Seeing Through NOAA's Blind Spot: What Business Can Learn from the Tsunami Response

The Indian Ocean tsunami may become a case study in university communications classes one day, much as the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the Tylenol poisonings are today. But this web log is about learning communications lessons in the here and now; the next tsunami in an area on the globe unprotected by a high-tech warning system could strike at any time.

What can we learn from NOAA’s response to the earthquake and resulting tsunami? By now the world knows that despite suspicions at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center that a tsunami had been generated, scientists there failed to issue a usable warning to the Indian Ocean region.

This web log believes they failed because, by NOAA’s own admission, the Center doesn’t maintain a list of media contacts. By inference, there’s no media plan to issue warnings to mass populations using the mass media. (See earlier posts – especially January 8 – for development of this theme.)

Despite the failure to save any lives on December 26, NOAA’s chief has lauded the Center’s performance as “excellent”. It’s safe to say that NOAA has a collective “blind spot” about what a truly “excellent” life-saving response would have been that day.

There’s much for business to learn from NOAA’s response – and also from how NOAA is dealing with the post-tsunami criticism it’s receiving:

Lesson #1 – Don’t be defensive; be open to input that sounds like criticism. It takes courage to accept criticism of your organization without immediately rejecting the critical assessments of its performance. NOAA appears to be in “spin cycle” as of this writing. It may be human to defend your organization’s performance, but listening is a better way to learn than talking.

Lesson #2 – Evaluate with an open mind what you’re hearing from both inside and outside the organization. Almost every major unplanned event can and should result in modifications to the crisis response plan. Shutting out the negative comments won’t lead to positive change. Your harshest critics may just know what they’re talking about.

Lesson #3 – Make sure you build efficiency into your crisis response. The Warning Center’s response was far from efficient; once scientists there suspected a tsunami, they made telephone calls to individual offices and colleagues in south Asia – i.e., one phone call communicated with one person. If a mass media response had been written into NOAA’s crisis communication plan, one phone call to the Associated Press or CNN could have been leveraged to produce a warning to millions of people before the tsunami arrived on the beaches of some Indian Ocean countries.

NOAA should modify its procedures immediately so its personnel can engage in life-saving efforts – not futile ones – when the next killer tsunami strikes.

Doug Carlson
Honolulu, HI
January 16, 2005
www.DougCarlsonCommunications.com