Gisli Olaffson Transcript

Ky Luu: Welcome to the Leadership Corner.  The Leadership Corner is a forum where leaders from the non governmental organizations, United Nations, local and national governments come together to share their insights, their motivation to provide assistance to people and communities affected by natural and manmade disasters. Our guest today at the Leadership Corner is Gisli Olafsson, who wears many hats. He is part of Microsoft’s Disaster Response Team, he is the team leader for the Icelandic Urban Search and Rescue Team. Gisli, by the way, recently just returned from leading the Icelandic team in Haiti. He also a member of the UNDAC (United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination) team. Gisli, welcome to the Leadership Corner.

 Gisli Olafsson: Thank you.

 Ky Luu: Now, can you, by way of introduction here, just explain how you got into this field, and how did it become that you’re a member of the Microsoft team, that you’re a member of the UNDAC team, you’re part of the leading efforts for the Icelandic Search and Rescue Team. 

Gisli Olafsson: So, it all started back in 1993, when I joined a search and rescue team in Iceland. In Iceland, we build all of our search and rescue, and actually most of our disaster management, on volunteers. So, it was something that made me interested in this—the ability to help others. And I started out doing the normal work of running up the mountains to rescue people or search for missing people. But I actually discovered quickly that my strength was actually in coordinating what people were doing. So that kind of led me into more of the incident management role, and doing that then led me to doing this on an international basis, through like the UNDAC teams. And then, for a number of reasons Microsoft three years ago decided to put up a disaster response team, and I was lucky enough to find out about it, because you don’t always find out what happens within a 90,000 person company, and I applied to become part of that, was quickly hired to do that role. So now I’ve managed to take my passion and my work and join that together in the same thing. Sometimes, that creates problems because you don’t know when your work ends and when your hobby or passion takes over, so sometimes it causes long working days, but hey—as long as it’s something that’s giving, that’s quite good. 

Ky Luu: That’s a good lead-in to the next question I have here, which has to do with your motivation to stay engaged. This is a very difficult environment to work in, moving from one disaster to the next, obviously dealing with the pain, the suffering, the complexity of disasters. What keeps you going, what allows you to stay focused with regards to this job?

Gisli Olafsson: I think one of the key things that keeps me going is to see the rewards of your work. And I was often asked, back when I started doing search and rescue, “Why do you wake up in the middle of the night to run out to start searching for people? Why do you go out on Christmas Eve, away from your family, to help find someone who is missing?” And I always say, “It’s the smile I see when a parent is reunited with a missing kid, or when a child knows that its parent has been found.” And the same thing, for example, in Haiti, seeing people being rescued, and seeing the relatives come, and see that their loved one has been found. That smile keeps me going for a number of years, because that’s what’s up here in my mind afterwards, it’s those rewards. 

Ky Luu: Now you have recently come back from Haiti, and it’s all in the press now, it’s in the news, it’s one of the largest catastrophic events, that not only hit the island of Haiti, but in terms of its impact to a single nation, to a people, there really is not too many comparisons out there. How do you see the current response unfolding, from your views at the field level?

Gisli Olafsson:  So, we were one of the first or the first international teams to actually arrive in Haiti following the earthquake. So some of the things that we were able to see before everybody else came was to see what the situation actually was inside Port-au-Prince as we got there. And it was definitely for us, a realization that things were of much bigger nature than we had thought we were going into. Not only was the destruction at a much higher scale than we expected, but also, the number of bodies we saw lying on the streets certainly made us realize this was no minor disaster that we were going into. Now, during the first few days, you saw a lot of confusion, you saw a lot of problems come up. It was hard to coordinate. There were few people to do the coordination, and there were actually very few teams that were getting in. It took teams quite some time to get in because of issues with transportation and logistical flights getting in, and so on. And as always, during these first initial days, there’s a lot of chaotic things, and the coordination that happens is actually, it relies on that chaos, and it tries to use that, and try to just steer it in certain routes. But you can see immediately, I would say on day five/six, that things were starting to become a little more organized. However, what you often see during these kinds of disasters is that not everybody necessarily wants to be coordinated. Some of the teams that were coming in were not always just thinking about coming in there to be part of this international system of “how do you do a response”, but maybe more focusing on their own citizens that might be in the country and be lost, or on other things that sometimes for us were a mystery why. We had a team that we saw there that drove around the airport and took pictures, but never, never seemed to be doing any rescues or going out. Of course you always find these disaster tourists as well. But it’s also the scale; within the first week, we had 52 urban search and rescue teams, or 1800 people and over 180 dogs. That is the biggest urban search and rescue effort ever. And, at the same time, you had in total of over 500 organizations coming in to respond. And trying to coordinate all of that, is a big big task.

Ky Luu: Whose job is it to coordinate all of this? I mean, we hear whether we’re talking about the tsunami, we’re talking about other catastrophic events, coordination, as you pointed out here, has always been thrown out as something that either when it works, we see some of the immediate positive impacts, but when it doesn’t work, we also obviously see the negative ramifications. But whose job is it to coordinate, and what is effective coordination, and what is bad coordination?

