All right, welcome back to the Ottawa Studios of Inside My Canoehead. I'm your host, Dr. D. Today.
We're going to talk about why we shouldn't try to save FEMA as an example of leadership managing issues and trying to solve problems. So sit back, grab yourself your favorite beverage. You're going to love this. Let's get at her.
An eclectic sound to start your day off with. Let's again, thank you very much for joining us here on the podcast. We appreciate all of your support. Your notes of congratulations for us reaching the fifth anniversary episode, our 340th plus episode of Inside My Canoehead, now broadcast in 110 nations and downloaded 33,000 listeners.
We are present on all six continents. We have a voice in preparedness. And what we attempt to do here is provide non-apocalyptic evidence-based education and preparedness and risk management. Our target audience is you.
It can be much of what we talk about is relevant for what you do in your family, what you do in your personal life. If you've got a side gig, a side hustle, an Etsy store, some online business, whether you work in the federal government or whether you're just an interested individual who understands that largely the world around them is pretty freaking chaotic and that you probably need to sit back, grab yourself your favorite beverage and listen to some conversations about the world around you. And not that I propose or posit that I have the one way to navigate an issue, but I'm trying to initiate a conversation within the public about ways to navigate an issue, which is why today I think it's really important to talk about to our American brethren and about 35-36% of the podcast listeners to Inside Mike Newhead are in the United States of America, a great country. I have spent many a time soldiering around the world, shoots and dirt with a lot of Americans on some battlefields around the world.
The point being is that they're going through a change in the government. And I want to leave out your personal belief on why things are happening and whether things are a good idea or not. In fact, what I try to do a lot in this podcast is remember that I'm a scientist, so nobody really cares whether we agree with what's happening or whether we think what's happening is a good idea. I'm far more concerned about what do we do about it?
What are our choices of response? And so today when I talk about FEMA, when I talk about the U.S. government's decision to withdraw or change a significant number of the funding or platforms or programs that FEMA delivered on behalf of the U.S. government, on behalf of the people of the United States of America, it offers a different lens on what can happen.
Sometimes we have exogenous shocks, as we refer to here. An exogenous shock is something, an event that occurs that is beyond your control, but it impacts how you intend to run your life, right? So the pandemic was an exogenous shock. You didn't control it.
You had no influence over it whatsoever. But what it did do is through the decisions of the government, through the rules that were imposed, it changes how people did business, whether that be loss of employment, loss of freedom of movement, loss of medical security if you got sick or lost somebody who was close to you, whatever it may be, exogenous shocks happen and they influence you. So when we look at what's happening in the United States of America, I wrote an article on Substack this morning, and it was the result of a conversation I had with an incredible mentor of mine in Toronto, Victor Delio, and we talk regularly on this podcast called The Fireside Chat that's on YouTube and over on the Logistics Institute website, but it got me thinking more about the difference between finding solutions and managing issues and the role of leadership in organizations. And that may sound blasé, but if you take leadership in organizations and put you in charge of whatever it is you're responsible for, whether that's me, myself, and I, or whether you're the head of a team of 30 people with a very critical decision to make, you are in charge as a leader and you are responsible to make informed decisions.
At some point, you have to make a call and lead your team down a certain pathway. You're going to find a lot of sources of information and data, you're going to seek advice, you're going to ask for guidance, you're going to advocate for positions, you're going to do what you can, but in the end, as a leader, whether it's a leader in your own life or a leader in an organization, you have to make a decision. And so if you're an organization right now that sits in the United States of America and you are funded to some degree or resourced by FEMA and that is withdrawn, you have now been placed and been hit with an exogenous shock, right? The way your business used to run, the way your organization ran, especially if you're a not-for-profit that's delivering valuable services to communities affected by disasters and say 50%, and I use this example in the Substack article, if 50% of your funding comes from FEMA and say you delivered food security, now that's done by different methodologies, we'll leave that aside, but if you delivered food security as a service to disaster victims and 50% of your funding came from FEMA and that funding just evaporated on a day and it wasn't replaced by somebody else, like some other actor didn't step up and say, you know, not-for-profit or a profit or corporation or other level of government, basically 50% of your revenue was cut.
