The Fifth Risk(44)
The relationship between the people and their government troubled her. The government was the mission of an entire society: why was the society undermining it? “I’m routinely appalled by how profoundly ignorant even highly educated people are when it comes to the structure and function of our government,” she said. “The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a‘collective good’ sense.”
Her first big task upon returning to NOAA was to fix the polar satellite, and she did it. “She’s unflappable with whiny politicians and lawyers,” says a former NOAA official, who watched Sullivan attack the problem. “She was good at saying,‘Stop bothering my people and let them do their job.’” She got a new polar satellite, launched in November 2017, back on schedule, but with a twist: she arranged it so that the problems that had bedeviled her predecessors would not trouble her successors. “Of the many incredibly stupid things that a person can do on this planet, one is to build and buy a single satellite, when you know you’ll need more of them,” she said. There was no reason that NOAA could not budget for, and begin to plan, the next two, three, or four satellites; there were even economies of scale for some of the complicated parts. The problem was that no one in government liked to pay now if they could pay later. Nevertheless, she somehow persuaded the relevant parties in Congress and NOAA to make a deal for multiple satellites.
The ins and outs of how she’d done all this would have made for an excellent Harvard Business School case study—or a briefing memo for the new Trump administration. But that memo would never be read. The first Trump budget proposed removing the money in NOAA’s budget that she’d secured for future satellites. The Trump people would never call her, but if they had she would have offered them one simple piece of advice. “You need to figure out what you want your leadership team to be intentional about—because if they aren’t intentional about it, it won’t happen. There’s hundreds of things that will naturally happen. And then there are the things that won’t.” One of the things that wouldn’t happen is satellites getting built on time, within budget. Another was that Americans would die, if you didn’t work hard to figure out what was going on inside their heads.
That had been her next big project. A Weather-Ready Nation, she called it. The Joplin tornado had been the catalyst. It had various ambitions—making communities more responsive to the weather, making fishing stocks more resilient to the climate—but at its heart was the desire to better prepare Americans to face threats. Kathy had helped to install Louis Uccellini as head of the National Weather Service; he shared her passion for the problem. The meteorologists inside the Weather Service were bothered that people didn’t respond as expected to their warnings. But then they were weather geeks. Scientists. “I can’t trace exactly where or when or how the realization dawned [on us] that the jargon-laden bulletins were not comprehensible to users,” said Kathy. “Or that people didn’t respond to raw data; they respond to other human beings, trusted voices. Or that the punch line—what this storm may do to you—was often buried after many paragraphs of geeky weather details. Or that normal humans don’t understand probabilities and cannot translate a wind speed or rain rate into tangible worries about the roof coming off or being knee-deep in water. You don’t particularly care what the wind speed at five hundred millibars is. You want to know: What’s it going to do to my house?”
So they set out to understand the people on the receiving end of the forecasts. It wasn’t enough to farm the problem out to others. They needed people in NOAA studying the way Americans responded to warnings, and to risk. NOAA was an agency staffed by hard scientists facing a problem that cried out for psychologists and behavioral economists. “The odd group, whatever the odd group is, needs to be in the room,” she said. “There’s all sorts of inclinations not to do that. The existing powers say, ‘Leave me alone, and let me do what I want to do.’” She wanted to start a conversation inside the agency, with the understanding that they couldn’t predict exactly where it might lead.
It reminded her of something that had happened just after the Challenger explosion. American cities were planning to name streets and schools for the astronauts, but that had felt inadequate to her—and to the astronauts’ spouses. Everyone who’d been close to the astronauts wanted the meaning of their lives to be better understood through their deaths. “They all had this shared joy of bringing science and technology education to lots of people,” said Kathy. “We asked, how do we continue that?”
By the end of 1986, the astronauts’ families had decided to create a science education program—though of what sort they did not yet know. The spouses asked Kathy to figure it out. She started by bringing them all together, to explain how uncomfortable it was going to be to create an entirely new thing when they didn’t know exactly what it would be. They’d need to invite many odd groups into the room and give them the power to influence the project. “I told them,‘It’s your legacy to the crew. But to do it you need to create a network of people who feel they can shape it. The conversation really matters. Converse means exchange with. It does not mean transmit at. That’s how you get new thinking.’” She’d heard a line once that still resonated with her: The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea.