In 2016, entrepreneur Billy McFarland and rap artist Ja Rule flew down to a private island in the Bahamas to plan a truly epic party. The Fyre Festival was promoted on social media by models , “influencers”and a marketing team that promised luxury villas, private jets and gourmet food.[1] That Netflix and Hulu released competing documentaries titled, respectively, “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” and “Fyre Fraud” tells you how successful they were at delivering on their promises. While easily dismissed as the just deserts of millennial self-indulgence, the Fyre Festival’s postmortem is a case study of organizational dysfunction that is easily transferrable to a military audience.
- Whether planning fleet operations or a raging party on an island formerly owned by Pablo Escobar, listen to dissenting opinions
The Fyre Festival starts its inevitable sprint towards failure when its logistics coordinator is dismissed after insisting that the selected location lacks both the size and infrastructure to support the concert.[2] Other interview subjects stated that McFarland refused to listen to legitimate concerns about the concert’s viability up until the day of execution, indicating a culture of extreme self-deception. It is easy to laugh at the Fyre organizers and far harder to critically examine how we react, as both an individual and as part of an organization, to dissenting opinions.
How would you or your wardroom react to a junior officer criticizing a tactical plan or a commanding officer’s initiative? What if it was a junior petty officer who disagreed with a plan being supervised by the goat locker? The Chief of Naval Operations stated in congressional testimony that the mishaps that occurred in Seventh Fleet in 2017 were in part caused by the Navy’s “can-do” culture. Yet Sailors of all ranks, to include the sitting Seventh Fleet commander at the time of the USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and John S. McCain (DDG-56) collisions stated that they informed seniors that they were overworked and under-resourced, indicating that leaders at multiple levels had identified a heightened level of risk. Did senior personnel fail to appreciate that risk or did they fail to listen in the first place?
- Establish reasonable expectations, whether for luxury accommodations or our role as sailors
Fyre Festival planners knew that they would not be able to deliver the luxury concert experience they had sold to attendees. Despite paying for a promised luxury bungalow, the average attendee spent the night on a wet mattress in a FEMA tent. Many of the concert goers took this change in circumstance poorly, with accusations of looting and an apparent breakdown in social order. In one interview, a clean-cut young man relates the story of his group peeing in the tents surrounding their own to keep other people away.
Before touting our superior discipline and resiliency, we should consider how many sailors fail to complete their enlistment because of a massive incongruity between their expectations of life in the Navy and reality? How many of those losses resulted from willful obfuscation of reality in the recruiter’s office? How many resulted from leaders simply failing to take the take to explain the realities of deployed life to our junior personnel? Not every graduate of recruit training is suited for life in the fleet, but losses due to either deception or a lack of mentorship should be unacceptable.
- Do you want to be a concert organizer or produce an awesome concert? Do you want to be a commander/commanding officer or lead sailors?
In addition to lacking any moral compass, concert organizer McFarland embodies the worst traits of a leader who is more interested in the status associated with his job than getting the job done.[3] The desire to be someone, as opposed to do something, is a hallmark of toxic leaders, and the convergence of status and lack of supervision only serves to reinforce negative behavior. The number of officers indicted in connection to Fat Leonard are a testament to the corrosive influence of access and status seeking. Senior officers, after all, are no longer furnished with someone whispering “memento mori” in their ears.
- Do not pay Kendall Jenner $250,000 for a single tweet in support of your concert, or the NFL $5,400,000 to support the military.
There is a certain degree of schadenfreude experienced in watching the Fyre Festival implode, particularly as the event’s leadership spent a quarter of a million dollars to have Kendall Jenner send a tweet advertising the event. That sensation of smug superiority retreats rapidly in consideration of the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) expenditure of $5.4 million to buy moments of recognition for veterans and active duty service members at NFL games between 2011 and 2012. That such an expenditure took place while the DoD struggled to operate under the Budget Control Act of 2011 only makes it more dubious.
Tolstoy wrote that unhappy families are unique in their unhappiness. A layman’s study of organizational culture, however, reveals significant commonality in causes of disfunction, regardless of the organization’s scope and purpose. Unlike the Fyre Festival, the US Navy is not generally characterized by haphazard incompetence and criminality. There are, however, echoes in segments of our disfunction. It can be extremely challenging to consider our organizational culture critically and unemotionally and cheap and easy to laugh at the Fyre Festival’s self-immolation. But if you watch the documentaries with a critical eye, you may draw parallels that allow you to improve your organization.
Endnotes
[1] An influencer is an internet personality who receives pay, merchandise or other compensation by generating ad revenue, with YouTube as one of the more popular hosting platforms. This is a real thing.
[2] Unless otherwise specified, sequence of events and statements by personnel associated with the Fyre Festival are derived from the author’s viewing of “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened,” available on Netflix
[3] Which, to be fair, involved hanging out on a private island in the Bahamas with super-models, so pretty understandable. The “Be” versus “Do” paradox is derived from anecdotes relayed by associates of iconoclastic Air Force officer, Colonel John Boyd.