You can't, as a leader, expect your team to deliver the same level of services that they did before the funding was cut, right? As a leader, you have to accept that irrespective of your mission, even if it's about saving lives, if 50% of your funding is withdrawn, then you are going to have an impacted level of service. Now, it doesn't necessarily equate 50-50, right? Because 50% of your funding left, the simple equation is to say I do 50% less, sometimes innovation, sometimes innovative ideas, novel ideas, concepts, reorganization, sometimes we can shave the ice cube, as we used to say in the army, we can shave a little bit off of that loss, but say 50% of funding is going to result in 40% less services, so even if you provide food security to disaster victims, you're now providing 40% less.
As a leader of that organization, that is a proper leadership position. The idea between solving problems and managing issues and grounded in the lens that we use, if you think about a theoretical framework, if you ever ask an academic about their theoretical framework, just sit back and hang on, you're going to need tons of caffeine until the lecture's over, but if we think about the idea, you as a leader, you can solve problems only in your organization, because a problem solver requires authority and control over the assets that will address the issue. So if I am the CEO of Preparedness Labs Incorporated, my company, which I am the CEO, I have absolute authority and control over all of the assets of the company, so I can solve any issue in the company whatsoever, okay? That's an issue solver, right?
That's a problem solver. Identify a problem, I solve the problem, because I have command and control, as the army would say, over the assets required to solve the problem. Issue management, which is what I think we really need to reframe the discussion around is when a problem happens in another organization that causes you harm. So I'm the food security delivery, and FEMA cuts 50% of my funding.
The problem is in FEMA. I can't solve that problem, because I have no influence, command, or control over what happens in FEMA, okay? I can't solve that problem for the last 50%. What I can do as a leader is I can manage the issue.
I can figure out a way for me and my team to navigate through the problem that we didn't cause, but were influenced by, to deliver the best possible set of services to our clients based upon the impact and based upon the effects that were impacted to us. So the FEMA cut 50% of my funding as a food delivery guy, as a food preparation guy, food security guy. I can do my best to mitigate that inside, but I can't fix the problem in FEMA. What I can do is I can issue management within my corporation and within my team of networked influencers, my own social network, leveraging my social capital with other organizations to figure out how we collectively might address this shortfall in funding, but that's issue management, right?
I can't solve the problem because I can't make the 50% come back. So I can't solve the problem. What I can do is manage the issue. And if we think about issue management, that is understanding that whatever I can manage control, whether it's me, myself, and my bank account, or a corporation as I do, I have limitations.
There are boundaries to what I control. And within that framework, I can solve pretty much any problem. What I have to do is be able as a leader to navigate shocks that happen to me. I have to be able to manage issues, manage my company through a pitfall.
And if you think about another good example is think about electoral processes, right? And I talked about this many times on the podcast in the previous season about, again, I'm a corporation. I own a corporation that works internationally. So we have some contracts that cross international boundaries.
When you do that and you have a US government that decides to play the tariff card and starts to within their authority, start changing tariffs on international, on international clients and different lines of business, different commodities that influences how I can't control the decisions of the US government, nor do I have no influence over them. However, I am affected by them. So as a leader, it's my responsibility to figure out how to manage that issue. How do I keep my corporation profitable, keep it running, meet its requirements to all of our members, and then deliver the services of which our clients are looking for within the environment of imposed tariffs?
You could even say that here in Canada this week, we had an election. We brought in a government and it doesn't matter what the government is, but that government is going to impose a set of rules on society. Every political movement does this. They advocate for some type of change in the way governments operate, a new set of rules.
You know, the old libertarian joke is there's two questions for government. How much of my hard earned money are you going to seize? And what limitations and rules are you going to impose on me? Obviously, it's a little bit more complex than that.
But the point to sell here is that we control very little outside of our own organizations. But within our organizations, we have a responsibility to take care of our mission to the best extent possible. And if 50% of my funding is removed as a food security company, then obviously I'm not going to deliver 100% of the services that I used to to disaster victims, right? It's not my responsibility to go out and replace that lost capability on the battle space or the disaster space.
