Another title for this week could be the studies of “no shit.” Two of the articles I read are on knowledge management and information sharing within a disaster situation. First up is “A tale of two hurricanes” by Alton Chua. I had been interested in this article from the start but for some reason had not gotten around to reading it till reading Matt Coblentz’s take on the article finally gave me that final push. This article can be easily summed up as – learn from the past. Chua explores how the initial preparations, implementation of disaster plans, pre-disaster evacuations, management of relief and rescue, and cooperation within and across agencies differed between hurricanes Katrina in August of 2005 and Rita in September of that same year. Chua reveals that, for the most part, Rita was handled much better than Katrina. Everything that went wrong during Hurricane Katrina, from the lack of prep to arguing over who was in charge of the situation, was corrected by the time Rita came around. Chua does mention how the evacuation for Rita was poorly planned and resulted in a massive gridlock, trapping thousands in the path of the storm. Luckily, they were not hit and the traffic was eventually dispersed by reversing the inbound traffic. The thing is, this could have been avoided if people had looked at other similar disasters instead of just the most recent, a fact Chua points out in his conclusion. A massive traffic jam occurred during a mass evacuation of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas in 1999 during Hurricane Floyd. It is clear that responders, government, and public alike learned from Hurricane Katrina and were far better prepared for Rita, but what if the two hurricanes had been farther apart? If it had been a few years instead of a few weeks would things have gone as smoothly during Rita? Or would we have forgotten some of the knowledge force on us during Katrina? As Chua says, it is important to treat lessons learned in disasters thematically instead of as individual nuggets of wisdom embedded in the context that that specific disaster (Chua, pg. 1526).
The second article focuses more on the role of trust in a disaster scenario. Classmate Stephen Antckak also looked at this article on his own blog. Ibrahim and Allen study major incidents in the oil industry and how information sharing could have built trust and lessened the damage done. Again, this seemed a no brainer to me that trust is necessary to get people to act correctly under stressful and high-risk situations. The interesting thing about the article from Ibrahim and Allen is their insistence that communication can truly be the difference between life and death. Like my parents have constantly said: communication is key. But the level to which this article seems to put forth that sentiment is bizarre. Perhaps I am misreading something, but it feels like simply the act of saying “trust me” in a stressful situation is enough to build trust and get a team to follow your instruction (Ibrahim. Pg. 1925). I find this ridiculously hard to believe. Yes, trust is super important and a necessary feature in resolving disasters, but you can’t build trust with a few words. Quick and effective communication and information sharing is very important in a disaster situation, that information can help to build trust, and trust is also necessary to surviving a disaster situation, but I don’t think two words is enough to win that trust. Ibrahim and Allen even say in their conclusion that “the indirect attribution of interviewees’ statements and concepts to trust could be seen as a limitation of the relationship we proposed” (pg. 1926). And I kinda have to stop it there. Yeah, that’s a big limitation. So while I agree with a lot of the concepts put forth in this article, I am not sure that their idea of being able to quickly build trust by simply invoking it is plausible.
For my third article, I looked at “The art of knowing” by Duguid. I fully admit I had to start with looking up the concept of community of practice. It’s just people who share a profession or craft. The community learns and takes on knowledge which is can teach to new members. After that was taken care of I looked again at the article. It is a piece championing tacit knowledge in economics. A paradox is put forth that knowledge is and is not a public good. Duguid argues there is no paradox because the critics are ignoring tacit knowledge. Knowledge that can be codified, copywritten, and otherwise regulated is public good. But the tacit knowledge, how to do something, the act of practice can not be so easily regulated. It is not a public good.
Chua, A. Y. (2007). A tale of two hurricanes: Comparing Katrina and Rita through a knowledge management perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58, 1518–1528. doi: 10.1002/asi.20640
Duguid, P. (2005). “The Art of Knowing”: Social and Tacit Dimensions of Knowledge and the Limits of the Community of Practice.. Information Society. , 21, 109-118. doi: 10.1080/01972240590925311
Ibrahim, N. Hassan & Allen, D. (2012). Information sharing and trust during major incidents: Findings from the oil industry. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63, 1916–1928. doi: 10.1002/asi.22676
Curiouser and curiouser 
Forgive me for the sea story but I can’t resist. When I was serving in the Navy, I was the Electrical and Reactor officer. One day, while on watch the training team came in. Naturally, they seek to evaluate your response to disaster, outages, failures, etc. That’s what you train for.
