It’s time to rekindle our imagination versus react to surprise.
By R. Dana Barlow
June 2024 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
The American public watched the grainy, post-midnight video of the Baltimore harbor with bated breath and an element of curiosity. If we didn’t know the headline already, we likely wouldn’t have been craning our necks at what was transpiring.
At first, it looked like a recording of a cargo ship in the background creeping toward the Francis Scott Key Bridge with the scant headlights and taillights of vehicles traversing the 57-year-old structure in the foreground.
Within seconds, however, the cargo ship lost power and hit one of the main bridge column supports, resulting in the bridge collapsing into the water, claiming the lives of six construction workers that had been repairing the pavement in advance of the morning rush hour.
Rightfully, the media concentrated on the loss of life first and the heroism of those who closed the bridge to traffic seconds before the disaster, thereby saving even more lives. Then media coverage and analysis shifted to ripple effects on the supply chain.
As we’ve witnessed time and again, supply chain’s crisis management philosophy embraces a reactive thought process instead of proactive contemplation. Creativity seems to take a back seat to contrivance and convenience.
Reactions to these events seem to be defined by several phrases that should give us pause. These phrases may be years apart, but they reflect disasters spanning nearly a quarter century. The most recent observation links two disasters as historical bookends, according to a March 29, 2024, story in The Washington Post headlined, “Officials studied Baltimore bridge risks but didn’t prepare for ship strike.”
When terrorists flew two commercial jets into the World Trade Center’s twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, Maryland transportation officials said they expressed concern that terrorists could destroy the FSK Bridge, too, the Post reported.
“… state officials worried about terrorism had focused on bombs and bad guys in small boats, not an errant 95,000-gross-ton container ship, according to a former official with the Maryland Transportation Authority, the independent agency that runs the Key Bridge and the state’s other tolled bridges, highways and tunnels, and a former senior state transportation official.”
“‘The assumption was a truck bomb or something like that,’ the former senior transportation official said.”
Referring to a cargo ship, rather than a truck bomb: “‘It never occurred to anybody.’”
During the 20th anniversary remembrance of 9/11, a History Channel documentary titled, “9/11: Four Flights,” referenced two published historical analyses titled, “Touching History,” and “The Only Plane in the Sky,” respectively. It posited two painful observations that should encourage, if not enforce, a complete overhaul of our crisis management/disaster planning mentality.
“The thinking on 9/11 was that a terrorist is not going to board an airplane with a bomb because they might get hurt,” said Lynn Spencer, the author of “Touching History,” and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident investigator.
“The idea of a suicide bomber, of a suicide pilot, had never been contemplated as a serious threat,” acknowledged Garrett Graff, the author of “The Only Plane in the Sky.”
John Farmer, senior counsel of the 9/11 Commission detonated the clincher. “There was a systemwide failure of imagination. After all the dollars we spent, there was nothing anyone could do. … They’re now sitting in those seats, and at that point, it’s just going to play out.”
Creativity. Imagination. Ingenuity. Intuitiveness. These all represent the bedrock layers, if not hallmarks, of strategic thinking within crisis management.
From a supply chain perspective, both the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the FSK Bridge accident disrupted transportation, which remains at the heart of organizational fortification. Prevent access to airways, bridges, ports and roads and products simply go … nowhere.
Globally, the supply chain has weathered a plethora of clogging problems, including floods, hurricanes, wildfires, the COVID-19 pandemic and even the container ship blocking the Suez Canal last year.
We must rethink and act – not react – now to earn the shelf confidence the public needs to feel about the cultural supply chain.
R. Dana Barlow contributes to The Journal of Healthcare Contracting as a senior writer and columnist. Barlow has nearly four decades of journalistic experience and has covered healthcare supply chain issues for more than 30 years. He can be reached at rickdanabarlow@wingfootmedia.biz.