Juliette Kayyem on Disaster Management & How to Fail Safer

Juliette Kayyem

Author, The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters, Former Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, National Security Analyst for CNN

What’s a book that changed your life?

I really like stories, ones that move you and take you away. I'm a big fan of Ann Patchett and fiction—surprisingly, or maybe not, given my world. She just recently wrote a book of short stories she wrote during COVID called, These Precious Days. I have to say in my later life, this was really a fantastic book because she begins to assess her life looking backwards during COVID, but there's a line in her introduction that speaks to me now. She says that she never could write short stories before because she always liked having long stories where the characters were really complicated and various things were happening. And that she realized that she was in a “make it basic, make it simple” phase of her life. And that's what really moved me about it.

What’s one thing you are never without?

Sadly, my phone. I have three kids and though two are no longer at home, someone always needs something.

Planning for the devil you don’t know.

The Verse: You got the title of your book from a woman named Jane Cage, who said "The devil never sleeps. But he only wins if we don't do better next time." Tell us a bit about her.

Juliette Kayyem: In the weird world of disaster management, you often are invited back to places a year later as they want to show where they've come from. And you're never quite sure—is this a celebration? a memorial? It's hard to tell. But I met Jane Cage who had taken upon herself to lead a recovery effort in Joplin, Missouri, which suffered a horrendous tornado in 2011. Tornadoes are what we call a bitch. They're just awful because they come fast without warning. They skid down entire streets and eviscerate everything, as we're seeing in New Orleans today.

Jane was incredibly optimistic. She had created this community engagement effort to better prepare Joplin, which is in tornado country. In other words, it could happen again, whether it's the schools or the streets or the warnings. Her optimism was infectious. She's very religious.  And what I like about her is that she was incredibly tactical in her spirit.

So I asked her, "How are you like this? Because I want to be like you." And she said, "The devil never sleeps, but he only wins if we don't do better next time." And I thought, we're a pretty awesome species if we just get out of our way. Despite efforts to prove otherwise, we have the capacity to fail safer.

You talk about disasters being a constant in our lives. To us that feels both true and depressing—but you say it should be freeing. Say more.

It's not like we're new to disasters, but the complexity of the world—computers, the internet, travel—connects us in important ways and can also create threats, whether radicalization or cyber attacks, or most recently, a pandemic. The numbers do show that at least in terms of damage, the US is experiencing multiple billion dollar events every year when they used to come maybe once a decade.

I think it's helpful to know what the word disaster comes from, because then we can push back against it. The word disaster comes from the Latin prefix dis- and Latin astro, meaning "star." They were often viewed and planned for as a random misalignment of the stars, which put humankind in a very passive role. That understanding did not require or empower us to assert agency over a disaster event, which we knew was coming—we just didn’t know when.

So between ignorance and agency, I choose agency. I do think it empowers people to believe that life isn't just some random thing. Of course, it has its randomness, but there's actually much that we can assert agency over. And one of them is the expectation that the next disaster is going to come.

We liked the disaster framework you shared—can you talk about "left of boom" and "right of boom" activities?

We make things more complicated than they need to be. I just divide the world into two time periods. If the “boom” is the bad thing (and I'm agnostic about the boom—the devil could take any form), you have left-of-boom activities—the things you do to try to stop or prevent it from happening and mitigating the damage. Then right-of-boom activities are on the other side of the boom, which is your response and recovery.

We tend to talk about success and failure as binary. Success is, did I stop the boom? And failure is, did the boom come? We need to reorient our standards of success to view success as, were things less bad because we anticipated the boom? That to me is a standard of success in a world in which you just couldn't possibly invest enough in stopping the boom.

The Boston Marathon is a perfect example. I was the State Homeland Security advisor and know something about marathon planning. Three people perished at the finish line, and one could say, how did they not stop the Tsarnaev brothers? How could this have happened? But 297 people got moved to area hospitals in three different states. Some of them lost a hand, an arm, a leg, a foot. Major damage. But not a single one of them died if they made it to a hospital. It's hard to say that is success because the terror attack happened, but it's less bad than the alternative. And that's because of the investments in anticipating something bad would happen. And so that's a way to think about how we can learn to “fail safer.” 

You say we all need to be disaster managers now—how have we evolved to this point where it isn't just left to specialists?

I think there’s been a motivation within my field to have an aura of expertise and to talk to the American public in a way that either made them tune out or freak out. It was like, “We’re special and you’re not.” Given the nature of the way crises unfold, that they impact us and our work and how we live and whether our kids go to school, that's just no longer true.

