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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 that United 93 had made it to Washington.

Statement of Problem

The main problem was a lack of communication flow between relevant stakeholders. 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 as the clear lead, that agency can be responsible for the most important decisions and delegate the remaining decisions to other agencies.

Coordination is a critical function that relates to control. The controlling agency needs to act as coordinator. Somebody within that agency should be designated as a crisis management lead, and there should be easy access within that agency to secure lines for conference calls and the contact information of all potentially-relevant stakeholders. Decisions must be made quickly as to who to bring into the discussion -- but clearly the FAA should have been brought into the 9/11 discussions much sooner.

Cognition is a key component that failed on 9/11 -- the gathering and transmission of key information was woefully inadequate that morning. It is important that each agency not only has the ability to gather critical information, but has the resources and humility to disseminate that information to the relevant stakeholders. Ad hoc teams come together during a crisis very rapidly, and this can lead to information asymmetry among team members. Millitello et al. (2007) argue that having systems in place ahead of time to manage the formation and coordination of these teams, and to deliver key information to members of these teams quickly, is essential to effective, rapid crisis management. From cognition and coordination flows communication. With people in charge of coordinating information, the communications process should be improved considerably.

Another lesson that can be learned from the immediate response to 9/11 is that these systems must be fully developed ahead of time. During a crisis situation is not the time to be developing systems or making changes to the systems and protocols that are already in place (Van Wart & Kapucu, 2011). It is necessary that for a wide range of scenarios -- a generic hijacking scenario should have been in place already -- that responses can be designed so that the key players are ready and the systems in place to handle the information, the coordination, the communication and the control of the crisis response system.