Tag Archives: leadership

Active Shooter Training for College Professors

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Today, I attended mandatory training for active shooters on campus, meaning that the campus police sat a bunch of us down and told us how we should handle ourselves in the case of an active shooter on campus. I’ve always found these types of exercises bizarre because as good-intentioned as they are, they almost always rely on the hope that in the case of a disaster/emergency, the people who need to do the right thing are going to be capable of actually doing it. And quite often, if you listen to the conversations of the other people in the room, a lot of people have great expectations of themselves about what they’ll do in an emergency. But the only real way to figure out what you’re going to do in an emergency is to either go through one, or train extensively until you go through one. Neither of those methods is one that is appropriate for most people and most crowds. So, as I’m quite apt to do, let me tell you a story.

Some years ago, I was out of the service and working for a hotel in San Francisco. I was the hotel investigator, which for all argumentation meant that I was in the management of the Security Department. The rank structure went kind of like Security Director, Assistant Security Director, Fire/Safety Director, Investigator, and then Shift Supervisor. So, in most circumstances, the investigator (me) was usually not someone who had to exercise a whole lot of authority. However, one day, as these things usually happen in bizarre circumstances, there was a radio call in the hotel indicating a chemical spill in the sub-basement level (which is where Engineering houses its staff and headquarters). A laundry person had accidentally mixed some solvent with another that shouldn’t be mixed with, started a chemical reaction and was immediately knocked unconscious. Then everyone on that floor collapsed and went unconscious as well.

When we received the call, the Security Director, the Fire/Safety Director and the shift supervisor were all in a meeting with the director, in which his office happened to be located right next to the stairwell leading directly down to the sub-basement. So, they all rushed out of the Security Office, down the stairwell, and in a few moments were completely incapacitated right smack where the chemical reaction was still flowing. I happened to be walking back to the office at this time, heard the call and was about ten seconds behind the people rushing down to the sub-basement. What I did differently than the rest of the leadership going down the stairwell was notice that the path took us down one set of stairs, down the hallway and then back down another set of stairs. On the way to that second set of stairs was a laundry deposit room, and by instinct, I grabbed about ten towels that were damp from having just gone through a wash cycle (they were in a basket in our path and wet, about to be transferred to a dryer). Having heard “chemical spill” from the radio, my first thought was to throw a bunch of those blankets over my face and breathe through them. No instruction manual or class ever taught me to do that, but it just seemed to be a logical thing to do for someone who has been trained to react to emergency situations from my time in the service.

Anyway, when I got down to the sub-basement, the first thing I noticed was the leadership of my department coughing and wheezing from complete lack of oxygen, so I grabbed the nearest one, wrapped a towel around his face and turned him around, forcing him back towards the stairwell where he had emerged only a short bit ago. I did the same thing for the Fire/Safety Director and maneuvered him over to the shift supervisor, who was incoherent and wandering aimlessly, putting the Fire/Safety Director’s arm around him and pushing them both towards the stairwell, so they could use each other to push each other up the stairs.

I, breathing through wet towels, found a stumbling engineer, pushed a towel over his face and had him take me back to Engineering where there were tons of oxygen masks they used just in case of a disaster like this. Fitting masks onto the people who collapsed in Engineering, the engineer and I grabbed the one worker who had started the chemical reaction and carried his unconscious self by dragging him up the stairs with us.

Once on the main level, I got on the radio with Security and started relaying orders, like taking elevators out of service, as we were getting reports of employees going down to the sub-basement level and breathing in gas fumes. In a short bit of time, we had the situation under control.

When I wandered back to the main Security dispatch office (which is different from the administrative Security office), I noticed the assistant shift supervisor standing in the room with the dispatcher, not sure what to do. I asked him what his instructions were, figuring the security supervisor is going to be more up to speed on what to do than someone who was only in a leadership position because of title (and rarely exercised it). But he was even more incapacitated than the management of the department, except his incapacitation came from panic, not from not knowing what to do. So I turned to the dispatcher, asked her if there were any open calls that needed handling, which she said a couple of doors needed unlocking, so I sent the assistant security supervisor off to take those calls and then decided to continue running security until someone higher up was on site to relieve me (which didn’t happen for another two hours because what I hadn’t realized was that the rest of the management was now in ambulances that had been brought onto site, and I was basically the only one left in charge).

