This isn’t just a fuel crisis. It’s a leadership failure.
Why have we raced to appoint a Fuels Tzar to manage the “crisis”? It’s not that we haven’t had warning or been here before.
We do not have a plan to distribute fuel from import terminals to end users, particularly in regional areas. Now is not the time to debate fuel rationing. The triggers, processes and communication should have been pre-planned.
We don’t seem to have learned the lessons of previous crisis.
We don’t need emergency action to deal with a crisis – especially one that we knew would happen again. Departments and risk and resilience task forces are looking at these issues but looking isn’t enough. We need preparation, planning, and leadership. Perhaps that is the question—who is leading?
Leaders should be doing very little
Hardest job ever. Sitting on your hands watching everything just happen. Your team in action: measuring, evaluating, reporting, adapting. Executing. You’re not needed because you have prepared.
Leaders think about what needs to be done while they have time to think. They force procedures to be developed, training, walkthroughs, rehearsals. They ensure ongoing readiness despite staff churn. They hear the grumbles: it’s over the top, we have other things to do, we will work it out on the day. Leaders persist because preparation matters.
A lesson learned over years of military training and exercises, from the smallest patrols to the large multi-national deployments. Put into practice when deployed with Australian contingent on the advanced peacekeeping mission in Cambodia – soldiers in a heavily mined, lawless, disease-ridden country. We provided the communications, with French aviators, a two-person German medical team, and three hours flight time by helicopter to the nearest hospital in Thailand. What could possibly go wrong?
“Non majeur, nous ne volons pas la nuit”. (No major, we don’t fly at night)
Our first casualty was a soldier hit by a motor vehicle, at night. It was traumatic, for me as well as the soldier (who fully recovered by the way). The hardest thing I had to do was sit on my hands and not get involved. The process ran like clockwork: our local team stabilising, a helicopter flight through a storm, across the front lines of three warring armies and an international boundary.
The next crisis, the Australian Contingent Commander was shot while in a helicopter up country. I wasn’t around, nor was our Regimental Medical Officer. Flown into Phnom Penh, cross loaded to a fixed wing, flown to a Thai air base, and into a military hospital. It worked.
Despite one recent account that suggested we were fortunate, it wasn’t luck. Everyone knew what to do. We had prepared, liaised, reconnoitred, written SOPs and rehearsed. The military is a high-risk occupation. Taking risks was part of life but risk-taking isn’t gambling. Risk-taking is managed choice, gambling is chance
If you run a business, public or private, you are in the business of managing risk.
I saw it done well again during the Canberra bushfires of 2003 while a GM at Transact, a start-up communications company in those days. Most of the network cable was above ground. A smart business choice, offering the best return on investment for a cash-strapped organisation backed by investors wanting rapid returns. Above ground networks also came with some high risks, environmental damage being one. The fires destroyed half the network, but a recent exercise in testing business continuity meant that the team knew their roles: who was doing repair and recovery, who was speaking, who was engaging the insurance companies. They knew the priority for restoration and the need to keep customers satisfied and safe—while defending against a rapacious competitor.
The leader’s job isn’t to deal with a crisis; it is to be prepared for one. Certainly, there are things that need to be solved as circumstances unfold. Experience and a holistic view do matter.
Despite most of us knowing the principles, so many organisations are clearly ill-prepared. The self-congratulations after COVID belied the rapid paddling most organisations went through just to operate, and some barely managed to do that. Despite all the time and effort put into business and IT continuity plans, they were largely shelfware, optimised for planning rather than preparedness.
Being able to keep operating and being able to resume normal operations as quickly as possible, when the world throws an unexpected curve ball is resilience.
It is a leader’s job to expect the unexpected and being prepared to respond. Flexibility is being able to adapt your plan, not creating one in the middle of a crisis. Optimised for approval, not execution.
Success takes leadership and ownership. Both are missing. We will face this again. The question is whether we prepare—or perform