So one motivation of the book was to simply say, this is just a discipline, no different than being a reporter or being a money manager. We're just normal people. There's nothing special about us. And so let's show you how unspecial we are by making this very, very accessible. There are things that individuals, leaders, managers can do in terms of the basic preparation for that moment of boom so you don't have your head in the sand.

This may seem obvious now, after COVID. It certainly wasn't before COVID. But think about how we talk about the end of COVID as a “new normal.” What does that mean? Nothing bad's going to happen again? Of course not. So we want to prepare for what I call the “now normal,” which is just, okay, we're here today. Did I assert agency over communication strategy with, say, my family or some sense of where everyone is? What are my backup plans? How do I stop cascading losses? How do I learn from past mistakes? Those are all things that are essential for anyone who manages—a family of five, a big company or, in fact, a nation.

On the right of boom side, cybersecurity is a great example because it has been so captured by left of boom activities, like the sellers all the gizmos who say, “We can stop you from being breached.” People do these tabletop exercises and they're all focused on how do I stop the red team from breaching the network? And then if they breach it, they focus on closing that breach rather than what is going to happen when the breach occurs. Well, in the case of Colonial Pipeline last year, the breach occurred, and all they could do was turn off the lights. They had no sophisticated response planning, because they simply believed that they could control the network. Good luck with that.

What is the preparedness paradox?

It’s the reality that the better one does to prepare for the boom, the fewer consequences will result. There will be questions about whether you overreacted or overinvested given the nature of the threat. But it’s just that the investments, if done properly, ended up undermining a narrative that you needed those very investments, because they worked.

The best example of this, of course, is Y2K. We spent a couple billion dollars to prepare for these computers that are all set at 1999 and could have gone to the year thousand, God knows what that would've meant. Not much happened when the clock turned at the millennium. That wasn't because it wasn't a threat. It was because everyone had prepared for it. So a narrative about Y2K soon became all these people overreacted, as if overreaction was necessarily a bad thing.

Another example is Fukushima, the Japanese nuclear facility that melted down after an earthquake/tsunami. Because of their bad response and a major radiation leak causing 25,000 evacuations and a permanent area that can't be lived in, the story is that nuclear facilities are unsafe, period. What happened there animated worldwide political movements, including in Germany, which abandoned nuclear energy. So now it’s a discussion about Germany’s dependence on Russian oil. The truth is, another nuclear facility down the street from Fukushima had prepared to fail safely. It understood that it was in a risky industry. Instead of thinking that it could prevent all bad things from happening, it had a much more sophisticated and nimble response capacity that allowed it to shut down. Although it had earthquake damage, it had water from the tsunami without radiation leak. That's your success, and that tells me there are ways to have nuclear energy and nuclear facilities that can withstand a disruption. There’s a very different narrative than if you only look at Fukushima.

You say we should focus on the commonalities of seemingly disparate disasters rather than prepare for specific disasters only. Tell us more.

Problems don't follow patterns, solutions tend to. They tend to be the same. We're not that special. And if we don't believe that, or if we don't invest in those common solutions, then we're learning again each time. You have to have persistent preparedness, so you're not ratcheting up and down all the time. You are preparing for some disruption. 

Post-9/11 is a perfect example. When I started my career in counter-terrorism in 1998, it was this really weird discreet field, and then 2005 comes around where you realize, gosh, a country that's so focused on stopping 19 guys from getting on four airplanes can't save an American city, New Orleans, from drowning after just a Category 3 hurricane. So thinking about ways in which solutions tend to be the same is important.

What should all of us do to become better disaster managers?

First, actually do the worst case scenario planning: What if something did happen? Chances are it's not going to happen. But for an individual like you and me, the most important thing will be your family, or your husband, or stepchildren, children, parents, brothers, sisters. Family unification and what will that look like? That is one of the most consistent animating forces about how people react and live during any disasters. Any disaster management plan that doesn’t focus on family unification is screwed, because people will behave in different ways if they can't find their child. I think a lot about where my people are. What are they doing?

Second—and this gets to the same thing, what we call situational awareness—is how will you know the best ways to figure out what in fact is happening at the moment it's happening? So if you live in a hurricane or earthquake area, are you plugged into alerts and warnings? 

Third, think through cascading losses: How will you stop the flow of bad? What's your on, off switch? Because things could get worse. If the phones go down, that doesn't mean you don't have other options…if you thought through those other options. So it's perpetual preparedness—just assuming that something bad is going to happen.