Two hours later, the assistant director of security, who was off site when this happened, showed up, and I turned over control to her, which ironically the next day she tried to explain to everyone how she had swooped in and saved everyone during the incident, to which the entire staff blew a gasket because they all knew she wasn’t there and knew exactly what DID happen. But that’s another story.

What I did learn at that moment is that often people don’t know how they’re going to react to a situation until the situation happens. We had all sorts of standard operating procedures and training, but until an incident occurred, no one knew what they would do, and those who thought they would do one thing did the complete opposite. The expectation that leadership would respond in some way went out the window when the senior membership was wiped out in the first few minutes of the situation.

I guess that’s why I sometimes have a hard time with these “active shooter” types of classes. I hope no one ever has to experience a real incident, but I’m not sure that I would be all that comfortable with the other people there, regardless of whether or not they attended a 1.5 hour class on how to respond. But I guess it’s better than nothing.

A Nation Without a Rudder

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Sometimes, it is so easy to fall into partisan bickering that it’s not even necessary to write the column. Circumstances fill in all of the details for you. But if you’re one of those people who purport to be lacking in partisanship, or at least trying to avoid the pitfalls, it’s a lot harder to talk about the same issues without someone automatically believing you are part of the status quo (one side or the other) and immediately fill in criticisms because of such observations and beliefs.

The President of the United States delivered his “jobs” speech last night, and it went over like a lead balloon. The Los Angeles Times (most definitely not a conservative newspaper) took a tongue in cheek approach to covering the speech, and wrote an article that is probably one of the most sarcastic I have read in ages. Here’s an example:

But here’s the catch that Obama and his Windy City wizards missed: Most Americans are not politically obedient machine Chicagoans. Like a linebacker reading the quarterback’s eyes, they’ve already figured out this South Sider’s game.

But after the laughing subsides, you have to start looking at the bigger picture and wonder what’s really going on here. If it’s just about one side failing, and the other side benefiting, I guess it would be fine (if you were on the side benefiting, I guess), but in this case, we’re not in a zero sum situation (where one side wins); we’re in a no sum situation (where no one wins). The United States is in such need for sustained success, and we’re nowhere near finding it.

Unfortunately, our country is like a boat with no rudder. Granted, it’s a pretty strong boat, capable of floating quite well, but at the moment, no one has any idea where to take it, and even if they did, they don’t know what to do with it once we get where we’re going. Instead, the hope is that things will get better, and all we have to do is just hold our breath until we get to that better place. That’s not a plan for sustained greatness. It’s a plan to avoid bad things by hoping things won’t be so bad if we get beyond the current wave of bad things.

So what is the answer? Well, we need leadership that can focus on what’s really the problems with America and then do something about fixing them. But as long as every leader is only interested in self-interests, like getting re-elected, we’re never going to find a solution because we’re too stupid to realize that we need to allow them to fix things first instead of punishing them for trying to do what’s right. It’s like the whole Jimmy Carter election where he spent his re-election period trying to point out what needed to be done to fix America. He got slammed and destroyed by his opponent because he “hated America” and other such false-isms. We’re so stupid and incapable of realizing our own self-interests that we’ll let someone say nice things about us and then convince ourselves that the person must be a great leader because he said good things about us. That’s how simple the America psyche is. And that’s why we’ll never actually get any success.

America needs a splash of cold water in its face to wake up and realize what’s really wrong. But we’ll never get that because anyone who wants to run for office is doomed to have to say nice things and embrace American exceptionalism rather than try to fix anything that’s wrong. Think of it this way: If I was to run for office and say that the way to fix our cities is to eradicate poverty by actually focusing our attention on improving the lives of people in poverty, while creating a new atmosphere of intolerance towards gangs, racism, hatred, and corruption, and then turned around and devoted my political life to doing just that, my career would be over before it started. However, if I got up on stage and talked about how great America is, how I’ll use my office to put more police on the streets to “stop crime”, and that I will support business to “rebuild this country”, I have a far better chance of being elected, and once in office, I’ll be completely ineffective, but will probably be able to enrich myself by giving rich lobbyists exactly what they need to make sure their clients become richer, while people who really need help get limited help and lots of condemnation for not raising themselves up by their bootstraps. Think about that for a second because I’ve described practically every politician out there, from your local mayor to the President of the United States. And somewhere out there is a voice thinking to itself, “well, the problem is too big, so there’s really nothing that can be done about it” and another voice thinking, “well, if I can’t fix it, I may as well try to profit off of it and make a good life for myself”.

And so the band will keep on playing on.