It's my responsibility to deliver what I can within the resources. And this is something that often affects that we bemoan about, but affects politicians. When you reduce the amount of funding to an organization, the funding can't deliver the same amount of services. That's not a failure, right?
If I withdraw 25% of the firefighters in the city of Ottawa, and the city of Ottawa reduces the 25% level of firefighting coverage, they're not failing. The coverage standard now changes. Obviously, as a citizen of the city, I'm going to be concerned about, but seeing that, which I don't control as a leader in my own household, it is now my responsibility to figure out how do I manage that issue? So what do I do?
Well, maybe I look around to see how do I follow FireSmart principles? FireSmart.ca, by the way. How do I figure out FireSmart principles? What can I do in my house to mitigate the probability of a fire?
And then what can I do to help fight the fire myself? Because there's a reduction in the city firefighting. Now, a little hack note here. The city is not reducing firefighting.
I'm just using that as an example, right? As a prime example for you in a household where you can be impacted by decisions governments make or supporting organizations. You have no influence whatsoever on their decision, but their decision impacts how you run your life. It then places the burden of leadership on your shoulders to determine what can you do in this situation to continue to deliver services to your clients or continue to protect your lifestyle to the best extent possible.
It comes back to the principle argument we make in this podcast in that preparedness is grounded in individual responsibility. In other words, it's up to you. Your outcomes are your responsibility. So if we circle that back to the argument of saving FEMA, it's not our responsibility.
If I was an American, it's not my responsibility to save FEMA. Even if I work in the Maryland Regional Disaster Management Agency or I'm a city emergency manager for a small town in Delaware, it's not my responsibility to fix FEMA. It's my responsibility to figure out how does my town now navigate the loss of funding, whatever this equates to in my situation. So as FEMA withdrew its support, it's withdrew services.
It's no longer delivering certain things that it used to. There was an article on LinkedIn about how prior to the Los Angeles fires, FEMA would rent apartments for those people who lost their homes but did not have insurance, so uninsured coverage. FEMA is apparently not doing that anymore. And it's in a journalistic article.
I have no idea if that's true or not, but that's what this individual on LinkedIn proposed was the situation. Okay, so how do I navigate that? I can get mad and there's nothing wrong with getting angry and typing your emotionally laden response to some text on X or on LinkedIn. But in the end, as a leader, again, whether it's in charge of just myself, a company, an organization, a family, a neighborhood, whatever it may be, my responsibility is to figure out the so what.
And we use this phrase in the army all the time. So somebody made a decision that impacted my life. So what? I have a responsibility to figure out now how do I manage that issue.
I'm not solving a problem because I don't own the resource. I don't own the place where the problem exists. Therefore, I can't solve the problem. What I can do is manage the issue.
And how do I manage an issue that's beyond that the inputs are beyond my control? Well, I look at what I'm responsible for. I look at what I can continue to deliver within the constraints of the changes. And I do that, right?
And I want to talk a bit about sometimes a failure of leadership that is coded or wrapped in wonderful outcomes. And the best way to put this is we see it often in certain conditions where leaders, you know, part of the resources are withdrawn. So what a leader does is they will come out and then they will attempt to continue to deliver similar services. They will attempt to stretch the resources embedded in their organization to meet the same standards that existed before the reduction in input resources.
And for very short periods of time, that can be successful simply because you probably have some pretty incredible people on your team. But it gets to a point fairly quickly where you start to burn the team out. And when you start to burn the team out, you're burning the leader out at the same time. That is not leadership.
That is not sustainable, nor is it in any way, shape, or form a demonstration of great leadership. Great leadership in chaotic situations. And I can tell you this from being an army officer for 20 plus years and having my toes in life situations. It's simply, I lead to the extent capable of my organization.
And then I look at my boss and say, I can't do any more, irrespective of what you want done. My organization, based upon the resources that you've provided, has got to its capacity limitations. And I cannot provide any more service to you, irrespective of what the problem is, irrespective of the situation on the ground, this is what I can do and I cannot do more. And sometimes that is difficult for people to deliver to a controlling agency.
