Complex decision making and teamwork when the heat is on

Effective decision making and teamwork are essential to ensure incident management teams function to the best of their ability in challenging and high stakes environments. To help improve these skills, practical tools have been developed by the Improving decision-making in complex multi-team environments project led by Associate Professor Chris Bearman at CQUniversity.

Formally launched in 2018 and 2020, a set of teamwork tools (the Team Process Checklist, the Emergency Management Breakdown Aide Memoire, the Psychological Safety Checklist and the Cognitive Bias Aide Memoire) cover communication, coordination and cooperation and include helpful suggestions on how to identify and resolve teamwork problems during complex situations.

Emergency services have been engaged throughout development, with information sought from 18 separate agencies ranging from state emergency services, urban fire, rural fire and local councils. Agencies allowed the research team to monitor both real and simulated emergency situations from within incident management centres, as well as providing feedback throughout the prototype stage. This has led to tools that are tailored specifically for emergency managers.

The tools are flexible and can be used as a health check to ensure the team is functioning effectively, to identify suspected problems, as a debrief tool and as a way to foster better teamwork. They have been used to better manage teams during incidents, to reflect on teamwork during periods of relative calm, and for assessment or debrief during training.

The South Australian Country Fire Service, Tasmania Fire Service and NSW State Emergency Service have adopted the tools and the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services sought out the expertise of the team in the aftermath of Severe Tropical Cyclone Debbie in 2017 to inform future preparation, response and recovery.

The high levels of collaboration resulted in Dr Steven Curnin (University of Tasmania) being awarded a research grant under the Discovery Early Career Research Award for 2021. The grant will allow Dr Curnin to build on both his previous Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC research, and his PhD which began with the Bushfire CRC, exploring tangible ways for agencies to nurture positive working cultures and improve decision making during natural hazard emergencies.

Those who work in incident management teams, strike teams and at regional and state operations centres can see the most benefit, believes Mark Thomason, Manager Risk and Lessons Management at the South Australia Country Fire Service.

“The tools are straight-forward and practical, and adaptive to the needs of individual emergency managers to ensure their teams are functioning to the best of their ability,” Mark says.

The Tasmania Fire Service used the tools during the 2015-2016 fire season, which saw TFS responding to many major bushfires over two months. The tools helped to ensure communication between different teams was efficient and timely during a highly stressful time.

Jeremy Smith, the TFS Deputy Chief Officer during the fires, highly recommends the tools to other emergency managers. 

“These tools have been validated and developed through a body of research. The support they provide for incident management is vital,” Jeremy says.

The project has also developed cognitive decision-tools and training materials to aide decision making in complex and high consequence scenarios. Fire and Rescue NSW’s Assistant Commissioner Rob McNeil has worked with the project team to understand his decision making as an incident controller deployed to Japan during the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami. The process has helped Assistant Commissioner McNeil better understand how he makes decisions, enabling him to teach this process to other incident controllers. 

Findings from this research are also benefiting organisational resilience, with the federal Department of Home Affairs launching a practical guide to decision making based on research carried out in the project. 

Working with AFAC through the Knowledge Innovation and Research Utilisation Network, a research utilisation maturity matrix has been developed to help guide emergency services and land management agencies in assessing how individual agencies implement research findings and where they grow their use. This element of the research has identified that agencies best placed to implement research findings have established governance processes to do so, embed utilisation into job roles, actively test outputs of research and are communities of practice.