America Needs a Social Messiah

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Most people feel it but don’t really know how to put it into words. Something’s wrong with our country, everyone seems to know it, but no one really knows what to do about it. Our politicians keep claiming they have it all figured out, but they’re floundering, unsure of what to do and constantly going back on everything they say because they’re as confused as the masses. Something’s wrong, and we’re at a stage where something needs to happen to fix what’s wrong.

Having said that, I have to point out that one of two things is going to happen (aside from nothing happening and this state of morass continuing for more years before a solution finally occurs). Either someone is going to come along and rally everyone together to lead them off the end of a cliff, or someone, or some thing, is going to arrive and lead us to a better place. We’re at that stage where we need something, and unfortunately everything already in place is totally incapable of doing the trick.

This is part of why Obama became president. He came after a crappy period in US history, when we had a president and and administration that led the country down a road into near despair and depravity. He came along and promised a new sense of America that would put the country back on track, kind of like a political messiah who would lead us to the proverbial promised land. Instead, he gave us a lot of what we already had, and basically became Bush Light, leaving us in a state where we’re still waiting for someone to come along and pick up the slack he was supposed to actually use to make things better.

It’s not just a bad economy that’s causing the frustration. It’s a sense that no one knows what to do with the most powerful country on the planet. We have no rudder, steering us to some place better because we honestly don’t know where a better place might exist. Technologically, we’ve created the computer and hand held devices that make life simpler, although they tend to make things even more complicated (adding to our work day instead of cutting it down). Intellectually, we kind of have a lot of science and medicine already figured out, although we still can’t provide health care for everyone, our medicine is created by companies that make only the drugs that are profitable and lobby to make sure things don’t get better for the masses, and we pay our businessmen far more than our engineers and scientists, which means we’ll always have more people making money than making better products. Our political landscape hasn’t changed since the 1800s, as we still rely on diplomacy that requires tit for tat game theoretical models which reward last year’s actions and beg next year’s compliance (even the Roman Empire planned five years ahead, rather than this “what have you done for me lately” policy we seem to have fallen into).

In other words, we don’t seem to have a direction, or even a clue as to how to get ourselves pointed in any direction. People are so focused on the now that they could care less about the future, and anyone who things progressively is seen as foolish and foolhardy, which means we are like ten year olds planning for lifetimes of mediocrity.

This is the time when someone can come along and change things. This could be a great thing, especially if we find an enlightened thinker, but unfortunately we’re so 18th century in our thinking that we all seem to believe we need an enlightened “leader” rather than an enlightened “thinker.” Think about that for a moment. When it comes down to it, we’re going to end up going to the polls, or erecting an homage to a power base, rather than follow the enlightened ideas of someone who has the right ideas. We’re so Hobbesian in our ideals (needing a leader to lead us) that we have forgotten that the US was created in Lockeian ideals (where we control the leader), and really should have been leading to Rousseauian ideals (where the group identity has more power than the individualistic desires that we have today…where some corporate entity can dominate the masses because it has economic power that speaks louder than ideas and voices).

Part of my fear is that most of the west is filled with people who are only capable of the lowest levels of Maslowian achievements (basic needs) rather than higher level analysis (using logic to figure out ways to fulfill needs rather than immediate gratification). This means that when someone comes along and tells us what we want to hear, we’ll comply and expect great results, and when that person proves to be no better than your average Detroit politician (i.e., corrupt), we’ll back that person even when things turn into Ponzi schemes and false hopes and promises. When people are incapable of thinking logically through higher level concepts, they’re constantly doomed to being cheated and exploited by their leaders (kind of where we are today).

The ideas of Rousseau are probably interesting to point out here because the ideas he espoused were those of an enlightened society that realizes its needs are met through its communicative knowledge, but as long as we want things fulfilled within easily constructed plans, we’re always going to be doomed to Hobbesian outcomes (the leader telling us to do what to do so he can get the payoff instead of us). The solution, unfortunately, involves more and more people talking to each other about how to make things better, but as long as media is one-way communication (them to us), we’re never going to get there. Social networking is designed to be two-way, but as I look at the recent approaches of Facebook and Google+, all I see are attempts to create celebrities with bullhorns, rather than a process to open communication between both sides. Which means we’re moving further and further away from where we need to be.

At the end of a diatribe like this, I’m sure the logical question will come: “Do we need to know this for the test?” And when I say no, thinking stops and texting starts.

So I give up again.