And think about it, your boss, and a great example of this is, and I learned this from a very intelligent Brigadier General that I work for, Brigadier General Keith. I won't say his last name to protect the innocent, and maybe not the innocent. But basically, I was trying to do far more than I should have in my job as a staff officer. And I had about 12 things on my whiteboard, and I was burning myself out.
And I was burning my staff. I was riding my staff pretty hard, and they weren't doing very well. And I finally realized that this is not leadership. What I was doing was trying to achieve the impossible without the appropriate resources.
So I went to my boss, Brigadier General Keith, and said, here are the 12 things that I'm doing, sir. I have the capacity to do four. Please tell me which four, and I will ignore the rest. And some of those extra ones were things he asked me to do.
And he said, not a problem. And he stood there next to me in my tiny little cubicle, and he took a white marker, and he just crossed stuff out. And he said, there you go. And he walked away.
And in about three minutes, all of that problem went away, because I just ditched the things that I didn't have the capacity. to do anymore and everybody accepted that they were gone this is the part that i want to really concentrate on for the last part of this podcast is a great leader understands the limitations of what they can deliver and understands the limitations of what their team can deliver and sometimes it will not meet the need on the ground and that is demonstrating top level leadership and that is a hard concept for some to understand that if there's 100 hungry people and i can feed 70 and i feed 70 i'm successful as a leader the fact that 30 people will go hungry does not mean i failed as a leader not at all right i had the capacity to to the best of my ability based upon the resources that i had access to i could feed 70 people and i did i met the mission my team at the mission they did the work great internal leadership and it happened 30 people went hungry what we often see is that when somebody says you know i'm in charge of food security uh for the state of maryland and i have to feed 100 000 disaster victims and fema cuts 50 of my funding and i can only feed 75 at a time now those 25 000 people who won't eat i failed them no i did not fail them i did not fail them in any way shape or form i was given the resources and the capacity to feed 75 000 people the fact that there was 100 000 people meant i met the standard and as a responsible it's not my responsibility to feed everybody that can eat it's my responsibility to feed as many as i can with the resources it's about framing your task if i give you an open-ended never-ending task with no defined capability then you will fail if i say to you it's your job for example and we see this far too often in the function of emergency management and you can look at your own competency or your own world in which you operate when we say to people that i need you to feed the hungry well what's that mean how many people at what time of day what type of nutrient profile right no i just need you to feed the hundred you are given charge of responsibility and a disaster to feed everybody who's hungry uh that is not leadership actually that is an abject failure of a leader to identify what it is the mission put parameters on it and put limitations based on capability for example uh in the situation the food security idea is if i can feed 75 000 people at the maximum end of my uh capabilities and i that needs to be clearly known as a good leader i'm going to communicate that to the people around me to my strong network my social capital my network around this is the limitation of our capability we can't go above 75 000 people that's all we can feed that's it it doesn't matter how many hungry people there are all i can feed is 75 000 how do the other people get that's a different leadership question for somebody else who's deemed who has the responsibility to answer that problem right that's not me i'm in charge of an organization that would get was given a task and i'm leading that organization to deliver the task the reason i say that it's not you know failing leadership it's not walking away from a problem set it's understanding that me with within the position that i'm in the authority it's not my responsibility to do that and i can't try to stretch my team and burn my team out trying to deliver a service that we're not capable of and in the end all i'm going to do is burn out my team burn out the leadership and burn a lot of credibility and institutional trust that we may have had before with a population when we said we could feed you and we can't and then we don't and we turn around later on and ask you to listen to us and consider us in a position of trust when we failed to meet uh what you thought we could do before and that's part of the last part of the podcast here today is on is really on what we understand to be expectation management within any field and i'll continue to use as an example for this podcast because expectation management is the gap between what your served population believes you're capable and responsible for delivering and what your organization is resourced to do right there's usually an expectation gap it's there and that expectations management is the ability of leadership to look at that and say the population believes we can feed every hungry person we're resourced to feed 75 000 we need to tell the population that we can only feed 75 000 full stop they need to know that and they need to understand that when we get to 75 000 and we don't feed a single other mouth that we actually are 100 successful in the delivery of our mission and we should be lauded for that because we did what we were resourced to do if people want us to be able to feed an unknown and infinite amount of human beings that we are talking about a level of resources required that they're not willing to fund in taxation right but this