Heather Stuart

This study examined in-depth lessons from historical emergencies and disasters by engaging with state and federal response agencies, as well as those supporting response and recovery, and local government.

This project developed simple practical tools that can help people better manage their teamwork, improve their decision making and develop more creative solutions. These include the Team Process Checklist, Emergency Management Breakdown Aide Memoire, Psychological Safety Checklist and Cognitive Bias Aide Memoire. In addition, the project considered how organisations utilise the outcomes of research and developed a tool to help agencies utilise research more effectively. In addition to creating tools that help better manage teams and make more effective decisions, members of the project team have also developed methods to help people to act more creatively during operations. These tools have now seen excellent utilisation by emergency management agencies in Australia and have attracted growing interest from international partners in the UK and Spain.

Over three years, the project focused on the nature of catastrophic disasters and how they are conceptualised in the Australian context; the historical frequency of compound disasters in Australia; the most appropriate practices to plan and prepare for catastrophic disasters; and how businesses and community organisations can best be incorporated into planning and preparedness arrangements for catastrophic disasters. The key finding from this research is that existing principles for disaster planning and risk reduction are not effectively implemented to develop plans that consistently inform decision making. To improve this, a key utilisation output from the research has been an emergency management capability maturity assessment tool that can be utilised by governments and organisations to better understand potential capability gaps in the context of severe-to-catastrophic disaster scenarios. Outcomes of the research were presented as evidence to the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements.

This three-year project worked with those in the emergency management sector engaged in diversity and inclusion practice to develop an evidence-based framework capable of supporting more effective management and measurement of diversity and inclusion. This project has experienced a high level of uptake and use during its three-year term and training in the use of the framework is underway. This has been aided by the sector’s focus on progressing the diversity and inclusion agenda, and the work of peak agencies and end-user organisations to develop programs and leadership. It has also contributed to the repositioning of the diversity and inclusion agenda as a risk-based business imperative, and has developed and provided materials to support the integration of diversity and inclusion into resilience, risk and workforce planning frameworks.