Gisli Olafsson: So, within the international community, at least when it comes to the urban search and rescue teams, there is a pre-defined way in which we should operate. There is a pre-defined way that says that the international teams that are coming in should work with the UN, and the UN should be the one in collaboration with the local government, should be coordinating the effort. And what you see is that, that coordination it is chaotic at first, but it does get a little more organized as the days go by.  However, the big problem with this system is the fact that as a team, you have to be willing to be coordinated by the UN. And, as I said earlier, there’s not always all the teams that want that, and they may be taking directions from their ministries, or from back home, that saying, “You should be looking here and here and here, because we may have citizens of our countries there,” and not think about the overall picture, and sometimes that leads to replication of effort or gaps being left because of that. So, when we try to talk about good coordination you want to make sure that you’re utilizing the resources you have as good as you can. That there is no duplication, that there is no gaps. In order for that to work again, the teams, the organizations, have to be willing to participate. 

Gisli Olafsson: I think one of the key things that we need to do is to think about the local capacity of the people. We need to, whatever we do, needs to involve the local people.  We very often have these magic bullets that we want to throw at a problem like a disaster. So a government may decide to send a water purification plant or a field hospital or one solution or another that is easy for them to put in there as a short term way of saying "oh we are helping out". But what they very often forget is this - long-term - and if you are going to do anything long-term, you have to be willing to invest in the long term first of all, not just while it is still in the media. We're seeing now week 3 that the media attention is going away, step by step. How many of those organizations are going to be there 2-3 weeks from now when the media is no longer interested? So you have to have this long-term view of things and "yes I'm not just there to save lives the first few days but I want to be there to work, to help rebuild". And if you are going to do it, you have to do it through the community, you cannot come in there and build a hospital and say "oh we built a hospital". What we found for example, in one of the towns that we visited was that they had a hospital, but because nobody had funded it, they funded the building of it, but nobody had funded the continuation of running it - that hospital hadn't been used in two years. You may have seen a donor come in there and give money to build that, but they didn’t think about the long term. So, the same thing you need to do here. Anything you do needs to think in the long term. How do you ensure that you’re going to keep on funding or build local capacity to fund those projects going through. 

Gisli Olafsson: I think one of the things we need to keep in mind is that it’s not just about what the public media says, what CNN is doing, what ABC is saying, or what’s in the Wall Street Journal. We now have the ability to get people to actually report on things. This whole idea of citizen journalism and to keep people interested in things at a much longer term is coming through, all the social media revolution that we are going through right now. So, I think there is an opportunity for us there to push politicians and others to not just forget things, like we’ve forgotten Darfur or other crises in the past. But to actually make sure it stays current in that social media, even though CNN & others may have stopped covering it. So I think there’s an opportunity there - will we make use of it? That’s the big question. 

Gisli Olafsson: I think what I’m looking at from my personal point of view is that I really want us to start to learn from what we do. I keep going to yet another disaster and I see that we’re still doing the same mistakes, we’re still reinventing the wheel every time. Especially when it comes to areas like information management. How do we capture the information about what’s going on, and how do we share that out to as wide an audience as possible? Unfortunately every disaster I come to, we are reinventing the - what information are we going to gather, how are we going to do it? I see people creating new Excel Sheets for capturing the same data, and you go, like, “yeah, but we just did this a month ago or 2 months ago,” and you go, like, there must be a way in which we can start capturing these best practices, and we can actually not just identify the lessons that we need to learn, but actually learn from them. 

Gisli Olafsson: My heroes, when it comes to this particular work, are actually the local people. Because when I go out and I see what’s being done, it’s not us in the international community who are coming in. We usually come in from our comfortable lives, and we come in and rough it out for 10 days or 2 weeks or 3 weeks in a difficult space and we do, we try to do our best. But it’s actually the people who were there during the disaster, who stepped up and started rescuing people, started doing things because they felt like they needed to. And then, they’re the ones who continue to do that work. So, I very often meet people in this line of work, the locals, and I’ve seen people who are, do not have titles, they’re not the country managers or country directors or operation managers, but maybe some of the lowest level within the organizations they’re working with, and whether that’s the Red Cross or national staff for the UN, but they’re the people who rise up and actually make things happen during a disaster. I remember especially when I was in Indonesia three months ago for the earthquake there seeing this woman who, you know, small petite woman who was working for a UN agency; she didn’t have a high title, but she was the one making everything happen. And those are the leaders; it’s not the ones with titles, it’s the ones that make things happen. So, what I think we need to see more of are those kind of people, those kind of leaders that step up and do the real work.  

Ky Luu: Right. Gisli, I want to thank you for coming on the leadership corner. And I want to thank you for inspiring the next generation of leaders. 

Gisli Olafsson: Thank you.