When bad things happen to everybody: Crisis management in a chaotic world

Responding to a threatening virus is nothing new to HKS Senior Lecturer Juliette Kayyem, who played a major role in managing the US response to the H1N1 virus pandemic in 2009 as an official in the Obama administration.

But now as the COVID-19 coronavirus has spread from Asia to Europe and the Middle East and threatens to reach pandemic status, Kayyem says globalization and other factors have changed the nature of crises humanity is facing—and that governments and crisis managers need to adapt.

“The nature of the crises we’re facing on a global scale is that they are very hard to limit,” she says. “They're very hard to contain and their impact is going to be felt across borders, across geographies, and across chain of commands.”

Kayyem tells PolicyCast host Thoko Moyo that there is already a well-established playbook for responding to a local, regional, or even a global crisis. But planning ahead for a so-called “black swan” event—the kind of low-probability, high-consequence crisis that has the potential to change the course of history—is often complicated by wildcards such as irrational fears, misinformation and disinformation, and politics.  

In the world of disaster preparedness and response, she says, measuring success sometimes means being happy that things could have been worse.

“It's not rainbows and unicorns,” she says. “In my world, you're already at the bad thing happening. And if you're lucky, maybe you can stop it.”

Juliette Kayyem is the Belfer Senior Lecturer in International Security at Harvard Kennedy School, a security consultant, entrepreneur, and the author of the book “Security Mom: My Life Protecting the Home and Homeland.”