Paradigm Shift
September 14, 1992

Monte Sahlin
North American Director
Adventist Community Services

Hurricane Andrew will become the symbol of a significant paradigm shift for disaster response. A lot of things have been said about it. The best way I know to tell you how important an event it is, is this little piece of history that a friend of mine looked up. The last time in the United States to date that there was an event that made this number of people homeless was called the Civil War. That puts it in some historical perspective.

Actually the paradigm shift in disaster response (like all paradigm shifts) was well in motion long before Hurricane Andrew. Let me begin by defining a paradigm shift. A paradigm shift is no logical continuity between where we were and where we are. Usually our models of change are incremental or evolutionary. We presuppose a stable platform to go from black and white television to color television or monaural television to stereo. Paradigm shift is a new concept of the last few decades that explains why there are sudden breakthroughs that are unexpected.

It describes a way in which science and technology Amutate.@ One example of this is the story of a little firm in Central California. A few years ago Apple Computer Company created a new kind of computer that could handle visual elements= graphics. Up to that point computers could not easily handle graphics. When the engineers at Apple created this new possibility, they did not dream of how it would be used. They did not foresee the way desktop publishing has revolutionized communication in the printing industry. They could not have foreseen that. That came out of a paradigm shift in the use of computers. Computers left the realm of mathematicians and became tools that communicators could use.

Paradigm shifts focus on a basic picture or framework around which we organize lots of data and experience. It changes that foundational picture, the central framework that causes all the dominoes to go down, all of the data to be reorganized. Another example: Before 1950 mass communication focused on the verbal and the auditor--words, newspapers, radio, word of mouth--what has been called the Gutenberg galaxy. Words proceed in a certain order with certain rules. One letter at a time, one word at a time, there is a linear logic about verbal communication caused by the invention of television. In visual communication things do not proceed in an orderly, linear fashion. Things happen on top of each other. There is a collagenosis effect of images so that the result is more than two plus two equals four. Two plus two may equal forty or four hundred depending on the richness and the depth of subtext in the picture. A good picture is worth a thousand words, a really nice picture is worth ten thousand words. That is a paradigm shift.

That is a paradigm shift that has totally changed the way we communicate today. Just one little example of change: My agency has on a number of times when there was a major disaster, sent an appeal letter to all of our churches for funding. In the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew we decided that an appeal letter could not really describe what had happened so we created a 15 minute video report that captured the real feelings of Homestead. You could not capture that in a letter no matter how many words were used.

Another example of paradigm shift is a major trend in our society that affects all organizations. It is driving a lot of the change in our agency. It is the shift from the smoke stack industry model to the information industry model.

The smoke stack industry model focuses on vertical integration of functions. In other words, General Motors in its heyday controlled everything about the manufacturing of automobiles from the mining of coal and steel to the refining of it to making parts all the way to the sales and customer service. It provided a fully integrated vertical system that had everything to do with cars.

In the information industry we talk about horizontal integration. Companies are extremely small. A major supplier of clothing is simply a vast network of small home industries. Hundreds and thousands of small home industries in Northern Italy and in France create clothing. Designers in Rome and New York fax designs to these cottage factories, households where people sew clothing and it is hipped to collection points or directly to stores. That is horizontal integration. Today organizations are not top down bureaucracies with huge departments that cover all aspects of production. But there are vast networks that don=t all belong to an organization but connect with the resources they need in order to put a product together.

The networking approach to organizations is changing the nature of our VOAD organization. That is one of the reasons why State VOAD have become increasingly more important and eventually as we go down that route State VOADs will be more important than the national VOAD. Because that is where horizontal integration or networking happens. Although eventually if this process of horizontal integration continues to move it will even eclipse State VOADs. National and international networks will develop around discreet functions or particular incidents that reach out to all kinds of individuals and groups.

The smokestack industry paradigm focused on products. The information industry paradigm focuses on service to the point that it has completely destroyed the definitive differences between products and services because now you can order a product custom-made for you. It doesn=t cost anymore to custom make it for you than it does to mass produce it. So you can go into a store and give them exact specifications of what you want and before the week is out that will be manufactured for you and delivered to your door. I found an example of this last week in Georgia. Would you like to have delivered to your door the very best quality fresh produce, direct from the farmer at less than wholesale price? That is possible today because of the network that is connecting small family farms throughout the United States called Fresh Express. It is not a big corporation, but a network of little family farms. You can call the Fresh Express 800 number and order the best quality tomatoes or strawberries. The kind that never make it in the supermarket, that only the top restaurants buy. And tomorrow morning one, two or three dozen of those tomatoes or boxes of strawberries, exactly to your specification can be delivered by Federal Express. Is that a service or is that a product?

