Lessons for Leaders from 9/11 and the FDNY
This coming September will mark 23 years since the WTC towers went down.
Paul Brown (FDNY, captain, retired), Andre Kotze (executive coach, Teamworks), and I continue our now 7 year project of interviewing retired FDNY first responders from 9/11/01. We also continue, thereby, to collect learnings of leading amidst crisis, recovery, and renewal, both individual and organization, learnings all too relevant (unfortunately) to our current times. We attempt, through workshops and writing, to pass along these learnings and eventually to generate funds for FDNY charities for fallen and injured firefighters (and their families), especially from 9/11.
We just generated another article based on our research, this one concerning inter and intra organizational cooperation. The article draws lessons from our research about 9/11, the immediate aftermath in particular, on how to generate that cooperation. “I’m from the Park Service and I’m Here to Help: Lessons in Intra- and Inter Organizational Collaboration from 9/11.” World Financial Review, https://worldfinancialreview.com/im-from-the-park-service-and-im-here-to-help-lessons-in-intra-and-inter-organisational-collaboration-from-9-11/
Our other articles present learnings regarding additional challenges facing leaders. Brief descriptions of and links to those articles appear below.
Regarding organizational change, several pieces offer findings. One appears in Firehouse Magazine, arguably THE professional journal for first responders, a journal that receives over half a million unique site visitors every month: Twin Towers and Organizational Change. The article concisely presents the efforts of the FDNY to change itself after 9/11 and the way that the Work Systems Model of change can help to understand the effectiveness of their efforts and guide other efforts at organizational change. (For a more expansive presentation of the change model and its application, Leading Successful Change).
Another article appears in Harvard Business Review and covers both organization change and renewal: https://hbr.org/2021/09/how-the-new-york-fire-department-changed-after-9-11
A Wharton at Work article about the importance of timing efforts at organizational renewal: https://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/thought-leadership/wharton-at-work/2022/08/timing-is-everything/
Finally (for now), our Knowledge at Wharton article extracts lessons for those leading through crisis and associated hard times: Leading through Hard Times
More to come as we continue our shared privilege of conducting this research.