Sense-making in a Simulated Emergency Operations Centre

This study reports the results of a laboratory experiment in decision-making in an Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) during a crisis. It adapted a validated simulation of a severe winter storm in a fictional city in Canada, during which a variety of serious events caused major disruptions, including loss of life. Participants were naïve individuals, as the focus was on sense-making in unfamiliar dynamic and uncertain environments and situations requiring urgent responses (i.e., conditions that occur during crises). The objective was to assess the impacts of enactment on the retention of memory of recent experiences. The enactment was theorized as the basis for sense-making processes where taking an action is guided by learning through acting. In contrast, predictions based on a simple model, the Zeigarnik effect, indicate the depletion of memory for completed actions, thus indicating their perverse effects on the capacity to learn. This experiment showed that participants in our simulation who played the role of passive observers of EOC activities during a severe storm remembered more of the events than did participants who played the role of trainees in the EOC who had to act on requests for information and decisions. Other results pointed to the conclusion that the role played by participants in the EOC significantly affected which events they remembered, their mood, and their priorities in the EOC. These results imply that having non-acting observers present in the EOC might be a way to better preserve organizational memory.