
The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
Interviews, stories and lessons learned from experienced crisis leaders. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Being an effective leader in a corporate or public crisis situation requires knowledge, tenacity, and influencing skills. Unfortunately, most of us don't get much training or real experience dealing with crisis situations. On this podcast, we will talk with people who have lived through major crisis events and we will tap their experience and stories from the front lines of crisis management.
Your host, Tom Mueller, is a veteran crisis manager and trainer with more than 30 years in the corporate communications and crisis fields. Tom currently works as an executive coach and crisis trainer with WPNT Communications, and as a contract public information officer and trainer through his personal company, Tom Mueller Communications LLC.
Your co-host, Marc Mullen, has over 20 years of experience as a communication strategist. He provides subject matter expertise in a number of communication specializations, including crisis communication plan development, response and recovery communications, emergency notifications and communications, organizational reviews, and after-action reports. He blogs at Blog | Marc Mullen
Our goal is to help you grow your knowledge and awareness so you can be better prepared to lead should a major crisis threaten your organization.
Music credit: Special thanks to Nick Longoria from Austin, Texas for creating the theme music for the podcast.
The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
EP 20 Behind the Scenes of International Disaster Response with US Ambassador Lewis Lucke
We're privileged to have an engaging conversation with retired US Ambassador Lewis Lucke. Now, he's not just any ambassador. This man is a seasoned crisis leader who has been at the helm of some of the most challenging situations around the world. From the reconstruction of Iraq to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Ambassador Lucke was right there, making decisions that impacted and saved countless lives. His tales are riveting, his insights profound, and his wisdom invaluable.
His tales of international intrigue over the course of his career are captured in his book, From Timbuktu to Duck And Cover, Improbable Tales from a Career in Foreign Service, found on Amazon here.
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Hi everyone and welcome to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. On this podcast, we talk all things crisis management and we deliver that through storytelling, interviews and lessons learned shared from experienced crisis leaders. I'm Tom Mueller, coming to you from Texas today. With me, as always, is my co-host, mark Mullen, joining us from Washington State. Hi, mark.
Marc Mullen:Hello Tom, looking forward to our time together today.
Tom Mueller:You bet it's going to be fascinating conversation. Today Our guest is retired US Ambassador Lewis Luck, a career diplomat who has just loads of experience dealing with crisis related issues, particularly during his time with the USAID office. So I met the Ambassador a couple of months ago at an event and asked him to come on. So he's with us today, ambassador, welcome to the show. Thanks, tom, good to be here. Hey, as we do on this podcast, we ask our guests to introduce themselves, so would you just take a little while and give us a quick history of your life and career?
Amb. Lewis Lucke:Okay, that's a big task. Before I moved to Costa Rica, where I am right now, I lived in Austin, texas, for a number of years, but then I joined the Foreign Service, which is something I guess I always wanted to do. When they say, what do you want to do when you grow up? And I was very happy to get into the Foreign Service of USAID, which is the US Agency for International Development. Among other things, usaid does economic development and humanitarian assistance response overseas. In terms of crisis management or crisis response, you say it is the international FEMA. Fema operates domestically and USAID operates overseas.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:So I missed a lot of popular culture in the US.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:I basically went overseas in 1978 and sort of only came back just a few years ago and found Austin, texas to be a very, very changed city.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:So, for better or for worse, I had the chance to work in about I guess it was about long term about 11 or 12 countries, more or less equally divided between Latin America, africa and the Middle East, and I'm really more of a I speak French and more or less a Middle East expert, and you know the current crisis is in Gaza and so forth.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:This really is very tragic for me, very partner because I kind of lived in that area of the world for a long time. But, in any event, the crisis response things that I've been in charge of was, first of all, the lead up to Iraq reconstruction, which was from really planning in 2002 and then implementation, 2003, 2004, when I was in Baghdad, and that we were very concerned about a large humanitarian, the possibility of a humanitarian disaster, which did not happen, which is fortunate. The other one, more to the point, was I was made the head of the whole what was it called? The whole of government response after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. So I was in charge of the USAID response, but the military we were all very much sewed in with the military, who had most of the assets, and we worked very productively together. That was quite a task and quite an event that you've heard me talk about before.
Tom Mueller:Let's jump right into the Haiti story, ambassador, because it was just sort of fascinating when you got the phone call and said, hey, we want you to head to Haiti. What was it like, sort of walking into the humanitarian crisis or the anticipated crisis that was Haiti at that point in time. How did you get things organized and get rolling?
