Wharton@Work

December 2024 | 

Transforming the Organization: FDNY’s Metamorphosis

Transforming the Organization: FDNY’s Metamorphosis

Before September 11, 2001, the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) was long regarded as one of the world’s premier firefighting organizations. But the aftermath of the terrorist attacks catalyzed a profound organizational transformation over the course of decades. Faced with an unimaginable loss of life (343 firefighters — 93 of whom were in leadership positions — representing more than 2,000 years of firefighting experience) plus the destruction of nearly a hundred vehicles and thousands of pieces of equipment (totaling an entire year’s budget), the department evolved, not only reinforcing its emergency response capabilities but also becoming a global leader in disaster preparedness and response. The FDNY's transformation, both in terms of acquiring new capabilities and reimaging existing ones, stands as a model not only of crisis management excellence but also of adaptive, forward-looking leadership.

According to Greg Shea, adjunct professor of management and academic director of the Leading Organizational Change program, what seems today like an obvious choice to reimagine itself was anything but. “The FDNY very easily could have said, ‘Change? What change? We’re going to rebuild the department as it was on September 10.’ This would have been a tremendous success, mirroring one many organizations make after they go through a crisis: revert to the old model, regardless of evidence that a better one exists. Remarkably, the FDNY chose something different.”

Shea and research colleagues Paul Brown, retired captain of the FDNY, and executive coach Andre Kotze have been exploring the transformation after conducting more than 80 hours of interviews with 9/11 first responders. They are currently at work on a book on the subject, sharing leadership lessons that resonate across all organizations.

Learning New Capabilities

Profound crises usually reveal knowledge that can and should inform any efforts to rebuild the pre-crisis organization. Decades of research confirm that businesses that actively embrace learning in times of upheaval are better equipped to navigate both future crises and the complexities of an ever-changing market landscape.

“The FDNY was exposed to a number of things in the course of dealing with this horrific event and its aftermath,” says Shea. “By aftermath, I’m referring to the first couple of weeks of rescue mode, which entailed searching for survivors and putting out multiple fires in a number of large buildings, hundreds of cars, and the enormous debris field. Then recovery mode, which lasted for many months, involved the FDNY’s major role in the search for the deceased at the site while also working to replace, such as one can, the hundreds of people they lost.”

According to first responders, it was during recovery mode that the FDNY began the shift from fire department to incident-management department. “They were still the FDNY,” says Shea, “but they began making a tremendous transformation when they acknowledged that something like 9/11 could happen again. Fire departments are set up to handle situations for a couple of days, not to be deployed for weeks and months. But 9/11 exposed them to the skills of incident management, as they worked with FEMA, the Forestry Department, and other organizations with more wide-ranging expertise.”

One of the examples Shea cites is when, during recovery, the Forestry Department reached out to provide resources. They encountered some resistance, even though they had skills and equipment that would be of help. Shea says the cultural bias toward going it alone and being in charge, plus the overwhelming scope of the crisis, contributed to the FDNY’s reluctance to accept assistance. But the federal firefighting agencies didn’t give up. Positioned outside the room where an important morning meeting was taking place, they approached one of the remaining senior-level FDNY leaders. That leader asked them what they had, and they responded by asking, “What do you need?”

“The next business day, they got more than what they asked for,” Shea explains, “including 400 communication devices and two transmission towers — atop the Empire State Building and the USS Intrepid, the decommissioned aircraft carrier in the Hudson River — to replace the previous one on the North Tower of the World Trade Center.”

As recovery efforts continued, the FDNY metabolized the incident-management capabilities of the organizations they worked with so well that they started to get invited by FEMA to help with other disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, Wyoming wildfires, Superstorm Sandy, and, most recently, Hurricane Helene. As Shea describes, “The FDNY moved from being consumer of FEMA's skills to student of those skills to national resource.”

In the business world, exposure to new knowledge and skills in the wake of a crisis is equally crucial. Those who take in valuable lessons can identify emerging risks more swiftly and adapt their strategies accordingly, much like the FDNY's evolution in disaster response and management. This proactive approach to crisis management becomes a cornerstone for sustainable growth and success in any industry.

Building Resilience

The lessons during and after a crisis may be about the workforce and who shows exemplary leadership and should be considered for a promotion — or who doesn’t show up in ways that their formal position would suggest they should. It also may be about the work and different or better ways of performing functions or new functions that should be acquired. And sometimes, absorbing those lessons takes more than one try.

Shea identifies a countercultural mindset change around mental health as one of FDNY’s most impactful shifts in the wake of 9/11. “As one of the interviewees said, ‘Before September 11, we took most of our therapy out of a bottle.’” But some in the department understood immediately that the impact of the terrorist attacks on its 11,000 people was too big for a business-as-usual response. They brought therapists into the firehouses, but few took advantage. The norm of self-reliance held.

But instead of giving up, Shea explains, FDNY leadership took another step back and realized that bringing strangers into a tightly knit organization where the culture was one of “sucking it up” and dealing with trauma individually was never going to work. So, they called in and began training their own retirees to start providing basic levels of support and act as conduits to mental health professionals who were highly skilled in PTSD and trauma.

That second attempt was a success. “Today, if you've got a problem, people aren't going to say ‘tough it out.’ They're going to say, ‘you’ve got to get that dealt with,’” says Shea. “Our interviewees told us it's not uncommon for firefighters to say to one another, ‘I saw so-and-so, and you should see them too.’”

At the same time, the FDNY rethought their informal caretaking process for when a firefighter died or was seriously injured on the job. The magnitude of the losses on 9/11 overwhelmed that informal process. “It didn't take them long to create a family-support process with dedicated resources. It wasn’t a case of changing something they were doing or adding something new. The difference was in how they organized to do it. In fact, one of the people we interviewed said, ‘I knew we were going to be okay when they institutionalized family support.’ He said, ‘I knew we were better.’”

“Ultimately, 9/11 did not change the FDNY. The FDNY changed itself,” says Shea. “They made choices about metabolizing the incident-management command models they were exposed to and the existing capabilities and processes that could be improved. In the process, they became a sought-after national resource.”