Extraordinary Public Servants

Submitted by ASPA-NCAC Board member Dale Jones

Millions of public servants at local, state, and federal levels serve citizens every day across our nation. They provide necessary services, assistance, and protection for the American people. The work can be routine and it can be extraordinary.

On March 26, 2024, the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco River in Baltimore collapsed after being crashed into by the Singaporean-flagged cargo ship Dali loaded with 4,700 containers. It is a historical national economic catastrophe. Two construction workers died, and four more are missing and presumed dead.

During the Key Bridge disaster, public servants performed with extraordinary service. According to the Wall Street Journal on March 30, 2024, a dispatcher at the Association of Maryland Pilots, a trade group, immediately acted with a call to the Maryland Transportation Authority (MTA) and stated, “There’s a ship heading toward the Key Bridge. He lost steering. We need to stop all traffic on the Key Bridge.” Within approximately two minutes, public servants ranging from officials in the state’s Key Bridge office to MTA officers acted with urgency and precision to stop traffic on the bridge prior to the collision, which resulted in no vehicles traveling on the bridge when it collapsed. Thus, no others died in this tragic incident.

This is extraordinary public service.

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Overview of our latest event: Preparing governments for future shocks: Roadmap to resilience

Preparing governments for future shocks: Roadmap to resilience

Our Panel:

  • J. Christopher Mihm, Adjunct Professor of Public Administration & International Affairs, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and former Managing Director for Strategic Issues at GAO
  • Eric J. McNulty, National Preparedness Leadership Initiative Associate Director and Harvard-affiliated Author, Speaker, and Educator
  • Kriste Jordan Smith, TSA DFW Federal Security Director and 2024 Chair, Dallas-Fort Worth Federal Executive

Board

The panel was moderated by Smith, who later summed up the event as follows:

Reading for Thought Leaders:

  1. Preparing Government for Future Shocks, A Roadmap to Resilience, lead author Chris Mihm
  2. Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Institute (NPLI) resources such as the Boston Marathon Case Study and Eric McNulty’s book, You’re It, both at https://npli.sph.harvard.edu/resources/.

Beliefs to Shift Towards:

  1. Whole of community efforts outperform agency-centric planning
  2. Give people permission to adapt, and they will figure it out
  3. Collaboration delivers better results than competition; pursue collaborative capacity
  4. Integrating and harmonizing is our most important work
  5. Remember that governance is not just about driving towards a Return on Investment (ROI), it’s about creating relationships that integrate the horizontal and vertical

Skills to Cultivate:

  1. Deeply listening to non-traditional stakeholders; what “keeps them up at night?”
  2. Boundary spanning; extending your network beyond command and control lines of authority
  3. Identifying your “barnacles of bureaucracy”, considering how to remove them
  4. Staying iterative, keeping moving to evolve
  5. Systems thinking; understanding the incentives and drivers at play
  6. Refine how you think about resilience. Explore it in multiple ways: psychological “it’s all in our head”, engineering “you bend it, you break it”, and evolutionary, “adapt or die”
  7. Effective, human-centered storytelling
  8. Negotiating and Resolving Conflict
  9. Decision Sciences
  10. Foresight
    *8, 9, and 10 are a “package”, the baseline for successful public service professionals

Tools to Use:

  1. Human-centered design principles
  2. Situation Connectivity Map, per Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Initiative
  3. Tabletop Exercises; a tactical way to cultivate relationships long before you need them
  4. After Action Reviews; build in that whole of community perspective
  5. “Julie” – the virtual assistant at Amtrak; it works! One of the better examples of how automation does not have to result in the endless doom loop of ineffectiveness.

Contact Information:
 Chris Mihm, j.christopher.mihm@gmail.com
 Eric McNulty, eric@ericmcnulty.com
 Kriste Jordan Smith, kriste.jordan-smith@tsa.dhs.gov

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