Disaster Recovery Journal Winter 2025

disasters themselves. Disasters rarely check the boss’s staff calendar to hit at the most convenient time. We all know Murphy’s Law will strike at the wrong time, in the middle of the disaster. Organizations will always miss the most critical person when the sky is falling. In the film, we see the president’s staff was missing the national security adviser, the vice president, the national security adviser, and the secretary of state. The secretary of defense checked out of the process by walking off the helicopter deck to his death! Only the deputy national security adviser stepped forward to fill the void. Could your organization suffer a 50% loss of critical staff during an emergency? Is your junior staff capable of stepping forward to even partially fill any gaps? Organizations need to expect critical people to be gone. The junior staff should not be forgotten. Who knows? The next crisis, the whole organization might rest on their shoulders! Do you utilize junior people in exercises? Does the plan make it easy to use non-standard people? At one place I worked, the plan had duty descriptions for every critical person. Then a new person could pull out that duty description to give them at least an idea of where to start working. The movie shows the problem of information flow. Everyone at the top of the pyramid knew the few known facts (a missile was headed toward them). We see a couple of scenes with a FEMA representative. She got the order to activate the COG (Continuity of Government) plan and nothing else. She did not have any information to pass on to other critical staff. The intensity of that moment caused people to forget about the rest of the organization. The rest of the team was lost like a ship at sea. Organizations should remember the rest of the organization during an event, or you won’t have an organization to use.

Is there a way to build in information distribution for the entire organization? The movie shows staff at Fort Greely in Alaska and the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (bunker underneath the White House) starting to crack under the pressure. This, for sure, would occur during such an event due to the immensity of the consequences. Leaders in both locations saw staff members starting to crack. Leaders stepped forward to calm staff during those intense moments, “Remember your training.” Common memories from training gives an organization security in the moment. It also gives people the courage to press-on during a stressful event. Does your organization have leaders who can do that? Do they know when staff have been pushed to the wall? Do you have a training plan people can lean on to get them through the stressful times? Do they have the knowledge to run mental wellness checks on the staff on a regular basis? The best leaders can do intangible things to calm everyone down. No plan will cover these little critical details. Only experience will teach leaders when to give a pep talk and keep the ship afloat. The movie superbly shows the shock in everyone’s faces when the missile interceptor misses the incoming ICBM. They knew – due to the trajectory and speed of the incoming missile – they would not have a second shot. At that point, no one in Alaska or D.C knew what to do next. Plan failures or unforeseen developments occur on a regular basis. Another example happened during Hurricane Katrina. No one foresaw the levy failing, creating a massive flood. Organizations should plan and train on finding these events quickly and responding appropriately. A preset plan won’t get you totally through the crisis. Everyone needs a decision-making

process to accomplish that. The processes will only develop over time and through a lot of training. Organizations need to develop a system to help senior managers make faster, smarter decisions. This system will help organizations overcome the friction and inertia created by the chaos. Parts of the system gathers the data together. Others refine the information and analyze it to ascertain its truthfulness. Then, others can refine that information to help decision makers to come to a better decision. This is done constantly, since the environment will be changing with the chaos. To refine this capacity, organizations must train, train, and train some more. Over time, the process becomes part of your culture. That helps others step into non-familiar roles to help decision makers. I know “House of Dynamite” is just a movie. However, many of us found it very realistic. Through its focus on process, you see certain lessons all organizations – government or private sector – could use to better prepare for the next disaster. The problems seen in this film did not focus on the lack of technology. The issues came from the normal friction that occurs in conflict. The way organizations can override these problems comes from developing people and systems. You will only get that benefit by committing to training over time. v Storm and in Iraq. He has an undergraduate degree in business from the University of Kansas, a master’s degree in public administration from University of Missouri Kansas City, a master’s degree in communications from the University of Kansas, and a master’s degree in history from Arizona State. Magee has also graduated from the DHS FEMA Basic Emergency Managers Academy, the master’s continuity practitioner course, and several Army schools all the way up to combined arms and general staff course. He has authored one book and several articles in multiple publications. Thomas Magee has more than 35 years of experience working as a federal civil servant. He has worked for a wide variety of agencies. Magee also is a retired Army Reserve LTC with experience in Desert

10 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | WINTER 2025