James H’s Reviews > American Dunkirk: The Waterborne Evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11 > Status Update

The training process and the planning process are intimately intertwined. Planning Shiism be conceived of as training, since it is in the planning process that future participants in disaster operations will become familiar with one another’s resources, capabilities, and even very existence.

Types of interdependence

1. Pooled: Work alongside in parallel

2. Sequential: One groups needs from another to function

3. Reciprocal: Back and forth dependency between organisations

There is no reason at all to think that some predetermined direction can encompass all emergent needs in a disaster context. Instead, having divers organisations and community institutions tackle disaster needs is the way to go.

The Mariners of 9/11 grafted their familiar uncontrolled environment in a way that allowed them to keep up familiar habits of thinking and interacting.

Particular concept of disaster management:

One sees plans as tools, not scripts; one that is respectful of new and unexpected resources; one tilted more towards effectiveness than efficiency; and one that liberates the improvisational and creative powers of an affected population to make meaning and solve problems, supported and assisted by external resources and advice.

Leadership is in many ways a group activity, a communal product. Even though ultimately one person may bear responsibility for the outcome of a decision, the prudent leader is alert for contrary opinions and monitors the effect of orders on the various constituencies, which include subordinates, superiors, and the general public who will experience the effects of these orders.

It is important to empathise how many stories we heard of emerging joint logistics and supply operations that clearly involved coordinating the actions of many previously unconnected individuals in diverse roles.

Beyond information and a goal, responders need some sort of “non-linear, dynamic system… to coordinate diverse resources, materials, and personnel across previously established organisational and jurisdictional boundaries.”

Sense making is social, in that, ‘conduct is contingent on the conduct of others, whether those others are imagined of physically present.’

Individual thought, moreover, is understood to be affected by Sofia contact with other people and organisations.

In disaster management, the move toward reliance on formal, centralised systems is intended to prevent organisational collapse, but the assumption that a disaster is a ‘thing’ to be managed rather than a series of events to be understood create conditions that lead to performance failures.