Role of Facility Managers in Emergency Management
Facility managers play a central role in managing emergencies that may occur at the facilities and cause business disruption, injury, death and/or property damage. These unforeseen events can generally be classified as:
(i) Natural emergencies that are the resultant of weather or environmental conditions, including fires, floods, earthquakes and infectious disease outbreaks;
(ii) Technological emergencies like power outages, hazardous material spills as well as heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) failures; and
(iii) Human-caused emergencies such as arsons, workplace violence and acts of terrorism [1].
In some organisations, the facility manager is involved in planning for and responding to emergencies. In others, the facility manager must manage all aspects of emergency management, from mitigation and preparation to response and recovery [2].
Indeed, good decision making is critical for effective emergency management. For instance, facility managers must make sound decisions when responding to emergencies [3] to avoid the situations from escalating into disasters with extensive damage and limited possibility for a swift recovery [1].
However, emergencies tend to be dynamic and ambiguous, with imperfect information and significant time pressure [4]. Under these settings, applying the traditional analytical decision-making approach that requires time and perfect information to weigh the options and select the best course of action is inappropriate or almost impossible [5].
Although analytical decision making does have its place in emergency management, it is more apt for emergency planning and policy development where time is not an immediate constraint [6].
Naturalistic Decision Making
Research on naturalistic decision making first emerged in the 1980s to study and understand how people make decisions in real-world contexts [4]. In contrast to analytical decision making, naturalistic decision making is a faster and more intuitive approach that relies on experience [5] and is more suitable for high-risk and low-time contexts like emergency response environments [3].
Based on the recognition-primed decision making (RPD) model, which is a subset of naturalistic decision making, effective naturalistic decision makers can appraise a situation rapidly and effectively, match the cues with their memories of previously experienced events to identify patterns and decide on the appropriate course of action. When similar patterns cannot be identified, they can mentally simulate a workable course of action to evaluate how it may unfold and make necessary modifications to suit the situational context before initiating the action [7].
According to Canon-Bowers and Bell [8], there are six distinct qualities possessed by proficient naturalistic decision makers:
(i) Flexible – The ability to cope with uncertain, complex and rapidly changing environments.
(ii) Quick – The ability to make rapid decisions with severe consequences and under time pressure.
(iii) Resilient – The ability to operate in stressful environments without suffering from performance degradation.
(iv) Adaptive – The ability to recognise when and how to apply a decision strategy and adjust it based on problem demands.
(v) Risk Taking – The ability to use knowledge to assess the risk associated with different courses of action and weigh the consequences of error against any potential payoff. Indeed, successful risk taking is a crucial part of naturalistic decision making.
(vi) Accurate – The ability to make accurate decisions.
While effective naturalistic decision making is contingent on experience, the infrequent nature of emergencies can limit the opportunities to secure the necessary experience [9].
Decision-Making Training
One way to enhance the capabilities of facility managers in naturalistic decision making is through decision-making training to impart the knowledge, skills and processes that underpin expert performance [10]. Specifically, the training must focus on five naturalistic decision making mechanisms that are necessary for making good decisions [8]:
(i) Situation-Assessment Skills
Naturalistic decision making theorists posited that situation-assessment skills are essential for making rapid, effective and accurate decisions. The two main aspects of situation assessment behaviour include cue and pattern recognition.
Unlike novices, expert naturalistic decision makers are better and faster at identifying the relevant cues, their significance, and the patterns they form.
(ii) Organised Knowledge Structure
Experience helps expert naturalistic decision makers form organised knowledge structures that they can readily access and apply to make decisions in new situations. As a result, their decision making is quicker and more accurate.
(iii) Mental Simulation
Expert naturalistic decision makers can use the recognitional process to generate solutions from their memory. When confronted with a novel situation, they can mentally simulate the potential solution and adjust it to suit the context before implementation. This ability can save time and contribute to the accuracy of the decision.
(iv) Strategy Selection/Modulation
Expert naturalistic decision makers can select strategies best suited to the situation but will continuously assess and modulate the chosen resolution based on changing demands. This ability does, however, demand their metacognitive skills.
(v) Reasoning Skills
Finally, the reasoning skills would comprise creative problem solving, analogies, critical thinking (i.e., testing assumptions, checking facts, seeking consistency among cues) and domain-specific problem-solving.
Simulation Exercises
Beyond decision-making training, facility managers may also practice naturalistic decision making through discussion- or operations-based simulation exercises [3]. The former may involve tabletop exercises that are highly versatile and can be customised to match almost any timeframe and budget. The latter may comprise drills and functional and full-scale exercises that require more effort and resources to organise and implement [11].
Simulating different emergency scenarios during exercises can mediate experiential learning and enable facility managers to integrate naturalistic decision making theories with the application. Furthermore, these exercises can enhance their tacit knowledge and strengthen their implicit information sharing abilities (i.e., they can foresee others' information needs and offer it without being asked) and shared mental models. These are vital for emergency response [12].
In summary, facility managers have always been and will always be involved in emergency management. However, the complex, uncertain, low time and highly stressful context of emergency response environments would require them to make swift, accurate and sound decisions naturalistically. In order to become effective naturalistic decision makers, facility managers should participate in decision-making training and various simulation exercises.
References
[1] Payant, R. (2016). Emergency management for facility and property managers. McGraw-Hill Education.
[2] Roper, K. O., & Payant, R. P. (2014). The facility management handbook (4th ed.). American Management Association.
[3] Sinclair, H., Doyle, E. E., Johnston, D. M., & Paton, D. (2012). Decision‐making training in local government emergency management. International Journal of Emergency Services, 1(2), 159-174.
[4] Klein, G. (2008). Naturalistic decision making. Human Factors, 50(3), 456-460.
[5] Flin, R. (1996). Sitting in the hot seat: Leaders and teams for critical incident management. Wiley.
[6] Paton, D., Johnston, D., Houghton, B., Flin, R., Ronan, K., & Scott, B. (1999). Managing natural hazard consequences: Information management and decision making. Journal of the American Society of Professional Emergency Managers, 6, 37-48.
[7] Klein, G. A., & Calderwood, R. (1991). Decision models: Some lessons from the field. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 21(5), 1018-1026.
[8] Canon-Bowers, J. A., & Bell, H. H. (1997). Training decision makers for complex environments: Implications of the naturalistic decision making perspective. In C. E. Zsambok & G. Klein. (Eds.), Naturalistic Decision Making (pp. 99-110). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
[9] Klein, G. (2015). A naturalistic decision making perspective on studying intuitive decision making. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 4(3), 164-168.
[10] Sinclair, H. (2011). Local government emergency management: Emergency operations centres, training and decision making [Master’s thesis, Massey University]. Massey University.
[11] Canton, L. G. (2019). Emergency management: Concepts and strategies for effective programs. John Wiley & Sons.
[12] Paton, D., & Jackson, D. (2002). Developing disaster management capability: An assessment centre approach. Disaster Prevention and Management, 11(2), 115-122.
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