The sheer collapse of New Orleans is shaping up to be a significant system perturbation all its own.
Time to pull out the six lenses we used to employ in my studies at the Naval War College:
First, there is the social scenario of seeing an American city so desperately humbled. We can say New Orleans was a freak of man-made invention with the levee and the notion that you could keep a city that large below sea level, but still, this is one desperate scene. By definition, this will be a recovery of great length and with strong differentiation--meaning some will recover with reasonable speed while others with great delay or perhaps never. In general, America tends not to accept such humbling well, preferring to answer the challenge with a "never again" sort of resignation that can be expressed in a variety of explosive ways. And explosiveness is what defines the System Perturbation: a change so abrupt that incremental responses are abandoned in favor of radically new approaches.
If there are parts of New Orleans that are written off as simply too hard to resurrect, then the environmental scenario may well become predominate, with a lot of finger-pointing regarding how America has overdeveloped coastal areas and run a boat-load of risks in a world featuring a warming global climate and rising sea levels. When you get a humbling of this magnitude, many will reach for biblical analogies and once you cross that line, the sense of transgressing God and Mother Nature may lead to a strong response not just in Louisiana but elsewhere across the nation.
The economic scenario is already playing out: the Big Easy was a hugely important transit point on trade, the movement of raw materials, and especially energy. The 3-dollar-plus gallon of gas is here already, and we may see a lot higher before recovery kicks in--if it does. Remember the underlying demand pressure from Asia. None of that goes away. So if this System Perturbation pushes markets to consider a rule-set reset, or a radically new discounting of risk regarding energy, new pathways may be explored that accelerate moves to new paradigms.
The political scenario stems in large part from the economic one. This one feels off the usual scales, and that means the government is stuck with the perception of needing not just to make good with the victims (thus letting the market do the rest), but to resurrect that which was lost. And if that cannot be done in what is perceived to be a timely manner, then the Big Flood can be perceived as yet another example of the Bush Administration being unable to handle big complex problems, along with Iraq and the slow pace of reforms/change associated with 9/11 (e.g., a clumsy Department of Homeland Security and the general sense of a pointless "Osama tax" on so much of our day-to-day lives). Thus New Orleans becomes a straw that breaks the camel's back--if the Bush Administration ends up looking like it screwed things up yet again.
That gets us to the lense of security. The perception may balloon that America's troops are being stretched abroad and thus the homeland is left that much more bare of these assets. But whether that happens will depend much on the performance of the U.S. military. Whom do we associate with such disaster responses? Naturally, the National Guard and the Army Reserves. What happens if it is perceived that we're light-handed back home thanks to a Global War on Terrorism that feels bogged down right now in Iraq? Good question, not easily answered.
These are all the natural downsides.
The upsides, of course, tend to arise from the notion that "that which does not kill us makes us stronger"--and more clever. Here we're into the last lens of technology. In short, we innovate our way out of perceived dead-ends. Specific examples of resiliency reborn may signal new understandings of how you bring back the disconnected to the world of connectivity--not so much repairing the old but creating new forms of connectivity. And I'm not just talking in a physical, networked sense, but in a social-economic sense: how do you make sure the rural and urban poor aren't permanently disconnected from the future by this tragedy? Does the shock allow us to solve old, seemingly intractable situations such as these, or does it simply exacerbate them?
Positive lessons in this regard can give us a renewed sense of confidence that this nut is not necessarily that hard to crack--not just at home but elsewhere.
And we may become more empathetic with that elsewhere.
One thing is clear: our system has been perturbed.
When that happens, new rules tend to come in waves, just like Katrina did.
Time to pull out the old Y2K report. Time to anticipate the political backlash, the rise of the "answer man" and the search for scapegoats.
The horizontal scenarios are just beginning...
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