Why not?

Twenty-five years after 9/11, why are too many governmental agencies and businesses still unprepared for crisis? Time to institutionalize our imagination.

Last month’s anniversary of 9/11 hit harder than most. It is crazy to think a quarter of a century has now gone by since that unfathomably terrible day. Yet every September 11, it feels like yesterday.

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I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts the other day. “The Opinions,” as it is called, features an open dialogue among various opinion writers from The New York Times. This time around the talk was focused on 9/11, with the discussion eventually turning to a recommendation contained in the 9/11 Commission Report about “institutionalizing imagination.”

A subsequent review of the report validates what the writers had said. Along with policy, capabilities and management, the report says, imagination was one of the four ways in which the U.S. failed to prepare for such an attack. Essentially, the report says, we didn’t have it. Or at least not enough of it.

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“Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies…” the report says. “It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.”

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Do we have more imagination now as a country? As businesses?

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Or at least enough of it?

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Fail to prepare, prepare to fail

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All of that got me to thinking about the unfortunate fact that too many organizations appear not to have learned the lesson of being properly prepared for the various crises that are always a possibility. We may have learned a thing or two along the way. But we still have a long way to go.

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Two recent examples come to mind. The first is the Pac-12 Conference. The crisis started in July 2022 when USC and UCLA announced they were leaving within two years to go to the Big Ten. Was there a crisis plan? I can’t say. What I can say is this: The conference commissioner was nowhere to be found. Neither were the Pac-12 university presidents, at least not in a coordinated or consistent manner. Rule 1 in a crisis: Communicate, communicate, communicate. Control the narrative. Etc. For those who think the cobbler tends to have no shoes, all of this is routinely taught in freshman-level PR classes.

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As for the other 10 schools? They were left to twist in the wind for more than a year as the conference tried to renegotiate a new TV deal. Which, of course, went nowhere. The result? A year later, all but two schools followed USC and UCLA out the door. Leaving a 109-year-old institution – not to mention countless hearts west of the Rockies – in tatters.

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The second is Silicon Valley Bank. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based regional bank failed in 2023 after a bank run, marking the third-largest bank failure in United States history and the largest since the 2008 financial crisis. Silicon Valley Bank’s was actually one of three regional bank failures, along with Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank, in the same month. Were the CEOs front and center? I don’t recall them being visible at all.

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Sometimes, failure to properly prepare for and address crises can affect an entire industry. In the case of regional banks, many had to answer hard questions about their own financial status. Those with stronger balance sheets had a much easier time with this. But the regional banking crisis was very real when it hit.

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As for Clients First, the good news is that we have significant experience in helping companies weather the storm. The bad news? We have significant experience in helping companies weather the storm. Our crisis playbook has our blood, sweat and tears all over it. (We recommended five critical steps to take with crisis planning on our most recent podcast.)

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Does this sound imaginative? Doesn’t matter. This is not nice-to-have stuff.

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A new challenge beckons

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2001 was a long time ago. So was 2004. That was the year when social media is generally considered to have taken hold.

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Did we institutionalize our imagination in preparing for related crises? We did not. Two decades later, countries starting with Australia were passing laws regulating internet access for young people. That’s great, and let’s hope it helps. It is just too bad that these new laws are in response to – rather than anticipating in advance – related crises including teenage depression and suicide.

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So now comes the next technological behemoth: AI. Are we prepared for related crises? Companies are talking. Governments are talking. But who will take the lead? Will there be a cohesive plan? Will we learn from the past and institutionalize our imagination? The jury is out.

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I heard an interview this week on NPR. It was with Dr. Ashish Jha, a former White House Covid-19 response coordinator and now CEO and co-founder of BioRadar. Why was he on? A laboratory worker at a plague research institute in Siberia apparently died recently, a victim of undisclosed circumstances. Thus raising fears about another pandemic.

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“We’re going to see more outbreaks, and we’re going to see more engineered pathogen outbreaks,” Jha said. “As a country, we’re not prepared for that.”