“The intent of terrorists is to convince the population that they cannot trust authorities and to instill panic and anxiety. Therefore, everything we do is designed to reduce the fear of the population.” For this reason, Israeli officials do their best to quickly restore routine after a terrorist attack.
Standard operating procedures are used to reestablish order, and each contributes to the pivot process. Following a mass casualty event, survivors are evacuated from the scene as fast as possible in a practice called “scoop and run.” Out of concern for secondary devices, responders have learned not to linger. “This also helps save the injured because they will get better care in the hospital than on-site,” Peleg explained.
Following quick investigatory work, glass fitters, carpenters, and welders restore the damaged area to its original condition. Ample psychosocial support is provided to the injured and victims’ next of kin to aid in their recovery and well-being, both short- and long-term. Typically, in the spirit of “life goes on,” the terrorist attack site soon returns to its prior level of foot traffic and activity. The rapid return to normal—the systematic pivot from crisis to routine—restores a sense of calm in the area and assists in long-term recovery, for both individuals and society as a whole.
“Experience also plays a role in resilience,” Peleg pointed out. “If something happens repeatedly, the population becomes accustomed to it and to some extent learn to cope with it through normalizing the phenomenon. For example, we studied fluctuations in the Israeli stock market following terrorist attacks. Early on, in periods of frequent attacks, the market would significantly decline for several days after those attacks. With time, though, as the population became more accustomed to the news and believed in society’s resilience, the dips would be much less significant and the market would jump back much quicker.”
Israel has had significant experience exercising its methods for enhancing resilience. We asked Peleg whether the country has recently gained any new insights. “We came to an interesting observation while assisting after the devastating 2015 Nepal earthquake,” he replied. “Countries around the world, including Israel, dispatched search-and-rescue teams. There were 2,248 international rescuers on 76 teams. We realized that, with all that, only 16 people, by our count, were rescued from the rubble alive. In looking at other earthquakes, we discovered that the number of people rescued alive from under the rubble was very limited. With further investigation, we found articles stating that most of those people were saved by family members, neighbors, and volunteers, not by professional responders. We shared this lesson with our civil defense system, the Home Front Command. Earthquakes are also a danger in Israel. So, we taught 75,000 Israeli high school students easy-to-learn light search-and-rescue methods—for example, how to use a car’s jack to lift up debris to save someone trapped under the rubble. We conducted surveys before and after the training intervention. We were encouraged to find a higher level of perceived competency and resilience after the training. They were confident that they would know how to effectively respond in an emergency. If you provide people knowledge and skills, you increase their own as well as their community’s resilience. When they feel helpless or don’t know what to do, their resilience declines.” Here Peleg was describing the pivot from helpless to helpful.
“The same is true in helping an injured person,” he added. “If you come upon an injury with massive bleeding and know how to stop the bleeding, you will provide the basic care and feel good about it afterwards. Otherwise, you panic and feel guilty and ashamed afterwards, especially if the person dies.”
Peleg emphasized a similar sort of know-how in coordinating the work of response agencies. “We prepare our plans, conduct training, and drill together across the many organizations involved in the response. If you are training together, you know the people from other organizations and they are speaking the same professional language. It is difficult to say no to someone you know. It is easier to say no to someone you don’t know. Together, this allows us to anticipate what is needed. Even before I open my mouth, you know what I need from you and you are already there providing it.
“Leadership plays a pivotal role in resilience,” Peleg continued. “Leaders first must trust themselves. They must prepare themselves to be resilient because other people are watching. It could be people in their organization, their colleagues, or the whole country. If leaders are not resilient, they will bring down the resilience of others.”
Practicing the Pivot
How do you insert all the lessons here into your crisis leadership toolbox? First, practice.
You daily face miniature crises.
Heading out to that critical meeting, you discover that your keys are missing. A trivial yet instructive set of pivots ensue. “Oh no! Got to be on time.” Basement pivot. Deep breath. Methodically, you pivot to retrace your steps from last night’s return home, and then remember that, distracted, you inadvertently left your keys in the door. Move on: you won’t do that again.
Here’s another: you receive a nasty and accusatory email from a colleague. Basement pivot: anger and the temptation to blast a fiery “reply all” retort. Instead, recognizing an amygdala hijack, you intentionally pivot out of the basement, calming yourself by slowly counting to ten, your trigger script. You take a moment to acknowledge your outrage and then pivot to your toolbox, thinking, “no email.” Instead, you organize your thoughts in a handwritten response. Now composed, you pivot to problem-solving, imagining a methodical Walk in the Woods. What was she thinking? What are you thinking? What are the differences? Where’s the agreement? And the disagreement? Do you have any new ideas? Is there potential for alignment? Give it time so that you can better figure out how to repair the relationship.
