This past week the NY Times featured a lengthy, detailed article about the travails of New York residents struggling to recovery from Hurricane Sandy. See: Hurricane Sandy Recovery Program in New York City Was Mired by Its Design; Broken Pledges and Bottlenecks Hurt Mayor Bloomberg’s Build It Back Effort.
Shortly after it appeared I got a note from James Fossett making the following points: “Your readers may be interested in this account of the difficulties New York City’s been having getting its home repair program moving after Hurricane Sandy. All the execution problems that have been noted before in trying to stand up an improvised program from scratch—bad design by expensive consultants, large numbers of untrained temporary hires who don’t quite get how programs are supposed to work, software that doesn’t work, plus too much focus on avoiding fraud. We still don’t know how to do large scale recovery effectively.” [He is the author of an important piece titled Let’s Stop Improvising Recovery, which I posted here some months ago.]
I urge you to read the whole NYTimes article, but here are a couple of key points:
While hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money sat waiting to be used, devastated homeowners were stuck in a n application process that was overdesigned and undermanaged……”
Nearly every federally financed disaster recovery problem has stumbled because of complicated rules and the difficulty of creating a large-scale operation in the aftermath of a crisis. But there is a widespread perception … that … the city’s program miscalculations worsened matters.
Granted that recovery may be perceived as a “wicked” problem, a term the public public administration community uses for complex and/or intractable problems. But there is some serious literature on such problems — just plug the term into Google Scholar and look.
More than once I have also lamented the fact that federal officials have never made the effort to engage the public administration and related research communities — via either the National Academy of Sciences of the National Academy of Public Administration — to help them think through the process of long term recovery from disasters. We have wasted time and billions of dollars over the past several decades. Not to mention the human anguish from inept recovery efforts.
All levels of government and all sectors of society have work to do to improve recovery. It’s time to admit the inadequacies and get help dealing with them.
Recovery Diva 
Einstein also said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This can be applied to all aspects of the disaster business as well as all institutions of society.
There are many well-seasoned and experienced disaster professionals in the field world-wide. Unfortunately, we lack a way of channeling, compiling and making the most of that expertise and real-world knowledge. We continue to talk about the gap between research and practitioners but make little if any headway in bringing them together to benefit the disaster business. We nibble around the edges of situations, skirt the issues and rarely get to the core of the problems. Personally, I have to believe there is a way and I know there is a pressing need to change the perspective and culture of this multi-billion dollar disaster industry. After 40 years in the emergency management field, my questions are: 1) Are we as the disaster community, at all levels, honest enough – dare I say thick-skinned enough – to examine ourselves and see the good, bad and the ugly? Having done that — 2) How do we courageously speak as one collective knowledgeable voice that is loud enough to be heard and make a difference?
I honestly don’t believe that the federal system can make necessary changes to improve their approach to recovery. That is why I left FEMA and joined the Field Innovation Team. Our take is that communities, and yes, first responders, are more capable of healing and helping themselves if you just provide some support (like we do) and let them tell us the needs, pain points, and wants. Maybe someday, the federal system will recognize that communities really do know what is best for them. Then again, sometimes the feds get blamed for things completely out of their control. Still, this is no excuse for the suffers of Sandy who aren’t being taken care of.
I agree. It is time to get serious about fielding teams of people to help design more sophisticate solutions to ongoing problems.
As Albert Einstein said:
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Yes Claire you are absolutely right: there is much research and writing about wicked problems….and we need to start taking interest in them and getting use to dealing with them, as most problems that arise from complexity are by there very nature, “wicked”. They also happen to be the majority of the problems in our world most worth finding suitable answers.