Why is paradigm shift an important thing to pay attention to? Let me tell you a story about the Santa Fe Railroad. You remember the Santa Fe railroad. It was a big company at one time. As a kid in the 1950's in Los Angeles, I remember the Santa Fe Railroad was one of the powerful organizations. About that time Santa Fe Railroad was offered the purchase of a little fledgling industry company called Trans World Airlines. They could buy out the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel for a pittance. The Board of Directors of Santa Fe had a meeting where they said, "We do not know if this new technology is going to work. It is just a fad. It will go away. We are in the railroad business." They made a bad choice. Santa Fe Railroad went bankrupt. It is gone forever. Trans World Airlines made millions and millions and became an industry leader. What if Santa Fe board of directors had said, "We are in the transportation business. How can transportation be provided best?"

There are major paradigm shifts today that relate specifically to voluntary agencies. One of them I have already mentioned; the change from what are called "matrix organizations" that are deep and have pyramidal organizational charts to what are called "network organizations" that are completely flat and are interconnected by the need to know, the ability to contribute information. That is going to change the nature of our agencies.

Another paradigm shift today that affects voluntary agencies is that information is the primary source of value, and the value of that hardware is declining. The VOAD member of the future is going to be an information-rich organization that may not own very much hardware.

Another paradigm shift that affects our organizations is a shift from national, mass-based organizations to local, participatory organizations. Increasingly our constituencies all gray together in a mass of individuals who want to respond to disasters. And we do not know anymore whether they are part of the Adventist constituency or Mennonite constituency or the Red Cross constituency or the Methodist constituency and they don't care. They are just individuals who want to do something and make a difference because people are suffering. They tend to operate on the basis of the personal and want to participate on a personal level. They do not trust large organizations and they don't want to be put into some bureaucratic system.

Another paradigm shift that impacts VOAD is a movement from specialized and particular knowledge and skill to a cross-disciplinary, global focus. Increasingly it is not important whether you understand how to do mass feeding or how to unload trucks or how to build houses as much as it is important for you to understand how chaotic systems reassert themselves into some order. That is the heart of knowing about disasters and response.

For example, could you predict how quickly life would begin to return to normal in Homestead? When I was there after Andrew it was absolutely amazing how quickly there is an air of normality in the community. A lot of us estimated that it would take months to do what had been achieved in days. We don=t know very much about how those chaos reordering instincts work, but the more we know abut them, the more effective we will be in the future.

I believe Andrew represented a paradigm shift point: A peg to hang the shift on for Disaster Relief. At least three things that happened in Andrew I believe are paradigm shift indicators.

Number one, the unprecedented level of evacuation. One and a half million people were evacuated. Here we have the largest single natural disaster in the recorded history of the United States to date and the number of deaths is so low that a major problem in Miami is the myth swirling around that they are hiding hundreds of deaths. More people are killed by drunk drivers on a typical Saturday night than died in Hurricane Andrew.

Number two, the role of the military. The fact that the military were invited into Miami has already changed disaster relief to a degree that none of us would have predicted possible before Andrew. Look at Hurricane Iniki in Hawaii and what happened there. Was there agonizing about whether the military should go in? Did the governor and the President play footsie for 24 or 48 hours about the issue? Did the news media discuss it? No! The storm had not yet made landfall and the commands were given for the military to go.

The military are going to be permanent players in disaster relief. I had a number of fears about that, frankly, and I was very careful to observe, when I went to Miami in 1992 what the role of the military was there. I was impressed that the military have worked very well with VOAD member agencies. They have not played the power games as I expected. They freely give military personnel to do work for VOAD agencies. An example: one of our ACS centers could not quickly muster volunteers to unload a truck that needed to be unloaded right away. Our unit leader asked a Lieutenant going by in a jeep for help and within 30 minutes a squad of soldiers arrived and unloaded the truck. The Lieutenant calls back and asks how long do you want them?

The military did not squabble with us over providing supplies and equipment. You need tents, fine! You need shelving built for a distribution center, fine! No quibbling about who it belongs to, or who will pay for it. I was absolutely impressed with the cooperative way in which the military has worked with VOAD agencies.

