Repertoires of collaboration for common operating pictures of disasters and extreme events

Abstract

Disasters are dynamic, emergent scenarios involving diverse stakeholders in complex decision making and as such, disaster response systems must account for these conditions. We suggest that emergency service agencies should consider supplementing their traditional command and control approaches and common operating pictures (COP), with purposeful collaborative approaches. These would facilitate the generation of common operating pictures incorporating dynamic and emergent characteristics, providing a range of options with which to better respond to disasters. Collaborative management and negotiated integration of information represent a paradigmatic shift in our thinking about disaster response. We have utilized McCann's (1983) Social Problem Solving Negotiated Arrangements (SPS-NA) to highlight problems with conventional approaches during three disaster scenarios. As a result of lessons learned from this analysis we suggest that developing supplementary repertoires of collaboration would have a positive impact on improved COP for effective disaster response outcomes.

Who do you trust? The digital destruction of shared situational awareness and the COVID-19 infodemic

“…We know that most crisis management agencies have established, agreed, authenticated and qualified mental models on which they base their internal operational command and control systems. This gives them assurance and governance of the information they produce ( Bunker, Levine, & Woody, 2015 ) and qualifies their decisions and recommended actions to manage crisis situations. It also engenders public trust in these agencies, to provide relevant and critical crisis information and advice for public action.…”

Using Audio-Logs for Analyzing the Development of a Common Operational Picture in Multi-agency Emergency Response

“…Situational Awareness: Disaster management is an active process over time, which gradually changes as the situation develops, and the signals change [13]. Disaster response systems must be able to handle the complexity of the emergency environment and include the fact that a variety of agencies will be involved in making complex decisions during the operation [14].…”

Social media in times of crisis: Learning from Hurricane Harvey for the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic response

“…Misinformation, scaremongering or trivialisation of a crisis event can all present challenges to government authorities as they develop their crisis communication strategy. Over recent years, a tension has been generated between formal ‘command and control’ and emergent informal self-organising information and communication systems for crisis management decision-making (Bunker et al, 2015). Up until the last decade, formally constructed and controlled information systems generated much of the information for critical decision-making during a crisis.…”

“…The answer to this question implies not only shifts in media perception and participation but also changes in the way individuals, and organisations, such as emergency management agencies (EMAs), make sense of information in critical situations (Oh et al, 2012; Stieglitz et al, 2015; Vieweg et al, 2010). Social media platforms hold the possibility to augment emergency warnings, crisis response actions (Bunker et al, 2015), information seeking and broadcasting (Ross et al, 2018), collecting donations (Starbird and Palen, 2012) or hierarchy-free collaboration (Schlagwein and Hu, 2017). At the same time, social media communication might also produce an adverse impact on meaning creation and decision-making due to their personalisation of information; haphazard facilitation of convergence behaviour; and enablement of anti-social behaviour (Bunker et al, 2019).…”