Disasters

Read an interesting article in the Washington Post last week titled Managing Information and Morale in a Disaster.

It's a summary from a book by Erika James about leading in a crisis, and specifically about a woman, a US Coast Guard Reserve officer, who was thrown into the maelstorm when she was assigned the responsibility of leading the Joint Information Center, "the unit responsible for managing all communications associated with the" BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She was coordinating questions to and responses from agencies ranging from BP to NOAA to the Department of the Interior, with questions ranging from 'Where can I get a check cashed' to 'I heard this specific thing happened; did it? ' to 'I hate you and hope you all die'. Her staff was entirely Coast Guard, and they rotated into and out of the job every 30 to 60 days. With all of that, she showed that even in the middle of chaos, it's possible to put together a strong, responsive team, and to get the job done, effectively.

I'll almost certainly never need the knowledge, but it makes me want to read the book anyway. Because I dearly do love competence.