Number three, the unprecedented degree to which we brought information systems to play in disaster response. One of the simple but extremely powerful things that happened is that American Red Cross and VOLAG office published a daily fax bulletin summarizing information that all the agencies fed to them. It was the first time we had a bulletin board that you could look at everyday and you could see what all the other agencies were doing. It is an extremely powerful tool. It will change forever the way in which we do disaster response because we will never again have a major disaster where we won't expect someone to do a daily fax bulletin. We will want the information to be more up-to-the-minute and better.

Another example is the 800 number my agency, Adventist Community Services has been deeply involved in where people can call if they want to donate commodities or volunteer services. You know, if you are on VOAD Executive Committee, that we have discussed this concept with FEMA for awhile. That particular proposal had not yet come to fruition on the morning before the storm. Our agency did have access to an 800 number and did have "on ice" a plan to respond. We sent out a simple fax message to about two dozen news media and the VOAD agencies saying there was an 800 number where people who wanted to donate commodities or volunteer could call. We had 15,000 calls.

These calls created an enormous database of resources an amazing array of resources. That database can produce about anything you are looking for. It became a phenomenal thing. The news media became very interested. We had to put a crew on 24-hour duty to deal with that flow of data. It is a two-way flow of data. It is not just that we got information in from people who offered bottled water or chain saws. The 800 number became a place where we could feed information back out to people. We told them what we needed as those needs changed every 24 hours. We told them how to pack trucks, how to organize collections, and where to get trucking donated. We connected them with other people. It really became a process of synergy; people communicating with people.

People would call the 800 number and say, "I am working on this I would like to leave a message for somebody who is working on another piece of this." Our 800 number operators could help people get together clear across the country. Because we were able to connect people with others of like interests and matching resources they were empowered to make a difference.

We trained the operators hour by hour. Sometimes as often as every 45 minutes we would have a teleconference with the phone operators and our field staff. Front-line workers could tell them what to say and change the scripts and the kind of information they were using.

We shared this information with other agencies. We gave the American Red Cross many medical volunteers. We arranged for Mennonite Disaster Service to get access to a crane when they needed it in Louisiana. That is an unusual kind of need in a disaster--a 50-ton crane--but there was someone out there who had one to volunteer. We gave volunteers to World Vision to run a distribution center. We gave construction volunteers to FEMA.

Our management information unit in Washington coordinated, tutored, tracked and linked literally tens of thousands of people across the nation, all responding to the disaster. They got involved and they got involved in an orderly fashion.

One of the results is the significantly smaller degree of a clothing problem in Andrew than we had in Hugo. I noticed the difference because it was something I looker for. We did not totally eliminate it, but we took a big bite out of the clothing problem. We started tutoring people early on, "don't send clothing." And we did not get a negative reaction. People started asking, "what do you need?" And we told them what was needed, and that is what they donated.

Strangely enough of those who should have the most respect for this kind of communication were the ones who did not pay attention. Some of you already know that the worst trucks to unload were those from the TV and radio stations. They did not pay any attention to our coordination.

Let me try to chart in a more formal way the paradigm shift for disaster responses. This is a first stab at something the policy scholars spend a lot of time doing. This may be your first look into a very esoteric way of thinking, yet it is one that we have to deal with. It seems to me that the old paradigm, the dying paradigm, for disaster relief is what I would label the "action-oriented paradigm." The old paradigm is made up of ideas like resounding first or fastest. Ideas like identity, turf. Ideas like using a seat of the pants definition of what it is that needs to be done; responding largely from tactical plans; clearly differentiating professionals from volunteers; using a standard textbook definition of need.

The new paradigm of disaster relief that I believe is emerging can be labeled information-driven instead of action oriented. It includes ideas like responding intelligently, connectivity and networking. Ideas like working from a strategic plan instead of a tactical plan, being prepared, breaking down the differentiation between professionals and volunteers.

The new paradigm focuses on a changing, volatile definition of need. One of the reasons we have to have information systems is that all of a sudden we one day in the second week after Andrew became aware of the fact that there was not a water problem in Miami anymore. Then there were too many plastic bottles of water stacked in parking lots. How do you quickly get the word to seven or eight thousand volunteer groups all over the country that are out collecting bottled water? We have to be able to turn the water off immediately.

The new paradigm for disasters focus on more urban locations. The reason why Andrew is unprecedented in its damage is because it mowed across the suburbs of a major metropolitan area. The Los Angeles civil disturbances; were they a disaster? Did your agency respond to them as if they were a disaster? We choose to.