You open the morning paper and find yourself and your organization on the front page. There is the “What the…?” pivot. Where did this come from? You go to the basement and blow off steam. Pivot. “One step at a time.” In the toolbox pivot, you traverse the POP-DOC Loop, convene your team, and get the full story. The situation begins to make some sense. What can you do to deescalate the problem? You forge a strategy, both responsive and proactive. You can do it and once you do, you’ll recover and move forward.
When you pivot to your higher practice and analytic capabilities, you get smarter than your brain.
What happens when you don’t pivot intentionally? You never do find those keys, and you blow a major contract by being absent from the meeting. You lash out at your colleague in a “reply all” email, embarrassing yourself and alienating others. And your fiery public response to the newspaper article adds damaging quotes to the story. You’re famous now for all the wrong reasons.
Going through this drill for relatively minor threats helps you when everything is on the line in a real crisis. Calculating how to get above and beyond the peril isn’t easy, and it’s impossible when you’re stuck in the basement. Reflect afterwards on what you did, how well you handled the situation, and what you can improve upon. Study yourself and embed the lessons learned for next time.
Assess also what happens when you fail to discipline yourself. When you, the leader, are in free-fall descent, the anxieties of your followers intensify. How do the reactions of others inform your self-reflections? How do you get a grip?
As you lead others toward productive response, your collective capacity to assess and move expands. People follow you. If you move up, they follow, confident that you will rally toward a better situation. Order beyond control.
Your leadership pivot can also be personal, expressed in ways that guide and inspire others.
Every year, during our NPLI executive crisis leadership program, participants hear from key leaders who were responsible during a recent crisis that shook the country, such as a hurricane, a mass casualty attack, or a pandemic. With great care and sensitivity, we changed course in June 2018, when we invited someone who survived a crisis to join us. How might leadership be differently expressed and realized
by a survivor?
Four months earlier, at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Eden Hebron was in English class when Nikolas Cruz killed fourteen students and three staff members. In her classroom, eight people were shot, three of whom died, including her best friend. It was Eden, accompanied by her mother, Dr. Nicole Cook, who joined us in our classroom at Harvard.
It took enormous courage for a fifteen-year-old to address a Harvard lecture hall filled with senior crisis leaders. Like many of the young people and parents who lived through the Parkland shootings, Eden and Nicole are on a mission. For some survivors, that mission is gun control. For others, it is political change. For Eden and Nicole, it is change of the response and resilience system. They found the right audience in Cambridge.
Eden began: “It was February 14, and I was in room 1216. The entire shooting lasted six or seven minutes. First, there were shots in the hallway, and then it seemed like, right at that moment, the first person in our classroom was shot. I went behind a table across from the door. The shooter never entered any classrooms. All the shootings were from the hallway through the doors. I ended up behind a table. I was never trained on what to do when there’s an active shooter. I thought this was fake at first, then I saw everyone run—run behind a wall or desk. I went straight to the closest place, behind a table and ended up by myself. The closest person to me, she was shot since she was hiding across from the door. Behind the table, the teacher had a bin to hold papers. The shooter came twice to my room, so I took the bin and put it in front of me. The table had a tablecloth, and I didn’t want the shooter to see my feet or my face. I don’t know why, but in that moment, that’s what I thought would help me be the most protected in such a dangerous situation.” Hidden from view, Eden survived the attack, physically unharmed. Her room was splattered with blood, glass, and anguish. “Three people in my class were killed,” she told the audience.
After sharing what happened, Eden turned our attention to her mission. “There were so many systematic failures of law enforcement in Parkland. Our student resource officer [Scott Peterson] who had a gun could respond, but he didn’t. And it didn’t seem like the school or law enforcement had a well thought out protocol or plan to attack or respond. It took so long for them to get in that building. People were killed on the third floor in the final moments of the shooting. If we had officers that knew how to take care of a shooter properly, all six students could have been saved. There were many systematic failures that need to be fixed. Maybe we can’t prevent shootings, but we could prevent the number of victims from going up.
“And because they didn’t have an effective response, when the police officers finally arrived in our classroom, they came in shouting at us. We thought he [the gunman] was back a third time. We didn’t know it was law enforcement. And if they had said anything like, ‘You’re safe now, here’s where we are, here’s where the shooter is,’ it would’ve made it better. Instead, they busted the glass and broke their hands through the door. There was no sensitivity, and for us, we had no trust in them, that they would keep us safe. That was something the students needed in that moment. We didn’t know—all we saw was a gun. And all they said was, ‘Get up and run.’
“I always had so much trust in police, but in that moment, we didn’t feel safe. And in that moment, the shooter was still out there. They evacuated all the students before they caught the shooter. We had no information when they sent us out into the hallways. And now I know, after reading through all the coverage and other shooting incidents, that there are effective protocols for shootings. When we think of Newtown [the December 2014 shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut], and how long it’s been since that happened, by this point our school’s [officials and law enforcement officers] should be more educated and told what to do and this is how to do it.”
