Get your team across the line with research-backed tools

A suite of team management and strategic decision-making tools, drawing on the latest research, is helping emergency managers and their teams to function well during a crisis.

By Bethany Patch from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC. This article was first published in Issue Two 2021 of Fire Australia.

Incident management teams and emergency management teams (IMT/EMTs) respond to emergencies day and night, often coordinating multiple incidents at once and making sense of complex information from disparate sources. They must quickly provide accurate information and warnings to numerous stakeholders.

While everyone is expected to play their specialised roles, teamwork enables IMT/EMTs to manage under this sort of pressure. Effective collaboration in these situations depends on a range of skills—both technical and non-technical in nature— to manage stress, fatigue and heavy workloads.

Over the last five years, Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC researchers have been working closely with emergency managers to ensure that people working in these critical roles have the latest knowledge to support them when the heat is on.

Associate Professor Chris Bearman at CQUniversity led the CRC’s research team for the Improving decision-making in complex multi-team environments project. The team developed six tools to help emergency management leaders and teams function well during a crisis.

“If we’re going to ask people to operate in increasingly complex environments, we need to give them the skills and tools to do so effectively,” A/Prof Bearman explained.

This added complexity means that decisions are now more complicated than ever. Helping people to cover all of the bases is critical, explained Dr Steven Curnin, one of the researchers who developed the strategic decision-making tools at the University of Tasmania.

“Humans are fallible, and during a crisis our decision-making can suffer. Simple tools like these can help,” Dr Curnin said.

Rob McNeil AFSM, Assistant Commissioner of Regional Operations at Fire and Rescue NSW, agrees, reiterating the importance of strategic decision-making in any type of disaster.

“The outputs from this project will greatly assist the industry in preparing our future leadership for disasters and the decisions they will be expected to make,” Mr McNeil said.

Together, the six tools form an effective suite of resources that IMT/ EMT leaders can draw on to support the overall functioning of their teams. They are helpful when onboarding and training new members, and useful during emergencies or in after-action reviews and debriefs to reflect and improve upon teamwork capabilities.

The tools all draw from a vast amount of research and expertise from the research team, as detailed below.  

Team management

The team management tools—developed by A/Prof Bearman and Dr Sophia Rainbird at CQUniversity, and Dr Christine Owen and Associate Professor Benjamin Brooks at the University of Tasmania—were designed to assist emergency management teams to monitor communications and deal with any breakdowns that might impair operational performance. This will help strengthen teamwork before, during and after response and recovery efforts.

• The Emergency Management Breakdown Aide Memoire is a simple checklist that helps teams recognise communication breakdowns through their outputs (e.g. incident action plans), and in their formal and informal organisational networks. Intended to be used by a senior officer, it identifies issues at a general level and provides five practical solutions to resolve any further breakdowns: delegate, resource, mentor, assert, replace.
• Taking a slightly different approach, the Team Process Checklist is more of a health check for effective teamwork and is used to build upon issues identified by the previous tool. It helps leaders think through three aspects of effective teamwork— communication, coordination and cooperation—to determine the nature of the problem, using queries such as ‘Are team members passing on information in a timely manner?’ and ‘Are appropriate communication procedures being used?’.

These tools were initially based on an extensive literature review of methods used to monitor teams, before being refined and evaluated by state-level end users during large-scale emergencies.

The other two team management tools were developed by A/Prof Bearman and Dr Peter Hayes (CQUniversity), with the support of Mark Thomason (Country Fire Service) and Peter Bremner (CQUniversity) on the Key Tasks Cognitive Aid.

• The Emergency Management Non-Technical Skills checklist is designed to help emergency management individuals and teams to enhance their cognitive, social and personal skills to complement technical skills and strengthen individual and team capabilities. This tool focuses on seven nontechnical skills—communication, coordination, cooperation, leadership, situation awareness, decision-making and coping with stress/fatigue—and provides descriptions and behavioural markers that can be used to determine how effectively these skills are being used and where improvements can be made.
• The Key Tasks Cognitive Aid is a checklist for regional and state control centres. It is designed to prompt leaders during a crisis to ensure their teams are undertaking the tasks most important to effective performance. It covers five phases of a control centre’s incident management process: readiness, escalation, coordination, de-escalation and termination or closing the centre. Within each phase is a checklist that can be used to tick off the key activities required.

Strategic decision-making

Developed by A/Prof Benjamin Brooks and Dr Steven Curnin at the University of Tasmania, the following cognitive tools recognise the growing number of tasks required in IMT/EMTs and the need to address human capability in changing environments. They help to identify and address some of the most fundamental cognitive issues associated with decision-making errors or biases.

• The Psychological Safety Checklist provides simple strategies to help people feel safe while enhancing and establishing trusting relationships. It outlines a cyclical strategy that a team leader can adopt when the team is first formed, and can repeat when new members join, to create a psychologically safe environment. It also suggests possible actions to take, such as ‘clarify roles and make them visible’, to ensure safety is maintained.
• The Cognitive Bias Aide Memoire can be used to identify cognitive biases in decision making. It is designed to be familiarised by a nominated team member, who would then act as the ‘devil’s advocate’ to challenge any existing team biases and mitigate the effect of those biases. It is best used for key decisions and involves two steps (each broken down into checklists):

1. assess available information, intelligence and decisions
2. determine its meaning.

These tools are now being used to support Australian emergency services and local government to lighten the load of managing emergencies by enhancing and supporting more efficient teamwork—an essential piece of the emergency management puzzle.

Mark Thomason AFSM, Manager Risk and Lessons Management at SA Country Fire Service, highly recommends the tools to other emergency managers.

“The straightforward, practical tools developed through this research are of great benefit to emergency managers to ensure their teams are functioning to the best of their ability,” Mr Thomason said.

“Anyone will find the tools invaluable during operational responses, debriefings or training, whether they work in incident management and strike teams, at regional or state operations centres, as team leaders, or as neutral observers.”

All six tools can be found on the CRC’s Driving Change resource, under the ‘Teamwork tools’ section: www.bnhcrc.com.au/driving-change/tools.

You can also learn more about the research project behind these tools at www.bnhcrc.com.au/research/multiteamenvironments.

Read more:

• The Emergency Management Breakdown Aide Memoire and Team Process Checklist in Hazard Note 33: www.bnhcrc.com.au/hazardnotes/33.
• The Psychological Safety Checklist and Cognitive Bias Aide Memoire in Hazard Note 73: www.bnhcrc.com.au/hazardnotes/73.
• The Emergency Management Non-Technical Skills checklist in Hazard Note 92: www.bnhcrc.com.au/hazardnotes/92.
• The Key Tasks Cognitive Aid in Hazard Note 93: www.bnhcrc.com.au/hazardnotes/93.