Amb. Lewis Lucke:Well, first of all, let me say I had been in Haiti several times before, really had to work, and starting in 1994, and then I was back again as the director of the USA ID mission in 2000 2001. So I was very familiar with Haiti, already spoke French. It turns out that the president of Haiti during during the earthquake was also the president when I've been there before, I used to be acting ambassador on a number of occasions, so I knew him and so I was very familiar with Haiti and with the. You know, the situation in Haiti is sad and crazy, is it sometimes? And disorganized and sometimes is Anyway. So I got the call.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:I was in Austin and got the call Can you come to Washington right away? And I sort of had a feeling they have me. Clearly they had something in mind for me. I didn't know I was going to end up being the head of the whole thing and in fact I met with the administrator of USA ID after he had only been in the office for about two days and he was sending me to Haiti and he wouldn't, he said I need you to get out to Dallas, get on a plane and go to Haiti.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:And I said, well, what's my job? And he sort of didn't answer and finally, finally, he said you're in charge. And I said in charge of what he said, you're in charge of the whole thing. So, okay, I mean that was. And he said by the way, the future of the agency really depends on how well, how well, you and we do. So I said, well, there's no pressure there, that's great, anyway.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:So I had, I had to tell us, I get on a small jet with several of my colleagues to be, and we coming into land on the one, the single runway into Port of Prince, and our plane was waved off. They didn't know that I was the I, the great poobah, you know, allegedly in charge of this whole thing, was on this plane that they wouldn't let us land. So we went to the neighboring islands of Turks and Kekos and, short, we had to had to figure a way to get to Port of Prince because they told me my first duty was to meet the Secretary of State, mrs Clinton, when she got off the plane. So I mean, there was, I was working hard to do that. But to more directly answer your question, I mean there's it would be completely overwhelming, and always was completely overwhelming, to run into the responsibility of what and how are you going to do in a disaster, because people are really dead and dying right and left. It's very sobering. It was a disaster of what I used to say to the press. It was a disaster of biblical proportions and all that that you can imagine and that that would entail.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:And I, you know, I had lived and worked in Haiti before and, as I said, so it was. I knew the place really well and I was looking at the reports on television before I got there and said, oh my God, this was place that I know so well. It's really. It's really. It's really hurting now, but we we do have people trained and we have systems in place and we have people in the US to be able to respond to the immediate needs, and I think I told I mentioned to you before we have this organization in USA called the Dart disaster assistance response team. Those are specialists that correspond, to, say, all of the sectors that you would need to have covered in order to have a competent response in those sectors being the ones you would expect.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:You know food, water, health and sanitation, logistics transportation Normally you would expect that construct for us, the US, to fit in, with a construct that was led overall by the UN and but in this case it was. It was very. It couldn't really work that way, but this the UN headquarters had been destroyed by the earthquake and many of our UN counterparts were dead, so we had to sort of sensitively try to replace them where it was necessary and and go go from. Their work with the Haitian government is weak, as it always has been and was, but you know giving them the respect that you know they're this, your country, and we need that. We need to work, you know, cooperatively with with you and everybody else.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:You know you're never prepared. You have systems in place, you have people that are trained, but the first few days are absolute pandemonium that we call it the heroin fire days, and every day it gets a little bit better. You have to have adequate personnel and other kinds of material support. Fortunately, we had the US military and all of their incredible assets, with all their training and all these wonderful people that were 21,000 soldiers, sailors, corpsmen, corpswomen, I think everybody but the Marines were there and they just did an incredible job. Anyway, so I'll over to you.
Tom Mueller:So, ambassador, describe those early days of the response for us, because we know, when you deal with a large scale crisis situation, that oftentimes you have too few people doing too many tasks and the days are long and the people get tired. How was it for you, in the early days responding to this Haiti crisis?
Amb. Lewis Lucke:Well, we knew it was gonna be very, very difficult sort of physically on us.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:I mean, when you're dealing with people that are dead and dying, you sort of say, to heck with whether I'm tired or not, let's we have to do, paddle to the metal, because people are counting on us. We needed to save lives, pull people out of buildings. We had a couple of rescue surge and rescue teams that we have on standby, that we brought in from Virginia and from California. So it's pandemonium, but you say, every day gets a little bit better. So the first steps were really basically to try to figure out how am I gonna? Where am I gonna stay? Where am I gonna from? Where am I gonna work? Do we have connectivity? How do we communicate with everybody else? Who's in charge? Who are my counterparts within the military? Who are my counterparts within? You have to get all of this sorted out within a system that is really has already, by definition, fallen apart and needs to slowly be put back together.
