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Crisis Management on 911
Summary of the Case
The real-time response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11 was chaotic. There were multiple problems concerning issues such as communication flows, equipment, and chains of authority. Key agencies such as the FAA were not brought into the meetings quickly enough. Key pieces of information were known to some players, but were not transmitted to all key players effectively. The NMCC and the White House did not appear to be working together to coordinate a response. In general, the response was not organized, and this resulted in a slower and less effective response.
There were several specific errors that weakened the response. The first airplane was misidentified as a twin-engine plane, leading to speculation that the first crash was an accident. The NMCC did not discuss the scrambling of jets even after it knew that the first plane had been hijacked. The wrong officials were on the conference calls -- or none at all. There were two simultaneous calls, creating confusion with respect to chain of command. All the stakeholders were therefore not on the same call at the same time, during the critical early response phase. The FAA in particular had bad information or none at all, so could not lend much help to the process. It had not been identified that the final plane, United 93, had been hijacked until after it had crashed, and there were no fighters scrambled in the air in the event...
This resulted in a number of issues. Key people were not involved in meetings; key information was not efficiently disseminated and the response was not tightly coordinated. As a result, there was significant risk of more damage. Should the attacks have been more extensive, the response would have been inadequate.
Proposing a Solution
At the heart of the problem is that there was no coherent system for dealing with such an eventuality. There were chain of command issues and the stakeholders did not seem to know who should be involved in the meetings. In order to remedy this, specific procedures should be put into place, and specific individuals should be assigned the tasks associating with implementing those procedures. Further, the information needed to implement the tasks should be available on a near-instant basis, so that there is no delay in the coordination process. Confort (2007) outlines the four key components of crisis management: cognition, communication, coordination and control.
The first step is to itemize a chain of command (control). The MNCC and the White House need to determine which agency takes the lead on coordinating a response. This will prevent multiple conference calls from occurring simultaneously. With one agency…
Works Cited:
Confort, L. (2007). Crisis management in hindsight: Cognition, communication, coordination and control. Public Administration Review. December 2007 special issue, 189-197.
Militello, L., Patterson, E., Bowman, L. & Wears, R. (2007). Information flow during crisis management: Challenges to coordination in the emergency operations center. Cognition, Technology & Work. Vol. 9 (1) 25-31.
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