Christmas Terror: Spectacular Failure and Success in Collaboration
05 January 2010 Tweet No doubt, the Christmas terror attack on Northwest Flight 253 as it was about to land in Detroit was a spectacular failure in collaboration among various national and international government agencies. Headlines tell the story! In a thoughtful post in Harvard Business Review blog, Preventing the Terrorist Attack: Massive Failure in Collaboration, Morten Hansen provides the background, the reasons for failure and recommendations on what can be done. The author specifically identifies two key barriers to collaboration: i) The Hoarding Barrier, created by officials not willing to share information, and ii) The Search Barrier, of inability of agents to search through the information.
Blogosphere has been generally less insightful than Morten Hansen. Other media - TV and newspapers - have also focused on the failure in collaboration. And, rightly so! We need to examine "the system” to fix whatever allowed this to happen. But that would be fighting the last war. We need to make collaboration work in future scenarios, which we will confront, without a doubt.
The spectacular failure has also become a political football among political parties as well as ideologues on the right and left. Their first purpose appears to be to score political points as we approach the silly season of elections later this year. Fixing the problems in collaboration appears to be secondary. These idiots need to realize that security is not a partisan issue – terrorists do not differentiate between the left and right, national and international boundaries, and ethnic, racial and religious composition. Sorry, I digress! But there is a lesson for collaboration here too: Bickering does not make for effective collaboration, and hidden agendas make collaboration an unmitigated disaster.
The spectacular failure in collaboration has provided opportunities for both improving our system of security and political bickering. Somewhere in this shuffle, we are really missing out on a great story of spectacular success in collaboration that prevented what could have been a horrific Christmas. This story has a simple yet extremely powerful message on collaboration: when collaboration matters, we make it happen!
Passengers on Northwest Flight 253 had a clear purpose for collaboration; it is survival. People involved in collaboration were highly motivated to achieve their goal and were in the vicinity of the would-be bomber. The process was improvised yet focused on the desired outcome for the seconds it took to subdue the would-be bomber. And the tools were bare hands and all the physical force they could muster, despite suffering injuries through it all. But they made it happen! Well done, indeed! And the reward for effective collaboration? A wonderful gift of life! Purpose combined with motives and incentives is indeed a key driver for effective collaboration.
We have earlier proposed a holistic framework of 4 Ps of effective collaboration. Let me briefly compare and contrast “the system” and the “passengers on Flight 253” using our collaboration model.
I recognize that govt. agencies can not everywhere, all the time, to be in the middle of the action. This is not the purpose of the above table. What I am suggesting however is that when the purpose is clear, something personally and collectively is at stake, collaborators are motivated, they can make it happen with through leadership, team structure and incentives.
Lokesh Datta
See Related Posts:
- The 4Ps of Effective Collaboration - Redux
- Collaboration = Cooperative Behavior + Assertive Behavior
- If You Can’t Pass the Ball, You Can’t play!
- BP Oil Spill - Unmitigated Disaster in Collaboration
- Get Teammates to Move "Towards" Rather than "Away"
- Short Stories From The Front
- Learning from Real-Life Collaboration Stories
Reader Comments (5)
The 4 Ps of Israeli Security
What Israel can teach us about security: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744426--what-israel-can-teach-us-about-security
Were all the recommendations following the 9/11 attacks put in place? If not, why?
Don Montalvo, TX
It is my impression that the volume of raw data ("dots") being collected and being shared across the FBI, the CIA, the Department of State the NSA and other parts of the DoD on the order of terrabytes per day. The problem is that "connecting the dots" is not a trivial problem because (a) it is very difficult to know which dots truly go with which other dots, (b) which "strings of connected dots" are threats, and (c) which "threat strings" are of immediate attention. There is a need for improved text analytical software and for more, better-trained analysts. Collaboration breaks down when there is a data tsunami.
Brad,
The issue you mention is quite real, as we know, even in the enterprise. Initially when big-chain grocery stores started issuing affinity cards in return for discounts to capture customer information, they also had a data tsunami and did not quite know what to do with it.
Your point is well taken! Perhaps we need to begin with the end in mind – what we would do with the data, if we could get it. The capture and utilization of data must be tightly aligned. In my past consulting experience, we only sought and captured the data we knew could use and, more importantly, how we could use it.
Thanks for your comments!
It's clear that there so much information out there, being collected by different entities all around the world, the pooling of all this data together into a collective database would be greatly beneficial to all parties involved however there are so many privacy issues and bureaucracies involved that I think that it is very unlikely to ever happen. It would indeed be contrary to their nature for them to collaborate on an issue such as this.