Then Eden’s mother spoke: “We’ve got millions of students out there today who have been in a classroom in this scenario or have seen it through a video. You have millions of students who are going to be adults who have almost zero trust in what’s going on right now with law enforcement or being prepared for mass shootings. I can’t imagine how many high school students are trying to learn right now while still suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. But nothing systematic has taken place to help treat this kind of trauma—many services that have been brought in are from private citizens. And among those, there is little focused on mental illness and continuity of care. There’s no screening in the school for PTSD or following kids over time. From a security standpoint, very little has been done to build that trust back. And now students are expected to learn and take AP [Advanced Placement] exams? When I think of all these students being scared for their lives instead of being focused on learning, it’s tragic. We could lose a generation.”
Eden raised her call to action. “This is real, and it can be your child if we don’t do something about this. I pray that no other kid has to see what I saw, one of my best friends getting shot in front of me. We felt all that pain and felt all the things that we don’t want anyone else to feel. But this can happen to them if we don’t do something now.”
We asked Eden and Nicole what they wanted to see changed. Eden called for better protocols, training, and preparation of law enforcement officials to mitigate active shooters. She also advocated preparation for students so that they know what to do and expect in an active shooting incident. She added, “Anyone with signs of mental illness or violent or aggressive behavior can’t get their hands on any firearm—that needs to be regulated. There are many kids who have violent behavior and don’t see consequences and aren’t treated as if they can be harmful in the future. Kids need to suffer consequences if they display violent behavior.” Nicole wants to see systemic reform to provide prompt post-trauma care to survivors and family members. Together, they have joined efforts to push gun safety legislation at the state and federal levels.
Eden and Nicole are taking their message to crisis response professionals, people who can translate the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School experience into tangible change. Participants in our Harvard classroom vowed to apply these lessons in changing protocols for their agencies and to bring the call for system change to professional audiences.
Out of crisis, good can emerge. It was clear to us that Eden’s resilience is in part powered by her commitment to seeking real change. She wrote us afterwards: “I honestly feel so much better and satisfied when I make an impact on someone or something. And I got that feeling as I left Boston.” This is a noble and courageous meta-leadership mission for an articulate and mature fifteen-year-old.
The Emotions of Crisis Meta-Leadership
Vulnerability. Fear. Helplessness. These are the disquieting emotions you feel during a crisis. Recall a time when you felt those sensations. They can motivate and activate. They serve as “forces for” when they bring people together to seek security, protection, and safety from the hazards of the situation. These emotions also rally people to fight real and perceived threats—the emotional “forces against.” A crisis shapes a “to do” list.
Arranged on a continuum, these forces range from swarm to suspicion. Are other people ally or enemy? Shield or assault? Defenders or destroyers? Lines are drawn and affinities established. It is a calculation of who wins and who loses.
During the Boston Marathon bombings response, the crisis leaders, their organizations, and the community-at-large jointly swarmed. That coming together—the swarm strength of the motto “Boston Strong!”—provided people with a comforting sense of security, protection, and identity. It was all of Boston together against the bad guys—the perpetrators of the horrific attack.
Just as the basement is the innate fear response of an individual, swarm and suspicion are the collective inborn responses of groups of people. Within the in-group—those who share an affinity, such as family, nationality, political bent, or work—people swarm. The swarm within the in-group provides re
assurance, safe haven, and the fortification of togetherness. People rally against the menacing out-group, threatening others they’ve identified as a moral, cultural, identity, or physical menace.
As the meta-leader, you coalesce followers in ways consistent with swarm instincts and principles: unity of effort, generosity, staying in lanes, no ego—no blame, and trust.
The Boston Marathon bombings response had a clear lineup of good guys and bad guys. Not all crises have those clear distinctions. During the Hurricane Katrina response in 2005, government agencies, which miscalculated the disaster and were slow or hostile in their actions, failed to pivot and thus became the bad guys. Likewise, in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the bad guys were both the responsible party—BP, the company that oversaw the drilling operation—and the government agencies that oversaw the response. One of the more difficult leadership puzzles was aligning government leaders so that together they could provide the best possible coordinated response. Leaders worked to shift from suspicion to swarm. Recall also the earlier story of parish president Billy Nungesser during that incident. Once the Coast Guard responded to his requests, he was transformed from a force against to a force for.
Jump-Starting a Crisis Response
A crisis and its response attract attention. There is fascination with crisis. Often, there are conflict, consequences, and departures from the norm. The news media cover crises because they’re new, emotional, interesting, and usually happening live. As a crisis meta-leader, your pivots take you to the epicenter of this storm of attention.
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