Identifying and resolving breakdowns at the regional management level (#221)
Research into several major bushfires in Australia has shown that breakdowns in coordinated decision making can occur between different levels of an organization, leading to an impaired operational response. Of the different levels of an organization, the Regional level plays a central role in communication between groups by virtue of its position between the incident management level and the state control level. This paper explores the strategies employed by regional level coordinators and commanders in identifying breakdown events and the potential strategies for minimising their impact, either through direct resolution or mitigative responses. Eleven situational semi-structured interviews were conducted with regional level commanders/coordinators from the three Australian fire agencies. In this method semi-structured interviews were combined with simulated event questions based on a real fire scenario. Results indicated that breakdown identification strategies could be separated into four groups: detection via conflicting/confusing information, detection using experience based intuition, detection via formal and informal networks and detection through proxy designation. The major cues for identifying breakdowns were based on operational informational, environmental information, social factors (such as key personnel involved) and resources factors. Breakdown resolution strategies were dependent on the actual event but could be grouped into direct and indirect strategies, with the former focusing on immediate solutions and the latter focused on pre-planning and predictive strategies. These results demonstrate the importance of regional coordinators ability to identify issues prior to breakdowns occurring and provide a distinct set of cues that can be used by regional commander/coordinators to identify breakdowns in the coordination of large-scale incidents.