I hope you had a chance to dig into that hurricane Katrina case study for yourselves. And when you read the details, it's pretty scary what happened. But lots of lessons and in this video, what I like to do is walk through for us kind of four categories of lessons around first experience and expertise. And then after that self interest and attachments and prejudgments. So on, experience and expertise one of all, there was a lack of knowledge about what was going on in that area in New Orleans by Broderick and his team. He actually knew very little about New Orleans. And if you remember the female on the Friday night saying most of New Orleans below sea level. But why is that? Because there really wasn't a deep understanding the vulnerability of the city to the levees. What was going on in the Superdome and Convention center and the fact that they were different different places. There really was a lack of knowledge. And by the way to be fair the parliament, homeland security at this time was was still kind of being kind of brought up. It wasn't a fully formed organization and they had not spend as much time as they would subsequently spend in rehearsing and practicing and game planning for all kinds of disasters. But the fact remains, there was really not as much knowledge as could have been the case. Misleading patterns, Broderick thought that a Florida hurricane would be very similar to what a New Orleans hurricane is, but of course it's not the case at all. First of all, there are more hurricanes in Florida than there are in New Orleans. So, experience for the average person with hurricanes is different and that does make a difference for your ability to deal with things. The geography is different. Certainly, when you look at the Miami area or the Tampa area and either one of the coast. Most of those areas are not, the cities are not below sea level. There are a couple of spots that are little iffy, but not really below sea level. But most of New Orleans, as we've talked about is below sea level. And another big difference is wealth. Southern Florida has some pretty wealthy communities, wealthy people. What does that mean? It means you can leave, the hurricane's coming it's not like an earthquake with no warning. And people do go to higher ground or to protect themselves in Florida, many people do. And but New Orleans is very poor, people didn't have those resources. And that means that the impact of a hurricane in New Orleans would be very different than the impact of a hurricane in Florida. So the pattern that he was seeing was not a correct pattern, misleading experience itself. We know a lot about general Broderick because he testified to congress after all this. And you can probably find that somewhere on google and there are hours and hours of testimony. I relied on a lot of that to kind of put together this case study and get a lot of the kind of the facts straight on this. And he talked about The Fog of War which is a well known concept which tells you don't act until you really know. The Fog of War is early days of the battle. It's confusing, it's factually kind of the vision you have of The Fog of War but but also metaphorically that there's ambiguity and a lack of clarity. And you shouldn't really expect too much information from the field in the first 24 hours. And the information you're going to get is going to be contradictory. These are important points because I remember talking about this, The Fog of War idea in particular with some of my students that had military backgrounds. And gone back to school and they were very upset to hear me speak about this and to read that what I was saying was actually accurate. He did say that because the doctrine that you learn in the military at least the US military is yes there is a fog of war. But that's where we take advantage of our opponents. Because we have better technology, we're in a better position, we're more well trained. And so the fog of war is not a reason to lay back and just wait and wait. It's a reason to act more quickly. Quite the opposite to the interpretation of general Broderick had. And so his experience was a little bit off more generally. He testified to Congress and he said when he was asked about his experience, been there done that well, he had been there, he had done that a lot, his experience unbelievable. But it's not the same because he had authority over US Marines among the most highly trained military personnel in the world. Certainly with the best technology and the best communications tele technology. A far cry from kind of just everyday people, many of them very poor but not a lot that lived in various parts of New Orleans. The difference is completely different and the application of that military experience was really a big problem. And so you see in all of these examples that I just shared all these kind of illustrations. The problem with expertise and experience in the same ways that we talked about it earlier. Now we're seeing it applied to a real world example and an important one. Okay, second is self interest. Certainly general, broader didn't want to look bad by passing on inaccurate information to the White House. And that comes from kind of a real belief in the chain of command, in hierarchy. Traditional kind of military bearing about that. And you definitely don't want to send inaccurate information in the White House. And so he delayed, Is that a good idea and not a good idea? That's just the reality and that's self interest. He especially didn't want the president or the secretary to say something in a in a press conference that was wrong because of him. That would be like the worst thing he could possibly do. Now, frankly, I think we could think of worse things than that. Then president misspeaking because he was informed about something incorrectly. Much worse is actually what happened, which is people suffering and dying. There could also have been an attachment to the White House and the importance of news. Although