Naturalistic Decision-Making in Natural Disasters: An Overview

Abstract

Paper Design Disaster managementDisasters may come suddenly and without previous warning. Some disasters happen due to an interaction of human and technology, AbstractDecision-making can take place in many settings: daily life problems, financial issues, health care matters or in emergencies and situations that require quick and high-risk decisions to be made. In natural or man-made disasters, the immediate decisions are crucial for effective mitigation and management. Thus, the Decision-makers during such situations must process a large amount of unreliable and incomplete information under sharp time restrictions and critical judgments are frequently made under pressure and high stake. The purpose of this paper is to present the decisionmaking process in real-life settings focusing on the recognition-primed model (RPD) in an attempt to understand how decisions are made in emergencies and natural disasters. Literature review was conducted and it was found that the dynamic behaviour of disasters requests the decision-makers to allocate resources and attention to collaboration and coordination. Decision-making, therefore, is a sensitive task of all management actors especially emergencies and disasters managers and the effective response to such calamities depends on how effective and timely are the decisions that have been made.

Decision-making at the sharp end: a survey of literature related to decision-making in humanitarian contexts

“…These challenges are a recurrent theme, too, in the emergency management literature (White and Turoff 2010;Kowlaski-Trakofler and Vaught 2003;Gralla et al 2016): the recognition and formulation of problems is an 'integral part of problem-solving in these settings' (Gralla et al 2016: 23). The focus on understanding a situation as a key part of the decision-making process owes much to Weick's theory of sensemaking, originally elaborated on the basis of a review of the (disastrous) response to a large-scale fire (Weick 1993) and referred to in several of the articles included in this survey (including Muhren and van der Walle 2009; Comes 2016; Gralla et al 2016;Bouafia and Khairi Zahari 2017;Lu 2017). In sensemaking theory, individuals and organisations are constantly exposed to a flow of information and events and try to make sense of these events in such a way as to engage in (as well as explain) action.…”

“…These focus on making an acceptable decision based on a, generally incomplete, understanding of the current situation and the application of previous experience and intuition. The analytic and naturalistic categories are 'the most important' approaches in discussions of decision-making in emergency management (Bouafia and Khairi Zahari 2017: 4), and a number of articles consider their relative merits in different types of (nonhumanitarian) emergency situation (Flin et al 1998;Patel et al 2002;Bouafia and Khairi Zahari 2017).…”