What does this paradigm shift mean for VOAD members? These are my hunches:

1. It means that we must do planning together.

2. It means that we must share more information and greater quality of information. We must put our hands on information, hard information about resources, and capability and capacity that frankly in the past we have never known because we have never measured it. But if we are going to have a strategic plan and be a player alongside the military then you have to know precisely how many blankets I can produce in precisely how many hours or I am not a reliable partner and I am out of the game. The same is true for each of our agencies.

3. It means fewer volunteers who are more skilled, more disciplined, and more prepared. Less need for masses of the last-minute free agents.

4. We must seek new partners. NVOAD has to open up lines of communication with those military units that will participate in future disasters. We must develop a partnership with the media. The media can be a great aid, for example, when they say here are 800 numbers that you can call to coordinate. And they can be a great liability when they pass around things that are not true and create responses that are not needed. We must seek new partnership with industry. Industry has been a major donor of commodities in this disaster. If we are going to respond to a like size disaster in the future some of our agencies will need to have some idea of what partners we can depend on to provide commodities.

5. It means the collapse of levels within our agencies. Our ACS state and national units collapsed into one level during Andrew. We had almost daily teleconference staff meetings bringing together our people on the ground, our people in North Florida, our people in Atlanta and our people in Washington, D.C. We functioned as one level, as one network. Don't waste your time arguing about conflicts between state-level and national-level units within your organization. They will have to disappear or else your organization will not be a player in the future.

6. It means autonomy will come from information networking and not from organizational arrangements. The people who know something valuable are the ones who will be able to play a significant role, not the ones who have agreements, structures and plans that assign them a particular role. If you don't have the information to do the assigned task, the network will build arteries around you and go ahead with the flow.

7. Leadership will be based more on information access and information management skills than on technical skills. The disaster manager of the future really doesn=t need to know much about the operational skills on the front line. She or he needs to know a lot about what kinds of information we need to have, who needs to have it, how we get access to it quickly, and how we disseminate it rapidly.

8. There will be a stronger role for the states. Both in VOAD and in government.

9. Specific plans will be written--interagency plans--for all major possible disasters. For example, the New Madrid Fault. There will be a book with strategic plans that will define roles for all governments and VOAD agencies. There will be one labeled San Francisco, South Florida, and so on.

10. Strategic planning units will grow in all VOAD agencies and there will be more interagency strategic planning: consortia to develop master plans for New Madrid, for San Francisco, for South Florida. There will be more focus on strategic plans and less on tactical plans.

Specifically, what does this paradigm shift mean for State VOAD? First of all I think it means more emphasis on sharing information and increasing the quality of information shared. Let us face it, at a lot of our State VOAD meetings the documents that we give each other are basically promotional literature. We are not sitting down and sharing precisely how many trained persons we have that we can mobilize in times of disaster, or precisely what kinds of commodities we can access. In the future this has to happen at state VOADs. If it doesn't happen all of our agencies will become irrelevant and disaster response will become a military function without any VOAD.

Secondly this paradigm shift means for state VOADs more training in information management skills. What percentage of the member of your state VOAD are able to use a database manger program on a laptop with a modem to plug into a bulletin board service and look at up-to-the-minute, "real time," about what is happening in a disaster. That is what a disaster leader has got to deal with in the future and state VOADs can equip these people to do that faster than just about any other organization.

Thirdly, it means a focus on strategic planning rather than tactical training in VOAD meetings. The regional NVOAD training conferences that we have had in the past several years have been real heavy on tactical training: how to do this and how to do that. The state VOAD meetings of the future will focus on strategic planning, sharing and discussion of those plans.

Fourthly, it means that we have to build quality between-meeting communication systems. Just having the meeting once, twice, three times a year is not enough. Teleconferencing, fax, e-mail, computer bulletin board services need to be built to connect your state VOAD.

Fifthly, it means the state VOAD need to focus on training their members in strategic planning skills. That is a major need of all the our agencies at the state level.

Well I have probably said a lot more than I should have. I may be dead wrong but I have a very distinct feeling that disaster relief will never be the same again after Andrew. Partly because Andrew connected with a lot of pieces that were already out there sprouting in the shadows. A whole new picture with which to think about disaster response. It has burst upon us. Those who see it will be players. Those who don't will not know what happened.

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