Manage everything or anything? Possible ways towards generic emergency management capability

This paper explores two different approaches to information processing and learning in societal safety efforts; stressing the specifics and aiming at the general. How the two approaches relate to higher-level efforts at societal safety is discussed, as well as the relationship between the two approaches and their consequences. As a background, the paper briefly explores the concept of generic capability - What is it? How can it be understood? How can it be developed? - and relates it to the interplay between specifics and generalities. The paper outlines examples of factors that may contribute to generic capabilities represented in the safety and emergency management literature. From the traditions of continuity management, resilience engineering and high reliability organizations examples are given and discussed in terms of focus on the specific and/or the general. The paper also discusses scenario-based learning and the perspective of semantic hierarchies, which explains how a move to more abstract concepts, encompassing the main meaning of more concrete instances, may support the development of generic capability. Conclusions regarding suggestions for practice and needs for further research are presented

Tool for evaluating organizational emergency management capability.

Crises or emergencies have drawn attention to the need of good emergency management capability in affected organizations or regions. An ongoing subproject in a Swedish multidisciplinary research programme aims at identifying areas or processes that are potentially important to include in the work of developing and improving an organization’s resilience and emergency management capability. This paper presents preliminary findings from interviews conducted to identify such areas or processes and proposes a first version of a methodology that can enable organizations to continuously evaluate and improve their organizational emergency management capability. Interviews were conducted with four representatives from different administrations within a regional public body in Sweden. Preliminary results show that when evaluating organizational emergency management capability, areas or key processes such as the following ought to be included: assessment of existing organizational emergency management capability, risk and vulnerability analysis, competence provision, operational surveillance and alarm functions, operationalization, communication, safety culture and organizational culture, leadership and management, individual and organizational learning. The proposed methodology for self evaluation of capability is based on a maturity model containing five maturity levels, low to high. An organization develops in stages upwards through the levels by building on the strengths and removing the weaknesses from the previous level. Each maturity level is described based on how the organization learns and reacts to new knowledge and experiences. Each area or process is evaluated and described according to the five maturity levels. The self evaluation provides for analyses, discussion and reflection concerning the proactive management activities taking place in an organization

The role of gender in students’ ratings of teaching quality in computer science and environmental engineering

Students’ ratings of teaching quality on course units in computer science and environmental engineering at a large Swedish university were obtained using the Course Experience Questionnaire; 8,888 sets of ratings were obtained from men and 4,280 sets were obtained from women over ten academic years. There were differences in the ratings given by students taking the two programs; in particular, teachers tended to receive higher ratings in subjects that were less typical for their gender than in subjects that were more typical for their gender. There were differences in the ratings given to male and female teachers, differences in the ratings given by male and female students, and interactions between these two effects. There was no systematic trend for students to give different ratings to teachers of the same gender as themselves compared with teachers of the other gender. Nevertheless, without exception even the statistically significant effects were small in magnitude and unlikely to be of theoretical or practical importance. It is concluded that the causes of differences in the career progression of male and female teachers in engineering education need to be sought elsewhere.   

Relationship between safety culture aspects - A work process to enable interpretation

Knowledge about the existing safety culture in a maritime organization such as in shipping companies or on board ships can enable the formulation of effective interventions to maintain and improve safety culture and safety in the organization. When assessing the safety culture, questionnaires developed for this purpose are often used. This paper proposes a work process that facilitates the analysis and interpretation of the relationships between safety culture aspects using questionnaire data. The work process includes the use of variable cluster analysis where the cluster solutions are presented in dendrograms. These were found to be an excellent way to visualize complex relationships in the quantitative data and to facilitate the understanding of the safety culture concept. Results are presented from applying the statistical process to safety culture data from six Swedish ships in international traffic. The visualized safety culture results can enable group discussions about safety on different organizational levels and can constitute an important input to the continuous improvement processes for safety and safety culture

Effektiv kommunikation av projektarbetens pedagogiska syften

Studenter som utfört ett projektarbete i en kurs intervjuades för att vi lärare skulle få ökad kunskap om deras lärandeprocesser. Vi bad studenterna att utifrån en figur bestående av tre parallella pilar, vilka motsvarade föreläsningar, projektarbete respektive kurslitteratur, beskriva hur de tre momenten var kopplade till varandra under kursens gång. Analys av intervjuerna visade att studenterna i princip hade två olika föreställningar om syftet med projektarbetet. En del såg det som ett tillämpningsprojekt, där de skulle tillämpa kunskaper och färdigheter de redan besatt, för att på så vis bevisa vad de kunde. Andra studenter menade att de sett konstruktiva poänger med att projektarbetet var förlagt parallellt med föreläsningsserien och självstudierna. Man kan säga att dessa studenter uppfattat det som ett inlärningsprojekt, syftande till att hjälpa dem i deras lärprocess. En av våra slutsatser är att det finns starka skäl att tydligt formulera idén med det pedagogiska upplägget av en kurs och att effektivt kommunicera den. Att noga särskilja olika typer av projektarbeten utifrån deras ändamål, t ex inlärningsprojekt och tillämpningsprojekt, är ett exempel på klargörande av stor vikt. Detta ökar möjligheten för fler studenter att få adekvata målbilder och lärprocesser

Learning for safety: Improvements of Swedish authorities’ toolkits for societal resilience

This thesis suggests improvements of selected parts of the Swedish authorities’ toolkits for societal safety and crisis management; crisis response evaluations, crisis management exercises and organizational risk assessments. The thesis also explores how visualizations of safety culture data can be used to support safety culture development. The research was motivated by practical needs and delivers results that can be used to facilitate and improve efforts for societal safety and crisis management. Empirical data has been collected from five Swedish public organizations (three municipalities and two county councils) through interviews, observations and questionnaires. Most of the research has been performed in close cooperation with practitioners. Methods from design science have been used to arrive at applicable solutions to the practical problems motivating the research. The thesis shows how learning results with broader applicability can be achieved from the evaluations of singular crisis responses. Evaluations of crisis responses do not necessarily have to focus on as accurate accounts as possible of what happened. To support the development of crisis management capability they should instead revolve around alternative possibilities. From a summary of what actually happened the exploration of possible variation can bring about broadly transferrable learning results. Evaluation results and explorations of variation should be disseminated throughout the organization. Crisis management exercises often produce vague results with unnecessarily limited applicability. This thesis presents a framework that can help to strengthen the learning effects of discussion-based crisis management exercises. In preparing exercises, aspects of reality that are considered relevant in future instances of crisis management should be identified. Some of them should then be used as parameters in a scenario description. In discussions, exercise participants should collectively alter the parameter representation of the scenario. This can establish shared mental models and provides variation for the individual participants to experience. Experiencing variation is vital for learning and developing capability. Important principles for the design of organizational risk assessment systems for large organizations are forwarded. Large organizations are typically hierarchically layered and laterally split into thematic areas. With such structures, first order analyses pertaining to single organizational units and their areas of operations should be performed unit-wise on all levels, and second order analyses with a systems perspective should be performed for all aggregated subsystems up through the composite organization. In second order analysis, data from the first order analyses of constituent organizational units needs to be reanalyzed, with level-appropriate questions and methods. It is not sufficient in a second order analysis to simply add or aggregate information from the first order analyses of the units in the system, and additional input may also be required. Organizational risk assessment in large organizations faces many communicational challenges, which pose major threats to the functionality of the risk assessment systems. This thesis presents countermeasures to such communicational challenges. For example, efforts to create and use shared knowledge, the bridging of steps of formal communication, the use of dialogue, and the standardization of parts of communicational work can help to reduce the threat of miscommunication. An organization’s safety culture can be developed through emergent change, which requires that relevant information is available to the organizational members. To support such change processes presentations of collected safety culture data should preferably: Facilitate the comprehension of data; Offer suitable relevance structures to the target group; Provide possibilities to experience variation; Evoke inquiry and inspire hypothesizing; and Visualize relations between different parts of data