I'll talk about attachments in more detail a little bit more. Self interest maybe some of you remember FEMA was run by Michael Brown was a personal friend of then President George Bush. And under the the creation of the department, Homeland Security, which came out of the 9/11 Commission Report. It was one of their recommendations and the creation of that actually encompassed FEMA. And Michael Brown was used to operating totally independently. He didn't like it at all. And so there was this kind of conflict turf battle between the two of them, which was very important. And it had something to do with the fact that general Broderick and his team never established effective communication with key people on the ground in New Orleans. Okay, attachments I started to touch on that, but the biggest attachment by far here was towards the military and specifically towards the marines. Remember what was the thing that finally triggered general Broderick to say, okay, we got a really big problem. The US government's gotta be much more proactive. That was the Tuesday afternoon 2 30 when army colonel had commandeered that helicopter and was talking to him directly. He had a trusted source, he felt confident with him. He was attached to other military sources and so that was finally the trigger. He also almost certainly over weighted reports coming from the Army Corps of Engineers who, by the way, we're the ones who actually elevated or created the levees. And so maybe it's not shocking that the reports from the Army Corps of Engineers were maybe a little bit conservative about the condition of the levees. But the people on the ground or local source of information. People that were there are state sources of information or the mayor's office. They were sharing really bad stuff that was going on about the levees and other things. But he had a negative attachment, he didn't trust them, he didn't believe in them. And it's not that the Mayor of New Orleans was really held himself up as operating in a very effective way here. He did a lot of things that were really not effective and wrong. And he got into a lot of trouble because of this afterwards as well. But to totally disregard all local sources and state sources makes it very difficult to really know what's going on. And that negative attachment played a big role. And then finally pre-judgment general Broderick made an early decision that a hurricane that Katrina was unquote a normal hurricane. And so he refused to recommend that the US federal government kind of push up quickly and be much more proactive. But what did he mean by her by a normal hurricane? Well it gets back to the Florida, New Orleans comparison. He thought a normal hurricane is kind of what happens in Florida and also in Louisiana. It wasn't going to be this kind of mega disaster with this incredible flooding and loss of life and loss of property. It wasn't going to be that I was just going to be a normal one, which is there's some damage is a little bit of flooding but okay. And he was wrong, he didn't understand, he didn't appreciate the differences. And he stuck to that view even in the face of mounting information from his own staff. He overruled his own staff. And this is where this point about data fallacy comes in. And in that video I share with you a bunch of ways in which people that buy into prejudgments especially that have this strong prejudgment. They will only look for data that is consistent with their point of view and will disregard data that is inconsistent with their point of view. And so in fact, and again, we know this from the testimony to congress he had a TV monitor on in his office. General Broderick did and it was showing CNN. And in the evening they were showing people in the French quarter of New Orleans out in the streets. Dancing and partying and having a great time and talking about how they dodged a bullet and that's all true. And he said to Congress, he described what he was watching and he said, what did you expect me to believe. But that was one data point that was consistent with what he wanted to believe. There were many other data points from his staff, from local sources, from the news. If he watched CNN even a little bit longer, he would have seen all sorts of things. But he stuck to the data that would support what he really wanted to do all along. And what he wanted to believe in that prejudgment that this hurricane was not that big deal. It's the same as any other, same as any other hurricane and that's what happened. You stick to the data that is consistent with your point of view and you disregard data that is inconsistent. And we saw him, we saw him do that. Okay, so wrapping up on module three by this point in this course three modules your ability. If you think about it, your ability to diagnose what is going wrong and why is very high. As you've gone through these modules with me watching my video lessons, working on the application exercises and the cases like Katrina and others. I think you've really flexed, your learning muscles and I feel like you're in great shape. Now there's one more step to take, let's take all of this knowledge, all of this practice that we've done so far that you've been doing with me. And let's bring it all home with an in depth discussion of how to make great decisions. We're going to look at safeguards that you can rely on to recognize and deal with some of these decision making traps and emotional biases. Biases that we've looked at and that we know are part of and parcel of how our brains process information and therefore how we make decisions. But we're also going to go further, we're going to go and module for where I'm going to really open up my entire toolkit on how to make better decisions. And there's going to be a bunch of really practical I think, useful ideas for you that will connect nicely to the first three modules and take us to the finish line. In this course, with a lot of energy and a lot of value at it, onto module four.
