Preparing for Crisis and Learning to Fail Safer in a Complicated World
An Interview with Professor Juliette Kayyem
Juliette Kayyem is a national leader in homeland security, cybersecurity, resiliency and safety. She is currently the faculty chair of the Homeland Security and Security and Global Health Projects at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is a CNN national security analyst, a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, and provides consulting services to public and private entities on preparedness and safety issues.
Professor Kayyem most recently served as President Obama’s Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. There she played a pivotal leadership role in major operations including the handling of the H1N1 pandemic and the BP Oil Spill response; she also led major efforts and stakeholder engagement in policies on critical infrastructure protections, cybersecurity, and community resiliency. Before that, she was Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s homeland security advisor, guiding regional planning and the state’s first interoperability plan, climate change policies, and overseeing the National Guard.
Professor Kayyem’s most recent book was released in March 2022, entitled The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in the Age of Disasters. In this book, Professor Kayyem lays the groundwork for a new approach to dealing with many different types of disasters and offers her readers a new framework to anticipate the “devil’s” inevitable return, highlighting the leadership deficiencies we need to overcome in order to face these certain challenges. Professor Kayyem maintains that it is no longer about preventing a disaster from occurring, but about learning how to use the tools at our disposal to minimize the consequences when it does. The Devil Never Sleeps is a guide for governments, businesses, and individuals on how to alter our thinking so that we can develop effective strategies in the face of perpetual catastrophe.
Susan Carney Lynch: Thank you Professor Kayyem for taking the time to speak with the Social Impact Review today about the critical topic of preparing for crisis in this complicated world — whether we are talking about a climate, technology, or human rights crisis. In your new book, The Devil Never Sleeps, you talk a lot about human nature — can you tell us what makes it so difficult for us humans to prepare for a crisis?
Juliette Kayyem: I don't condemn human nature. Maybe we have an optimistic attitude. We think the worst won't happen to us. We recognize bad things are happening, but not to me — individually. I think the second point is, we're really bad at calculating risk. Generally, as institutions, as governments, and as people, we fear things that are not likely to impact us. Meanwhile, we're smoking cigarettes. And third is what I describe as the ‘preparedness paradox’ — the more we prepare, the less likely bad things will happen and the fewer consequences there are likely to be. That investment in preparedness becomes hard to justify because you're not seeing the consequences of not being prepared.
Anthony Mohr: The ‘preparedness paradox’ is what you highlight in your book with the Y2K example.
Kayyem: That's right. Y2K is the perfect example of this, where everyone is very nervous, billions of dollars are invested. The new year comes around, there are just blips here and there, so then the narrative becomes, “everyone was freaking out” rather than, “thank goodness for the preparedness,” because the consequences were less severe than everyone expected. That is a challenge, and as I write, the only response to it is that we need to make preparedness for the boom or the devil's arrival — call it what you will — we need to make preparedness part of our standard operating procedures.
Mohr: We're supposed to prepare for all risks that can occur. On the other hand, we have ‘black swans’ and by their very name, we don't know what the black swan is. We're preparing for something when we really don't know what's going to occur. How do you handle that problem?
Kayyem: In reality, we have no idea what the problem is going to be. So The Devil Never Sleeps is a little bit controversial in this regard in that I say look, you know insurance exists to cover the high cost, the high probability, high consequence events or the low consequence events. Think of auto insurance or hurricane insurance. The black swan focuses on the low probability, high consequence events. What I argue in the book is to focus on high consequence events. What if we just put our investment in that because planning for the high consequence event is going to cover the low consequence event. Then we'll begin to see the commonalities of our preparedness rather than focusing on a particular risk. One of the recommendations I make is if you think about the corporate sector, you've got your chief security officer and then your chief information security officer and then your risk officer, and now you have your chief medical officer and chief health officer who's preparing you for the next pandemic. That's a lot of chiefs. They're all preparing us for what I call the “boom” that is going to have uncontrollable consequences. What if we just changed our lens from left of boom, which is our focus on prevention and risk calculation, to right of boom, which is, “Okay, lots of bad things are happening with lots of bad consequences; I can't predict them, but I know what the consequences are.”
Lynch: I have a question around that very issue of what happens when incentives get in the way and bad consequences result. Let’s take the case of Hurricane Irma — lack of emergency preparedness in a nursing home. When the hurricane hit and knocked out the power, one nursing home in South Florida didn't have air conditioning. Twelve residents died of heat stroke even though they were across the street from a hospital. This facility lacked emergency preparedness. How do we deal with situations like this one?
