W. David Stephenson

W. David Stephenson, a homeland security and crisis management strategist, earned a nationwide reputation as a leader in innovative homeland security strategies, especially ones that empower individuals, use technology in innovative ways and create public-private coalitions to produce security and economic benefits. Stephenson's articles on such topics have appeared in The New York Times, The Journal of Homeland Security and The Los Angeles Times, to name a few.


What kind of people do you see Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials as? Does DHS need to attract a different kind of person, and what kinds of people are poised for that type of position?
I became involved in this issue after the talk within the first few days of 9/11 about the failure to connect the dots. I happen to be a very right-brained, intuitive-type person. A lot of my work in the past dealt with corporate crisis management, and one of [my] strengths was the right-brained ability to pursue a bunch of different tasks simultaneously rather than linear and hierarchal approaches to things.

An experience three or four years ago really confirmed that for me. I was giving a speech in Washington to a homeland security conference, and I sat at lunch with 11 men and women of various ages whose common denominator was they were all senior civilian analysts for the Department of Defense. At some point, their conversation, because I was the fly on the wall, turned to Myers-Briggs profiles. They went around the table asking what their profiles were, and with tiny exceptions they were all very left-brained, introspective, intellectual, thinking rather than sensing personality types. And I'm not saying for a moment that we don't need that. Particularly in dealing with terrorists, you [need] people extremely sophisticated at analyzing e-mail traffic and all the other analytical tasks so important in dealing with terrorism or in planning for any kind of emergency.

However, and I'm afraid Katrina really showed this in spades, those people are totally incapable of -- I think it's just the way their brains are hard wired -- of responding very rapidly, and saying, "OK, plan A didn't work, let's go to plan B." They approach things in a linear and hierarchal fashion.

We have to deal with the emergencies that actually happen rather than the ones we'd like to have happen. In Douglas Brinkley's book about Katrina [The Great Deluge], there was a quote about [then-FEMA director] Michael Brown: "All that he possessed were the routine skills of a quartermaster, a linear, bureaucratic breed for whom creativity or improvisation was decidedly a detriment. For individuals of Brown's mindset, there was only the recovery plan, which was to be executed as fastidiously as possible. Any deviations from this plan could lead, as the mindset believes, only to probable lawsuits, distribution glitches and chronic heartburn. Most seasoned rescue and recovery experts, however, understood that improvisation is the fundamental modus operandi in a disaster, flexibility being the true guiding principle."

When I read that, I thought, "Yep, that's the problem!"


You wrote in a Boston Globe article that citizens are as unlikely now as they were before 9/11 to report "a terrorist act in the making." Why is that?
I find it hard to predict human nature in a situation like this, but one thing important to keep in mind, particularly in a country as large as ours, is that you or I are the ones likely to see some sort of aberrant behavior versus a first responder, just by virtue of the fact that we're the ones in the community day in and day out.

The technology exists for you and me to play a responsible role, but government has not caught up with that. They don't