Tom Mueller:Now I know that, of course, when you're working long days like that, having experts who can get up to speed quickly and work quickly is critical, actually. So the dark team that you mentioned, the disaster assistance response team how well equipped were those folks to get up to speed and get on the ground quickly?
Amb. Lewis Lucke:They're very good at their jobs, they're well trained and they deploy whatever needed, and we have dark teams scattered through the regions of the world that are on call, sometimes in the region and sometimes out of Washington, to be able to do what they do.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:So they know what they're doing, but they're subjected to the same kind of chaos that everybody else is to start with. So their job essentially was to assess you, to figure out where the problems are. How serious is the water situation, for example? Is there sufficient quantities of potable water? Are there sufficient quantities of food in the country? If not, what do we do to bring it in? What do we do to facilitate everything that needs to be done in order to make it a little bit better every day? So they assessed and it was fairly quickly was evident that there was not really a major food problem, even though we were ready to bring in all kinds of food. I mean, we bring in food to Haiti anyway, and we were ready to bring in and did bring in bottled water, water in a larger quantity, storage things on ships, etc. But it was really clear to us that food availability or water availability was not really the problem.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:It was a question of distribution and transport. So we worked on all of those problems and all of those sectors right from the get-go.
Marc Mullen:It sounds like you're practically literally an army descending with a lot of people and descending with marching orders and everything else. But how quickly do you have to start letting the country in this case, letting the government of Haiti take over the response, or run the response, or direct the response?
Amb. Lewis Lucke:Yeah, that's a really good point in that we were always very clear about the fact this is not our country. We need to do our job, help Haiti get back on its feet to the extent it can, and then and then leave. The other thing we didn't want to do is is put the country on a dependency on donated food and water and all that stuff, when that they actually have, weak as it may be, they have a private sector and it was important for the private sector to get back and fill that function and do what they would normally do anyway in a non-crisis situation. So we were very sensitive about all of that.
Marc Mullen:So you have a strong sense of sensitivity to the local business, the local industry.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:I had a good. There were some fortuitous things that happened in Haiti that made the situation as bad as it was horrible, unspeakably terrible as it was made things go a little bit better. I mean, the UN was debilitated so they had to bring in people from New York to from the UN headquarters to run the UN operation, who happened to be an American and happened to be a friend of mine. So we had already had a great relationship and a great rapport. That was that was going to continue as long as he and I were there.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:The other thing is that the military head and these are the this was the US military head had all the tools. They had all the fun stuff, you know, an aircraft carrier, the SS Hope, the helicopter carrier, the baton and so forth and, as I said before, 21,000 sailors and soldiers and post guard people. They were really incredibly well equipped and very, very well led. My military counterpart had been the head of the deputy commander of the South Com, the Southern Command, and he was two three-star general and just absolutely superb.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:And the other thing was it was interesting that happened there was this is General Ken Keen a General Keen's counterpart within the UN, and there was a UN stabilization force in Haiti at the time of the earthquake, called Manusta. Manusta was don't ask me what the acronym stands for because I forgot but the, the head of that was a Brazilian general. The Brazilians were really the head of Manusta, but with all other representative countries, he had gone to staff that general, the Brazilian general, had gone to staff college with the American general, so they were friends, so we all had this really good. You know prior existing relationships which really eased the communication tremendously.