During this exercise, we had an outage on an electrical switchboard that powered a set of cooling pumps. The reactor operator turned to me and said we needed to turn off the reactor circulating pumps because the upstream cooling pumps were now out. I briefly thought, “no, that’s not right; that switchboard powers the redundant set of cooling pumps, not the primary ones. We don’t need to turn off the reactor pumps”. However, I trusted my guy and thought, “he must know something I don’t”. So I agreed, and we turned off the pumps unnecessarily.
Got dinged for that one, Lesson: open your damn mouth and ask questions. Don’t just be a lump. Trust works both ways – he was trusting me to backstop him and I failed. That was my job; backstopping the operators.
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It’s been a while since I’ve read Ibrahim so perhaps my memory is faulty on some of their arguments, but I agree with your overall assessment that perhaps there is more to be done than simply requesting that the subordinates place their trust in a leader, especially if their prior time together was limited. Whether there was time to do so or not I cannot say, but maybe if the foreman in one of their case examples had explained why he made the decision he did, in addition to the aforementioned suggestion of trust reassurance, that could have been more effective. Instructions that sound clear and intuitive are not going to be interpreted the same way by people bounded by different knowledge sets, and communicating context becomes very important.
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Carolyne, It was very interesting to read what you as well as what the author had to saying about the handling of Hurricane Rita vs. Hurricane Katrina. Being a TA for associate Dean Dr. Veil course (disaster communication) made me think a lot about situations such as these. We actually watched a fascinating video about how poorly prepared the governor and other community leaders were when hurricane Katrina struck. I think a lot of cities and the United States as a whole learned quite a few lessons from Katrina. How to share knowledge and how to decipher the importance of given information.
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I feel like this is a lesson that keeps having to be learned over and over again. The article even talked about how the study worked because the hurricanes were so close together. We need to better manage past knowledge so we don’t keep making the same mistakes.
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Part of the problem is that disasters like this (i.e., natural disasters) are highly variable. That is, no two storms are alike, no two places that they may hit are alike, etc, and so to develop a highly codified response is just plain hard. That said, you’re absolutely correct.
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I just read the Wang & Lu paper and it is just astonishing how management chose to learn from the lesson and what it does for the company.
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Interesting points here. The studies of “no shit” got a laugh out of me, and you’re right that many of these findings are intuitive. But we have to remember that we have the benefit of hindsight now, and some of these findings may not have been so intuitive in the past. Plus, science often finds results that contradict common sense, so I don’t think these findings can be dinged too much.
The case of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are very interesting, and I’m glad there’s been some research on it. After the absolute disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Rita occurring just a few months later and targeting similar areas scared the crap out of people – hence the massive evacuations. But these evacuations were every bit a disaster too – people were stranded, their cars had no gas, there was no water, and all of this occurred during a scorching heat wave. It’s estimated that over 100 people died as a result of the evacuation. This was a clear organizational failure, and one that I hope we’ve learned from.
I also find the assertion of Ibrahim & Allen implausible. I haven’t read the article (it’s on my list for a later blog), but I’m guessing that they are asserting that using those words can be helpful in building trust in addition to other trust-building activities. I’ll let you know how I interpret it once I read it thoroughly.
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You are of course right about the benefit of hindsight and the existence of real life contradictions to what we all took to be common knowledge, but I’m glad I made you laugh! I am looking forward to your take on the Ibrahim and Allen article. I’m hoping I just missed something or misinterpreted what they had said, so it will be fascinating to read your thoughts on it.
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I agree with you that these were kind of no brainers. However, I think they are no brainers for interpersonal relationships. These studies have just found that it applies to a larger scale, which isn’t always true. But I really enjoy how you go about discussing the articles. It’s a fun read.
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Great post! To your question I think the response to natural disasters will continue to expand on resources available and a pseudo-standardized response team but it will always be organized chaos at best. There are so many volunteers during most natural disasters that are involved out of passion for their community that will change from location to location. The human factor in natural disasters, combined with the unpredictable results of the disaster itself, make it hard to have lessons learned outside of being prepared in the event of a disaster. As Dr. Burns mentioned, no two disasters are going to be the same.
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I really enjoy the perspective of trust that you took with this blog. Trust and knowledge management/sharing are meaningfully related in such a way that they often explain each other. Trust can be built up by the transfer of knowledge or destroyed by the cease of that transfer. On the other side, we don’t often want to give information to those we don’t already trust, and thus the stalemate occurs. An important aspect of this process is to look at the benefit to the individual to share knowledge with someone who they may have a deep relationship with already.
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