A vivid example of the costs of making the wrong choice between centralization and decentralization occurred in 2005, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) responded to the devastating impact that Hurricane Katrina had on New Orleans. The hurricane flooded much of the city and resulted in a mandatory evacuation. However FEMA, the Federal agency responsible for disaster relief, was widely criticized for being very slow to respond to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of mostly poor people who had been made homeless. For several days, while thousands of homeless people huddled in the New Orleans Superdome, lacking food and adequate sanitary facilities, FEMA was nowhere to be seen.

A postmortem revealed that one reason for FEMA's slow response was that the once-autonomous agency had been placed under the direct supervision of the Department of Homeland Security after September 11, 2001. FEMA officials apparently felt they had to discuss relief efforts with their superiors before proceeding. This cost the agency crucial time in the early hours of the disaster and significantly slowed its response, meaning that the relief effort was less effective than it might have been. In addition, FEMA was poorly managed. Its head, Mike Brown, a political appointee, had no experience in disaster relief. Moreover, the agency had been gutted by budget cuts.

In a highly critical report of FEMA, the U.S. Senate Committee charged with reviewing the response to Katrina cited a "failure of agility" and con-cluded that response plans at all levels of government lacked flexibility and adaptability, which often delayed response. In other words, decision making was too centralized, bureaucratic, and inflexible. Decentralization would have helped enormously in this case.

1. How would your knowledge of strategy to this point impact your response?
2. What would you have done differently?
3. How might your faith impact your decision-making in this case?