Tom Mueller:Ambassador, I know you know when we've talked in the past you've mentioned at times some of the challenges that you can run into, you know, with personnel who were involved in the response. Now, when you know the people you're working with, as you just described, with the leadership there, things can go really smoothly. But there are times when you get different groups of people coming together to support a response and sometimes things can get a little off kilter. Have you seen any examples where you know some of your staff? You know where you ran into those issues.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:Well, the first issue was really that we were not as an agency, we were really not well equipped to muster, to mobilize quickly with additional staff as needed. You know, ours is it's the government, okay, it's this massive bureaucracy and it's slow and there have to be really need to be better mechanisms to be able to mobilize the people that we needed. So a lot of times it was fortunate that FEMA was actually present there, even though FEMA doesn't work overseas. For some they were there because they were invited there by the. They had a USAID. I was able to use some of those FEMA people to fill in some of our own gaps. We had plenty of gaps and we tried over time to get as many people as we needed. It was important for us to do as best we could for the emergency only the and I should have said this earlier. We were there for the emergency response and recovery stage, not not nothing to do with reconstruction. This is only the emergency response which you know, for a while people are alive and you're pulling live people out of buildings, and then for a while, then after a couple of weeks, you say, well, okay, there's very little hope left for more alive folks, we're going to have to transition to, to recovery and and you go, you go into that stage. We knew that that was going to probably take about three months to to do all of that.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:One of the other problems that I think we had overcome by the time we got to Haiti in 2010 was that USAID was used to dealing with the military. Finally that's when I was in Iraq there was a lot of resistance on the part of some of the USAID. People said, oh well, we're not military, we don't want to work with the military. You know, some of this ideological stuff that I just could not relate to, because you need to get your help from wherever you can get your help in order to have a competent and thorough response.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:By the time, we and, by the same token, a lot of the military folks had no idea what USAID was. They just knew that we had some money and they kind of wanted it, and so it was a little uncomfortable in Iraq 2002 through 2004. But we all went to school on that particular instance and that example and we learned about enhanced, improved civilian military cooperation coordination. There was all kinds of seminars, there were lessons learned, there was all you know you can imagine how many power points the military may have put together in order to teach its people, like we did trying to instruct our people, about the relative advantages of each of these agencies our agency versus the military, with all of their assets, organizations and capabilities, and so forth.
Marc Mullen:I have a question about timing and mission. They kind of fit together. But you said that you were called to DC and your boss of two days sent you to Haiti with the direction you're in charge of everything. Then you started calling in bodies to come and come and work. How soon did you have a timeline so you could tell people we're going to need you for three months or we're going to need you for two weeks? And how long did you get to keep that you're in charge of everything title before somebody else started telling you no, that's not what I meant.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:You're a very sage person, mr Bark. I was telling Tom the other day the military has a great expression called the 2000 mile log screwdriver, which means how this is how you get managed from Washington or from far away by all of your mini-bots. Worry about the military, because they were great and they were fine. Anyway, I did have to worry about threats of micromanagement from our own people back in Washington and told me at one point they said you know your job. Once you get there you need to spend most of your time doing PowerPoints for the present. And I said that's crazy. I mean I'm not going to do that. That's insane, frankly. I mean we're pulling bodies out of buildings.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:We did focused effort here of all the few people that we have and you know, and do create a little bit of success and a little bit of order and build on that. I didn't think I wasn't able to tell people. I didn't have the luxury of saying I'll come work for work for us for three months or two weeks. I would say come work for us at all. And I had. I had some of my old colleagues from Iraq days that would hear me, like on NPR, on radio, and they would volunteer and they would show up. It was amazing. So we had Throughout the, you say, people from all over the hemisphere and the world actually, who came in logistics people not nearly in the numbers that we wanted, but we were able to sort of pack, just catch can with some of the FEMA people and some of the other contractors that we were able to get. But I mean, I used to I would write papers about this kind of thing and when we were in Iraq, we had situation times 10 in Iraq because we it was a huge operation and we needed to have mobilizing technical, qualified people quickly to fill these kinds of positions. And we, we figured it out finally in Iraq, but not using the USAID personnel system but using a different contracting. We were doing sort of all of the above and Haiti and trying to patch it all together.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:And you know, like I told Tom before, I mean, every day got a little bit better. Crazy. And I told my people, I said, you know, you, the days are very, very long and what you need to do is realize that this is a spread, this is a marathon on a spread. And I was, I'm, completely violated immediately by, you know, trying to work 20 hour days and just after a while you fall apart and physically we were, we were sort of we were not our finest after you do about two weeks or three weeks of 20 hour days, but that's really what the job that the job needed far more than that.
Amb. Lewis Lucke:So, and we were very dedicated to try to just looking around the damages of poor prints and the bodies stacked up. And you know my old staff come into work and you know their parents had all been killed and it was just, it was unbelievable stuff. So you try not to. You know you have to remain focused, remain, try to be organized. A delegate authority understand that the people that have the expertise. It's their job to do it and it's certainly not my job to micromanage them and I tried to get that message back to Washington don't micromanage us. We sort of know what we're doing.
Tom Mueller:That concludes the first part of our interview with Ambassador Lewis Luck. Tune into our next episode to hear the conclusion of the interview, during which the ambassador talks about dealing with the plethora of NGOs on the ground in Haiti and also gives us some pointers for how to deal with a tough boss, which, in his case, was the Secretary of State. If you want to reach us here at the show, you can email me at tom@ leadinginacrisiscom. Thanks again for joining us and we'll see you soon on the next episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast.