Each year Australian emergency management organisations coordinate the response to thousands of emergency events. While a successful outcome is achieved in the vast majority of these events, notable and ongoing concerns are being raised as to how well some of the emergency management teams have functioned.  Often the problems are not based on technical skills (such as the use of equipment) but on the non-technical skills, such as: communication, coordination, situation awareness, and decision making. In addition, skills such as creativity and divergent thinking may be important in helping people to manage ever more complex emergencies. This project seeks to develop simple practical tools that can help people to better manage their teamwork, improve their decision making and develop more creative solutions.  In addition to developing these tools this project also considers how organisations utilise the outcomes of research.  Application of research in support of organisational learning is critical not just for organisational growth, competitiveness and sustainability but also for wide-scale industry development, community and economic well-being. However, maximising organisational learning from research often falls short. As part of this project the research team developed a tool to help agencies to utilise research more effectively.

A number of tools were developed to help people to better manage their teamwork and decision making. These tools include:

• Team Process Checklist (TPC)
• Emergency Management Breakdown Aide Memoire (EMBAM)
• Key Tasks Cognitive Aides for State and Regional Coordination Centres
• Emergency Management Non-Technical Skills (EMNoTS)
• Psychological Safety Checklist (PSC)
• Cognitive Bias Aide Memoire (CBAM)
• Individual and Team Coping Concept (ITCC)

In addition to creating tools that help better manage teams and make more effective decisions, members of the project team have also developed methods to help people to act more creatively during operations (such as stretch thinking loops for team decision making). To help end-users to diagnose their capacity to utilise research a self-assessment tool was developed (known as the self-assessment research utilisation maturity matrix or RUMM). This tool can be used by practitioners to identify steps needed to move along the path towards research implementation.

Read the final report here.