Thinking outside the box

Steve is an Associate Professor in Disaster and Emergency Management and an ARC DECRA Fellow in in the School of Social Sciences in the College of Arts, Law and Education. Over the course of his extensive career, he has developed resilience initiatives with organisations from the public sector, including state and federal government agencies; in the private sector, with organisations from across the critical infrastructure sector; and in the not-for-profit sector. He brings this practical experience to academia, conducting research that seeks to enhance the human capabilities of teams working in high consequence environments such as crisis and emergency management. He continues to combine his academic and practical capabilities on national advisory groups promoting organisational resilience.

‘Following both the commission on 9/11 and the Global Financial Crisis, failures of imagination were identified as root causes of deficiencies in planning and response.’

In order for emergency and crisis managers to foster creativity and stretch their imagination in scenario planning, it is necessary for them to have the appropriate tools. Research conducted by Steve and his colleagues led to the development of an alternate method for scenario planning that uses Stretch-Thinking Loops. This technique has recently been used in Australian COVID-19 scenario recovery planning.

Managing our cognitive limitations

In emergency and crisis management, there is a need to make decisions with imperfect information, to process large amounts of intelligence and distil this into a coherent understanding of the situation. However, cognitive biases are acknowledged as mental behaviours that can prejudice decision quality in a significant number of decisions for a substantial number of people and are inherent in human reasoning.

‘Important actions made during and after numerous high profile disasters have indicated that bias influenced the decision-making of those involved.’

Collaborating with Australia’s leading marine spill disaster response experts, Steve and his colleagues identified a series of cognitive biases that were developed into an industry driven aide memoire that can first be used to assess the available information, intelligence and decisions, and then used to determine the meaning of the information, intelligence and decisions.

Building trusting relationships swiftly

Interorganisational collaboration requires trust, and it is important for those involved to be able to gain trust quickly or enhance existing trusting relationships during and after a disaster. Although pre-existing trusting relationships are the gold standard for collaboration in emergency and crisis management, they may not always achievable. In these circumstances, trust must be formed swiftly.

‘Notable disasters such as Exxon Valdez, World Trade Center Attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and Haiti earthquake have highlighted failures in interorganisational collaboration.

Research that Steve conducted with emergency management practitioners from the public and not-for-profit sectors involved in the 2016 Tasmanian Floods, identified that ‘swift trust’ facilitated collaborative relationships. Working with the Tasmanian State Government, this research developed a guidance document explaining how to foster collaborative relationships in emergency management recovery operations