The idea that a command and control system should be founded on a managed cycle of information gathering, understanding, decision and action is not new.  John Boyd’s ‘OODA Loop’ (Boyd, The Essence of Winning and Losing, 1995) was first presented in a different context, but now underpins a good deal of development and practice in the command and control field.  We have found that the OODA Loop is a particularly useful model when time and dispersal are important factors.

Boyd’s OODA Loop is therefore quite a good foundation for command and control in disaster management, where the dispersed elements of police and emergency service organizations (ESOs) need to think, decide and act consistently, even when they are far apart and racing to stay ahead of unfolding events.

This requires information that is available, accurate and consistent, supporting the achievement of shared understanding (often called shared situational awareness).  Shared understanding is the foundation of effective distributed decision-making.  Achieving it is difficult because of the range of factors involved: not just good information, but also the many ‘softer’ contextual factors surrounding the situation and the decision-makers.  For disaster management organisations, achieving shared understanding relies on disciplines and capabilities like intelligence, data fusion, common operating pictures and decision support tools.

But there’s a problem.  In complex crisis situations, all those affected are involved in critical decision-making.  Like the responders, members of the community must do their best to understand what’s going on around them and to make the best decisions they can.  Shared awareness and consistency are hard to achieve.

Imagine community members staying at home because nobody told them how fast the fire was moving.  Evacuating on the wrong route and being cut off by rising flood waters because they didn’t believe what they were told.  Going to an evacuation centre only to discover that the authorities had closed it and opened another.  Or ESOs focusing support on one community member or group (perhaps based on one agency’s perspective) when another was, in fact, more vulnerable.  Or deploying scarce resources to one small township when the NGOs knew that another was in more immediate danger.  If only they’d all had the same information and shared a level of understanding.

So it is essential that disaster managers recognise, understand and start to work with the community’s decision cycle.  By understanding how the community thinks, decides and acts, agencies and ESOs can act in concert with NGOs and the community, achieving more effective disaster management processes and underwriting community resilience.

This requires us to answer questions that are still relatively unfamiliar.  How can ESOs take part in the community conversation?  How do they recognise community sentiment, atmosphere, influences and belief about the situation and the roles being played by others?  What has to be done to enable common understanding?  And where is the tipping point, at which part of the community establishes consensus and decides collectively to do something that the ESOs have to react to?

Right through the traditional command and control disciplines and capabilities, new approaches are needed.

For example, just as government agencies and ESOs are used to considering information as ‘trusted’ or ‘untrusted’ depending on where it came from, so do members of the community.  We don’t tend to trust faceless institutions but are happier with the elements that we can see and interact with: the local policemen, firemen, paramedics and other emergency service-men and -women.  We also trust our personal networks.  Many of us hold a near-constant conversation with our friends on Facebook, exchanging views and forming collective opinions on the things that matter to us.

But the interesting thing is the trust we place in people we have never met.  Consider eBay.  We choose to buy from a particular seller not because of what eBay says, but because of what other members say.  Or Amazon, where we trust the views of other buyers to guide our shopping decisions.  Or Twitter, through which we tune in to a host of complete strangers.  Trust is something that we like to make personal decisions about.

The community should also be seen as an important source of information and insight.  How do agencies and ESOs leverage the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ (Surowiecki, 2004)?  With the benefit of local knowledge and what they can see with their own eyes, the wisdom of the community must be taken into account in the decisions that affect them.  They may know best.  A really effective approach to enabling community resilience must combine the wisdom of the crowd with the local insight of NGOs and the better information channels and decision support systems of agencies and ESOs.

It can be done.  Our methodology for disaster management consists of six stages (Listen, Understand, Decide, Communicate, Act and Learn) and three critical overarching enablers (Trust, Influence and Cooperation).  Throughout this modified decision cycle, new, smarter, more imaginative methods and approaches can underwrite better community outcomes.  We balance traditional (and still indispensable) ‘command and control’ with a bottom-up ‘persuade and cooperate’ approach.