An overview

Decision making is the cognitive process of selecting one choice out of a set of choices (Grant, 2009). The process starts when a task is to be done, an action is to be taken, a goal is to be achieved or a need is to be fulfilled, and different options exist to carry it out. It ends when the decision maker has selected an option. The decision maker can be an individual, a team, or a coalition of organisations. In emergency response, an option is usually an intended course of action, with actions occurring serially or concurrently (Grant, 2009). Below are some of the important factors which affect emergency decision making.

Emergency decision making is different: Decision making during emergency situations differs from ordinary or business decision making. Because lives and infrastructure may be at risk, stress levels are high, available time is short, the situation is continuously evolving and often information is incomplete and sometimes conflicting. In these circumstances, rapid situation assessment is a key pre-requisite for making appropriate decisions. Salas et al., (1995) describes this as a cognitive process in the situation assessment that provides the integration and understanding of information and temporal processes in which the experiences are used to predict the future. Stress being a conspicuous feature of emergency decision making, the degree of stress must also be linked to the process and outcome of emergency decisions (Bond & Cooper, 2005). The role of stress: Stress is defined as a psychological factor that threatens the individual’s physical and psychological well-being and increases the individual’s responsibility for the successful task performance (Driskell & Salas, 1991). Berkum (1964) attributed the decrease in working memory, where all the information is encoded for processing, as the cause of decreased performance under stress. Hence, excessive stress significantly reduces the human capability for information processing (Keina & Friedland, 1984). Fiedler and Garcia (1987) argued that decision performance is

41 influenced by the individual’s cognitive resources, level of intelligence, experience and technical expertise, which in turn are influenced by the degree of anxiety or stress. Task complexity and team support also have an influence on the decision outcome (Fiedler and Garcia, 1987).

The role of experience: Decision making is based on a concept, an understanding and identification of the general requirements of the situation (Stevens & Campion, 1994). Klein (1989) defines the stages of decision making as feature matching, situation assessment, mental simulation of actions performed in similar past situations, and the outcome of action. Wickens (1992) argued that decision making is based on a decision maker’s experience and an increased ability to assess risk. Therefore, even if a situation is evolving, an experienced emergency manger is more able to recognize, interpret and integrate the new information and make the decisions about how the response should proceed. Klein (1989) found experienced people were making choices based on their prior experiences and their ability to recognise or classify a situation based upon the critical cues from the environment and their goals and expectations from typical actions. The most successful decision makers were the ones with a good understanding of their goals and recognised the prominent features of the situation. They recalled a single course of action based on the recognition of situations and evaluation of the options by mental simulations to assess the outcomes (Bond & Cooper, 2005). However, this model cannot be applied when a previous situation is not completely remembered. The role of available time: In emergencies, the tendency to make decisions faster makes them more prone to errors. Therefore, the stress level is also high when decisions are required in a short time period. Emergency situations are characterised by dynamic and evolving conditions, role uncertainty and complex situational constraints. Some of the several factors that contribute to this complex process are the unique attributes of disasters, rarity of disasters and less time during the disaster to understand and to obtain the experience necessary for emergency response. These problems are highlighted from the perspective of information management and decision making within integrated emergency management environments (Paton & Jackson, 2002). Emergency management needs to deal with these characteristics by delegation, communication, decision making and inter-agency co-ordination.

42 The role of co-ordination and collaboration: Inter-agency communication is important for effective decision making (Paton et al., 1999). In large scale emergencies, like the risk of a tsunami, a team of various individuals is involved in decision making. These individuals are usually from different backgrounds with different expertise and experience. Moreover, many of their objectives differ, depending upon their roles in the overall emergency management. Therefore, understanding the situation in a right and similar way is a challenge. Implicit information gathering is more effective if team members have a good understanding, not only of their own information needs, but also the needs of the fellow team members who depend on them for information sharing. Hence, for effective multi-organizational and multi-disciplinary co-ordination and performance, a team mental model is very important to provide the information required to achieve the common goal. With a team mental model, an implicit knowledge of activities and procedures called tacit knowledge exists within a team (Paton & Jackson, 2002). Tacit knowledge permits people to learn from their experience and to apply their knowledge in a goal-directed manner (Sternberg et al., 2000). Tacit knowledge also improves a person’s adaptability to the changing environment. Therefore, it is an important component of effective performance in evolving, uncertain and complex emergency situations.

The role of explicit and tacit knowledge: The knowledge requirements for emergency decision making, as identified by Wang and Rong (2007), include explicit emergency knowledge sources and the agility of emergency knowledge support and features. The emergency knowledge sources include emergency environment information, contributing emergency incidents and emergency documentation. As the emergency knowledge required for decision making comes from diverse sources, it requires decomposition, matching and integration. The sources mentioned by Wang and Rong (2007) are quite important, but these authors ignored the other forms of knowledge, e.g. tacit knowledge (Paton & Jackson, 2002) which is experiential and obtained from exercises, trainings and simulations or from knowledge created about fellow team members’ work and their shared mental models.

Thompson and Dowding (2002) propose the following factors as the most critical for the decision making process.

43 The decision maker’s situational awareness (SA)

Level of stress

The difficulty of the task or its complexity Level of team support

These factors are strongly inter-dependent. For example, when a task is difficult or complex and the decision maker has a lack of situation awareness, the stress level rises (Sinha, 2005). Similarly, providing a higher level of team support can reduce high stress levels. The excessive stress also affects a decision maker’s ability to process information by reducing the short term memory (cognitive resource). Hence, situation awareness and team support can be improved to reduce the stress factor, ultimately improving the decision maker’s ability to make better and informed decisions. These issues are further discussed in subsequent sections.