In the 1990s, as an editor for Internal Auditor magazine, my team and I put together a piece called “Before Disaster Strikes.” In it, we asked several organizational leaders to describe the “lessons learned” from major disasters they had faced, including the 1996 Olympic Games bombing in Atlanta and the Northridge earthquake in 1994. Apparently, we were on to something, because my readings this week emphasize the role that past experience plays in creating the tacit and explicit knowledge required to manage disaster risk and recovery.
To begin with, all three of the articles rely on several specific incidents as case studies to support their points about the role of knowledge management and transfer in emergency situations: Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in Chua; Deepwater Horizon and other oil rig disasters in Ibrahim & Allen; and storm Xynthia on the west coast of France in Weichselgartner & Pigeon. According to Chua, six primary lessons learned from Katrina that were applied when hurricane Rita hit resulted in preparation and response efforts after that storm that “greatly surpassed that for Katrina.” Weichselgartner & Pigeon note that “…there is a need to build upon past achievements in creating more understanding of natural hazards, by better integrating that knowledge into the wider efforts directed at sustainable development.”
However, Chua points out the importance of not just looking at past events in isolation but considering them thematically. “In this way, a collection of similarly themed lessons learned that transcends across the confines of all past cases can be brought to bear. Over time, lessons learned can be chained into richer and more textured documentations such as learning histories that contain descriptions of various circumstances under which past decisions were made, as well as the rationale and the outcomes of those decisions.”
One such obvious theme is that effective knowledge management is an essential part of ANY successful disaster planning program. Indeed, Ibrahim & Allen point out that “…the ability of offshore crews to share information with each other and communicate effectively could be the difference between life and death, between minor environmental damage and an environmental catastrophe.”
Yet all three articles call out the inadequacy of academic studies regarding knowledge management and disaster risk management and recovery. According to Chua, “…despite its knowledge-intensive nature, disaster management attracts little attention from the KM community.” Chua, therefore, calls for more KM research to be performed in the disaster management arena. Ibrahim & Allen, who focus on how information sharing can contribute to the trust in superiors required to successfully manage—and even survive—an oil rig disaster, note that while a plethora of studies on trust and its relationship to many aspects of human behavior and organization, “the literature on trust and information sharing during major incidents is particularly limited.”
Unfortunately, even when knowledge is acquired through research, it doesn’t always translate into effective action, as Weichselgartner & Pigeon point out. They note that the recent increased focus on the role of knowledge management and risk situations hasn’t made much practical difference:
“…despite an immense expansion of risk-related knowledge systems–special research programs and institutes, specialized journals, advanced technology, increased financial resources, and so on–insufficient progress has been made in converting research findings into practical DRR management.”
It is possible, therefore, to “know better and lose even more,” as they put it. “Researchers often do not consider the needs of potential users in policy and practice when conducting research and do not systematically produce directly usable risk information and, likewise, decision-makers do not always use the most appropriate available scientific information to make policy decisions.”
Which is the ultimate purpose of creating, transferring and managing knowledge, after all.
By the way, Weichselgartner & Pigeon do an excellent job, in my opinion, of clearly delineating the differences between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, as well as between tacit and explicit knowledge. I found their article very readable and highly informative.
References:
Chapman, C. (1996). Before disaster strikes. (cover story). Internal Auditor, 52(6), 22.
Chua, A. (2007). A tale of two hurricanes: Comparing Katrina and Rita through a knowledge management perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(10), 1518-1528.
Hassan Ibrahim, N., & Allen, D. (2012). Information sharing and trust during major incidents: Findings from the oil industry. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(10), 1916-1928.
Weichselgartner, J., & Pigeon, P. (2015). The Role of Knowledge in Disaster Risk Reduction. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 6(2), 107-116.
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I always think of my friend Greg when I think of disaster preparedness. He and I have worked together at 2 different employers over the years, and I was always impressed by his preparedness. One year, during a rare heavy snow fall (this is decades ago) he was stranded in the office for 2 days, without power. Luckily, he had prepared by keeping an emergency supplies kit on hand — bottled water, granola bars, extra clothing, etc. He also always keeps a blanket in his car, as well as emergency rations and water, flashlights, extra batteries, a multi-tool like a Swiss Army knife, etc. People sometimes laugh at him for that, but he’s the one who manages to get through snow storms and other weather events just fine. He seems to enjoy trying to figure out the best way to get through theoretical situations like that. I have worked at companies that have given short shrift to preparedness like that and have seen them suffer the consequences. It isn’t necessarily that a disaster has a low probability have happening, but it is that probability AND the consequences of not being prepared that should be taken into account when considering disaster preparedness.
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One of the things I liked about the Chua article was the observation that in the event of an evacuation order, the governor has to also order that the highways be reconfigured to be one-way. While that initially struck me as an improvement to the overall “checklist” of things to do in the event of a disaster and disaster readiness, if you abstract that edict into, “improve transportation bandwidth”, you get a different perspective on it. What does this thought do for evacuation by land, sea, or air?
If you were a telecommunications person, reconfiguring your router with extra ethernet ports to improve speed and bandwidth is call trunking. So, trunk the highways. Designate which ones will be in which direction and just change all the highways into a one-way system each.
It can change your thinking.
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This is a really fascinating synthesis of some of the more disaster focused literature in our reading list. I’m very much interested in the role of KM in disasters, so I look forward to getting in to these articles. I completely agree with the assertion that there is a lack of disaster focused knowledge management literature, which is especially crucial given how important knowledge management is in disasters. However, I somewhat disagree with the point regarding the practical difference made by disaster and risk management literature. Look at Hurricane Harvey last year, a storm with many parallels to Hurricane Katrina. While the damage and loss of life in Houston was still terrible, it was not nearly as bad as during Katrina. I think research in disaster risk management has led to substantive policy changes over the past decade or so, and we saw those policy changes play out during last year’s hurricane season. There is still a lot of work to do, and there are still a lot of vulnerabilities that research or policy haven’t covered yet, but I disagree with the assertion that there has been little in the way of practical difference made by risk management and KM literature during disasters.
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Yeah, I agree — the W & P article does a nice job with those distinctions.
Speaking of the W&P article, you hit on this in your post, that knowing doesn’t necessarily lead to the right decision making. In the W & P article, there’s this line: “The case study [concerning Storm Xynthia] illustrates that the sharing of data and information is often prevented by underlying issues of power and competition at institutional and administrative levels … (p. 112). The article ends on a discussion about policy — as you do — but then that raises a whole lot of questions about a whole different area. And that means, this stuff gets difficult very quickly. What are we to do?
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Keep going. What is it Churchill said? “If you’re going thru hell, keep going.” Something like that, the point being that the more difficult it is, the more we need to keep plugging away. Eventually one arrives on the other side, hopefully a better one.
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Christy,
I love that you decided to read and included Chua research in your blog post cornering disasters situations and applying experiences from a thematic standpoint. I have just fallen in love with conducting and applying research thematically. I think applying something thematically is so important because i believe it’s when you tap into working in corporate America like settings. I also think disaster like situations in differing settings such as academic is also incredibility useful and important.
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