Kayyem: It's interesting because the book doesn't cast blame. It assumes people's motivations are all over the place. I don't go around saying Boeing is horrible, BP is horrible. Look, major corporations can be greedy; welcome to the world. But only a few of them get into big trouble, right? So, in terms of a crisis, what's the distinguishing factor? That's where, for example, the comparative analysis I do in the book between Fukushima, owned by TEPCO, and a more nimble nuclear facility down the street that did not have radiation leaks. Fukushima learned to fail safely. They were hit at that nuclear facility. But they were able to fail safely, which is what I’m urging in The Devil Never Sleeps. I consider the attitude of “I'm not going to fix things I can't fix” through the lens of disaster management, or, as I say, at the end: “I’m all for resiliency.” But what I try to do is to put you in that moment of what I call the moment of the boom. I can't change your motives, but I can tell you from history, from the Trojan horse to Surfside Florida — the building collapse that occurred last year — I can tell you what the commonalities are.
Another thing I’d say is that on a monetary basis, we can make a case for preparedness. BP is a perfect example. They rejected having a second blowout preventer, but the blowout preventer was their single point of failure. It costs about $35 billion later. They probably wish they had invested in preparedness. I can give you the numbers. The book is a look into my field, to make it accessible to people who are thinking about how they can learn to fail safer. There's a very strong incentive in my field to make places spend more money than they need in order to buy more things. There's money in risk prevention. Think about cyber security downward. Part of what I want to do is say that not everything bad that happens is a crisis. Companies are going to be dealing with crap all the time. The CEO has an affair. There's a disruption of services, an attack, whatever. A crisis hits an institution's core value, like BP having safe offshore drilling. Your response time is limited. Those are the two factors that go into it.
Mohr: One of the ingenious moves that you mentioned in your book was the Indonesians, when they put tsunami warnings in their mosques. Can you tell us why this strategy was so key in your view?
Kayyem: Right. We can learn to fail safer. I don't mean to minimize my field, but this is not rocket science. It's taking something that seems complicated and saying, well that's just situational awareness. It's just telling people what's happening, and this knowledge will influence greater preparedness.
Lynch: What are the most critical qualities of leaders in crisis today and the sacrifices they need to make, particularly now that there's so much crisis fatigue?
Kayyem: I’m not urging people to be emergency managers. I am urging them to treat preparedness like they treat finance, operations, and legal matters. I have this story in The Devil Never Sleeps about a very smart Fortune 200 CEO. I say to him casually, “How often do you meet the CFO?” and he says a bunch of times a day. I say, “What about your chief security officer?” He says “Well, he's former FBI; he knows what he's doing.” The idea that you can delegate that task permeates so many of these companies because we've made ourselves seem special. Part of what I’m saying is to make us less special. We report to you and you make yourself accessible for people like us. What CEOs can do now is really think about architecture. This is what I’m focused on, what we call accessibility. Are you focused on this effort? Are you focused on both left of boom and right of boom? Are mechanisms in place to fail safer, in other words, to stop the cascading losses and what we in the emergency management field call ‘stupid deaths,’ deaths that did not have to happen? We can do this; this is an architectural fix. Right now, if 100 companies called me and said, what's the first thing we should do, it's not to buy anything. I’d say, give me your reporting chart. Tell me where everyone is. What you'll find is that it can't be rationalized after the disaster. The details can be worked through, and I think communication is also the huge role for a CEO, but first I’m really focused on architecture.
Mohr: If I’ve got $1 to spend, do I spend 80 cents on the left and 20 cents on the right of boom? Or do I put my money right there on the fulcrum? And if it's on the fulcrum, how do we determine where the fulcrum is?
Kayyem: It’s not that I have the right answer, because each company is going to think differently. But I think that going back to BP is a perfect example. We convince ourselves that nothing bad happens because we say we have the last line of defense. That's just a crutch, because then you're not preparing for, say, when the blowout preventer fails. Let me allocate the hundred pennies on Colonial Pipeline. If I’m the cyber security expert at Colonial Pipeline and I’m looking at my pennies, they're clearly at 80 that I’m going to stop something bad from happening and maybe if you're lucky, another 20 are on “what are the consequences.” So, when the inevitable breach happens, their only solution is shutting down the pipeline for a week. How can that be a sophisticated response system? I think cyber security is the worst in terms of its preparedness, because there's a lot of effort on stopping the breach. Come on. You have to assume breach, and then what happens? I was giving a speech to a military person who sits on the board of a big cyber security firm. He said it was like a light bulb coming on over his head. He’d seen so many table-tops in which we're focused on preventing the bad thing, and then the bad thing comes and the table-top ends. There's a winner and a loser. My whole point is that this binary notion is too easily preventing us from failing safer. I can measure that in money, body count, destruction. I can measure the difference between a million people lost by COVID and say 200,000. Not that 200,000 is acceptable, but compared to a million, it is.
Mohr: Would you recommend more table-top exercises?
Kayyem: Yes. What I want is to see people test. As I write in the book, it's amazing how many CEOs and leaders will fight the scenario. They say it won't happen that way. Well, that's the point. I’m looking at consequences. I’m not looking at calculated risk. You can train for a calculated risk all the time, all you want. That’s easy. But I think a really interesting emerging space is the growing literature on learning in the moment. We know how to plan. And we know how to do after-actions. It's learning in the thick of it. We need to be much better about absorbing lessons learned in real time, and it really does follow a lot of the work that a lot of people are in. It sounds simple, but it's like product management. Is it working, and if it's not working, throw it out. Engineers do this all the time.
