Recent Events and Consilience Leadership 

What do Osama Bin Laden’s death, April’s deadly tornados in the southern US, the “Arab Spring,” and recent comments from the US Coast Guard and others about the Deepwater Disaster all have in common?

They all are related by the contribution of Consilient Leadership thinking to understanding what happened, as follows:

Bin Laden’s death:  Seal Team Six is rightly given enormous credit for carrying out this mission flawlessly, but the unsung parts of this mission relate to the incredible training they undertook beforehand (“The will to prepare to win is more important than the will to win”), and the relentless, conscientious, and resilient efforts of literally thousands of intel analysts and others over ten years.  These efforts represent the values of deferral to expertise, attention to detail, and resilience that are at the core of any complex undertaking, and/or the success of any complex enterprise

April 2011’s deadly tornados:  This story is yet to be written, but comments so far suggest that FEMA in particular has finally learned some valuable lessons from past experience, and together with other federal and state agencies, is responding much more quickly and effectively to this disaster.  In other words, virtually anyone or any organization can learn!

The “Arab Spring:” A recent headline in a Council of Foreign Relations publication Foreign Affairs declares “Why No One Saw It Coming,” but nothing could be further from the truth.  As is becoming clear with relation to the financial disaster of the past three years, there are always those who figure out the “weak signals” of potential issues, and our challenge is not to give up on forecasting, but rather learn from them in applying behavioral science and network theory to prognostication.  The core of that effort will be to identify the weak signals of impending issues, which are likely to be found in nuanced changes in such media content as Twitter traffic, patterns in phone calls, and other “early warning indicators.”  We have the technology; we just need to figure out to apply it.

Update on the Deepwater Disaster:  A great deal has been written about this tragedy, and this is what is clear from every single report and investigation – like all major disasters, Deepwater was not caused by a single point of failure but a series of mistakes.  In this case, these appear to include outdated equipment, lack of training, lack of coordination among the driller, the mud company, and the owner of the rig, failure to adhere to safety procedures, and numerous other mistakes, any one of which, if corrected early enough, would have limited or eliminated the disaster!

Conclusion? The next time you see a disaster, or a failure to discern an impending crisis, or an example of what seems like incredible performance, ask yourself, ‘How did this happen, and what can I personally, as well as my organization, learn from this?  During this inquiry you will find that examples of either the application, or the failure to apply, Consilience Leadership thinking abound.

Consilience Leadership is now available for pre-order on Amazon. To reserve your copy, click here.