The Belfer Center, with support from McKinsey, brought together a diverse group of leaders from the emergency management community to discuss the evolving nature of emergency management, the challenges the enterprise faces, and solutions and strategies to better prepare for the new, poly-crisis climate. Among those leaders were former FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor and former Deputy Administrator Rich Serino.

During our early response, I realized that our ability to generate new innovative ideas to counter the lack of critical resources was fading. In some cases, it seemed like the harder we squeezed, the less and less “juice” we were able to produce. The struggle to generate novel ideas to overcome shortages ran parallel with our dwindling and hard-to-regenerate human resources.