the development of attitude(s) regarding agencies with whom information should be shared that caused difficulties in proper and timely intelligence sharing with appropriate entities. The formation of DHS and subsequent confidence-building measures between agencies has gone a long way toward changing the territorial attitudes of some of our top performer intelligence gathering agencies, but the process needs to continue so we do not find ourselves in “the dark” to some degree when we are confronted with a future attack scenario.

  • Barbara Field

    How prescient your presentation was! As a New Yorker who is still haunted by 9/11, thank you for your insights about trust, communication and the true meaning of cooperation, interagency or otherwise.

    Barbara Field, Communications Manager, Business and Financial Services
    UC San Diego, bfield@ucsd.edu