is part of the blunt conversation that public sector is it rarely ever has with their served population and it's simply because what they don't want to do is show that there's a limitation on what they can do and there's a point where you're on your own and this is a difficult point within the frame of emergency management and with fema because the served population for one reason or another has now gotten to a position in almost all jurisdictions that the government will just fix everything that whether it's a government program government emergency services government response somebody aka the government will solve the issue and feed me and house me and water me and fund me and get me back up on my feet the reality is that doesn't exist in any jurisdiction anywhere in the world right nobody can do all of that but why don't we communicate limitations to the public why don't we be brutally honest with the population to tell them these are the limitations of which we can do and at that point you're on your own because i've often said and i've written many times it's in both of my books actually there's something called the preparedness gap right and the preparedness gap is that point at which you understand because you've been told and informed by your government that at a certain point their resources will absolutely run out and it doesn't matter what's going on and it doesn't matter what the event is the government resources come to a conclusion and from that point forward you are on your own so if that is well communicated if that is well understood by the served population they can have two choices well actually i have three choices the first choice is to say don't like that i want you to do more here's more taxation money see how optional that is the second one is oh this is when you stop okay great now i know when i have to kick off and begin to take care of everything right so now i'm going to do the preparedness efforts on my own to feel at that point to take it from that point so great government thank you very much you did a wonderful job i got it from here the third option is what the vast majority choose is ignorance i'm just going to ignore the world i'm not going to do anything and i'm going to pretend like that gap doesn't exist right and then when something happens i'm just going to get wildly angry and blame the government for providing inappropriate services to the served population what's happening with fema is a lesson for all of us it's a lesson whether you're american canadian whether you work in the insurance industry the motor vehicle industry the construction industry whatever disruption is real and impactful you are a leader in charge of some type of organization and that could be your family you a company or whatever or a not-for-profit organization you are a leader in charge of delivering a service based upon a set of resources when that set of resources human financial capital or otherwise changes your delivery of services will change also your ability to meet a prescribed mission may be influenced by an exogenous shock and being able to publicly say that is going forward the reason and the impetus for this podcast episode is i have read hundreds and hundreds of posts on linkedin on x and various other news articles about people mad at the changes in fema very few of them some do but very few actually offer a salute an idea of how we manage the issue how does the new york state government manage the reduction in fema funding if they can't replace it then what do we do right so if a hundred million dollars of funding is withdrawn or equivalency is withdrawn and the state does not have the money to replace it what does the state decide to do at that point how do they change how systems are run or do they change how systems are run and as i sent in the article quite bluntly if fema did x and fema doesn't fund it anymore guess what nobody does x if there's no more funding than nobody does x and it doesn't matter how important x is to people it just goes away and when you honestly and intelligently communicate that with the served public the public now realizes hey fema's withdrawn this big piece that we used to count on we have three choices we can fund our local government to replace it in taxation which is probably not going to happen we can then decide how we best manage that issue as a collective group of people across all our sectors of society or we can stick our head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist right now most are sticking their head in their sand and pretending it doesn't exist and they're getting really angry at the people who are making the decisions in fema and i get it you're cheesed off you're pissed off you're angry you want to throw things great but throwing things and getting cheesed off doesn't solve any issues and it doesn't ameliorate the loss your responsibility as a leader is to do what you can within the resources and protect your team and if you can't feed everybody feed who you can that's your responsibility that's what you're assigned to do communicate to your serve public what you can do and what you cannot do and then you let the cards fall where they may it's just the way it works there's never enough resources there's never enough people and there's never enough money and so we just need to navigate this new world with new novel and innovative ideas that incredible leaders are going to come up with but in the end with drawing a significant piece means unless we make dramatic and systemic changes to the way we do business the service level to the population is going to drop it simply will and we just have to accept that's the new normal nobody asks you and i whether we like it or not in fact it largely doesn't matter if we like it or not so how do we do that how do we navigate it that's leadership it's issue management not problem solving so thanks for joining us uh this week at inside my we appreciate all of your feedback drop 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