So often we see in government, businesses, non-profits and even military that the chain of command stifles fluidity of information and that is the same as curtailing or putting up barriers to fluidity of motion.
The Hurricane Katrina disaster was blamed on the inability of FEMA to work under a Department of Homeland Security and communicate properly and Michael Brown was not able to work with the local authorities who were in way over their heads even before the wall broke and nearly drowned the Mayor of New Orleans himself. What went wrong?
Well at some point the Mayor should have done something. Anything would have been better than nothing as he let 1500 empty buses remain in the city and become flooded and not one took a single load of people out of the mandatory evacuated city. Indeed a some point somewhere along the way the chain of command broke down and rather than action, the Mayor sat on his hands failed to show leadership and the city sank.
Of course in the current paradigm of the Blame Game Age, we know that Michael Brown was axed and sent home, as a political casualty due to insubordination of the Mayor who was suppose to be working with him. Yet in normal chain of commands you get to pick the people under you. In this case they did not even know each other yet Katrina forced the issue.
At some point one or the other should have taken charge and dealt with the problem unilaterally. Yet the Mayor said we have it under control, everything is fine and then after the fact the levee broke and then the Mayor was on TV screaming like a little child; “Where are you?” Now then whose fault is that?
In hindsight sometimes the chain of command needs to be broken and the local team needs to get with the program, they didn’t, so we all lose $200 Billion because a Levee broke that wasn’t suppose to? Yet the Mayor and past Mayors had all the time in the World to fix those issues. Consider this in 2006.
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