Lynch: To switch gears to the global crisis in Ukraine, the stakes are high. What lessons can we look to in history for guidance as to what nations and individuals can do to be in the right position during a disaster?
Kayyem: Right. Obviously, it’s a disaster for Ukraine, and then of course the refugee disaster, although I’m pretty convinced this is probably a short-term refugee crisis. I even see it in the numbers coming to the United States, or lack of numbers coming to the United States, that most people want to go home and are hoping that they get home soon. As for the deep strategy of the post-World War II European Russian American order, I leave that to others. I’ll focus on what I do know, which are a couple of aspects of this. The first is in a crisis, there’s nothing better than a great message and a great messenger. It is remarkable that Zelensky has continued to galvanize a unified effort against Russia while China can barely extract public support. When you make China sheepish, you know you're doing this right. And so, the importance of what is that message and how the messenger is communicating — it isn't just that he's great. His messages are targeted to the audience. When he spoke to Congress, he talked about every representative going back to their businesses; he talked about 9/11 and our revolutionary spirit. He does something different in Germany and elsewhere. Also just appealing to young people. His videos are no longer than a minute and 20 seconds, if that. He knows you, knows his audience. The second area is of course policy bumping up against logistics every single time. My book is a lot about planning for how you move stuff from Point A to Point B. It's not rocket science, but you better have plans to move from Point A to Point B. I don't want to help the Russian army. I just know that any history of this conflict might be less about Russia’s imperialist historical intentions and a lot to do with whether it can feed soldiers with MREs (meals ready-to-eat). It comes down to that, and that means we probably overestimated their capacity. The third is, of course, cyber security. I'm not going to pretend I know what's going to happen, but the lack of cyber-attacks that we anticipated is interesting in terms of both misinformation and going after critical infrastructure. There are a number of theories about why we're still waiting for that shoe to drop, but it may be, once again, that Putin’s misinformation extended to how we perceive him and his strength.
Mohr: What struck me in your book was the section in which you describe where you were on 9/11. Let’s close with that poignant story and its message today.
Kayyem: I’m in counterterrorism. I’d served on the national commission on terrorism, and I'm on maternity leave at the time — my oldest; she's now 20. I’m being urged by my mentors to figure out what my next career move is. I was going to take part of the rest of the year off, because, to quote one of them, counterterrorism is a niche field. It's September 11, and I’m doing what a lot of mothers do, which is you try to assert that you are still a functioning human being. I decide to go with my baby from Boston to New York to visit my family. But the airplane’s too much with a baby, so I decide to take a train. There are very few people in counterterrorism, so when my phone starts ringing, I immediately know it's a terror attack. I’m literally on BBC live as I’m nursing a baby. Two of the hijacked airplanes had left from Logan, but my parents didn't know I was on the train. And the train keeps going into New York because there are no protocols; we got the airplanes out of the sky, but the trains are still going. And I’m doing these interviews and then it dawned on me that actually my community — this train — should not go into New York. We reach New Haven, we're three quarters of the way there, and someone hears me being interviewed and asks what's going on, so I tell them. I have an expertise and that's all she wants. She just wants advice. It's my responsibility to communicate with people like her in a way that I know can fill that space. So, I stand up on the seat and say to everyone, “I’m in this field; there's a terror attack; wherever your family is; you need to not go into New York.” We evacuate that compartment, and the conductor comes to me and says, “What's going on here?” He had not been told not to go into New York. About ten minutes later, we’re still in New Haven, and they bring the trains down; they stop the trains. And I thought that was a lesson. Just talk to me like I’m on the train with you. I want to help out in any way I can with this and other emerging crises into the future.
Lynch: Thank you very much Professor Kayyem for your time and your insights today. The strategies you have shared with us on how to fail safely during crises will help all of us as we continue to experience, lead through, and weather crises in our complicated world.
About the Authors:
Anthony J. Mohr is a 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and has over twenty-six years of service within the criminal and civil justice system at the state level. He most recently sat on the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, where he presided over civil and felony trials. Earlier, he was a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court, and in private legal practice. Among his numerous professional affiliations, Anthony served on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court and chaired both the Superior Court’s ethics review and response committee and the statewide Committee on Judicial Ethics of the California Judges Association. He serves on the Regional Board of the Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles Region.
Susan Carney Lynch, Dr.PH, is a Harvard ALI Senior Fellow and Editor-in-Chief of the Social Impact Review. Prior to ALI, Susan spent 20 years at the United States Department of Justice as Senior Counsel for Elder Justice, where she led federal civil long-term care quality prosecutions nationwide and elder justice policy work. Susan has also had adjunct faculty appointments teaching health, law, and policy at law and public health schools for the past two decades.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.