Muhren, W.J.

Walle, B.A. van de

English

Research Papers in Economics

Crisis Informatics
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Sense-making and Information Management in
Emergency Response
by Willem J. Muhren and Bartel Van de Walle
Willem Muhren is a doctoral candidate and Bartel Van de Walle is an associate professor
in the Department of Information Management, Tilburg University, The Netherlands.
They can be reached respectively at w.j.muhren<at>uvt.nl and bartel<at>uvt.nl.
E
mergency response conditions are characterized by a high degree of
turbulence and dynamic change, time constraints, cascading events,
a multitude of actors and high stakes [1]. Emergency responders need
to make decisions on the course of action they will pursue, and they also
need to make judgments on what is happening around them and understand
what is going on in order to decide and act appropriately. Our research shows
that in such demanding conditions, effective response is very much dependent
upon the responders’ sense-making abilities.
Sense-making
Sense-making literally means making sense of things, making things
sensible. Sense-making is usually initiated by a sudden loss of meaning
caused by unforeseen changes in the environment which break the imaginary
link between expectation and reality and force actors to reevaluate what they
are doing and where they should go. When people’s sense of what is
happening is affected, and they do not know how to proceed, they experience
what is called a cosmology episode: they are being thrown into an ongoing,
unknowable, unpredictable streaming of experience in search of answers to
the question, “What’s the story?” [2]. When people who are struggling to
make sense actually find an answer to that question and their sense-making
efforts have actually produced sense as the final product, they have the
fundaments to make decisions about future steps. Sense-making is not just
the end product of understanding itself, but is even more so the process of
how people try to find out the story, the deliberate effort to understand events
and how they give meaning to what is happening in order to reduce the
equivocality and ambiguity that surrounds them.
Research on sense-making has identified a set of seven properties that
characterize the sense-making process [3]. First, sense-making is grounded
in identity construction, meaning that the interpretation one gives to what is
happening depends on who the sense-maker is and who he or she represents.
Second, retrospection plays an important role in sense-making, since people
use hindsight to look back at experiences and use the lessons learned of their
success or failure in the current context. The third characteristic of sense-
making is enactment: people do not wait passively for things to happen, but
act to influence the environment and observe what happens. Fourth, the
social dimension is important for sense-makers, as they always try to find
out what other people think and understand, and they take into account
other people’s reactions when they act. Fifth, sense-making is ongoing, a
process that never stops, especially in such a dynamic environment as an
emergency. Sixth, people extract cues from the environment and focus on
them, as they cannot pay attention to everything that is happening around
them. Finally, sense-making is driven by plausibility rather than accuracy,
as plausible accounts of the situation are often good enough to act upon.
Information Processing in Emergency Response
Emergencies are characterized by various types of information problems
that complicate responses. Information can be inaccurate, late, superficial,
irrelevant, unreliable and conflicting. It is extremely difficult for responders
to make sense of what is going on and to take appropriate action as
information about the environment is subject to multiple interpretations.
Struggling with interpretations, responders are searching for the right frame
of reference for the situation they are confronted with. Frames of reference
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are the interpretative frames that provide the context for creating and
understanding information.
Emergency responders typically face situations in which there is a lack of
a frame of reference or in which there are too many frames of reference to
process [4]. Ambiguity results when responders do not have a framework for
interpreting information.Ambiguity is a difficult challenge to overcome since
it involves developing a frame of reference when none is available. Usually
the first stages of an emergency are characterized by ambiguity. Over time, as
more information is gathered, people negotiate their interpretations and share
their understandings.Other events develop, such as the arrival and intervention
of emergency response teams or the increasing involvement of political
stakeholders and media, typically leading to multiple, conflicting interpretations
of what is happening. This is a situation of equivocality, and the responders
have to make sense of several competing or contradictory frameworks.
A balance is needed for creating new frames of references in situations
of unclear meaning (ambiguity) on the one hand and reducing the frames to
avoid confusion created by two or more meanings (equivocality) on the
other hand. People actively try to make sense in an attempt to overcome
situations of ambiguity and equivocality. Information and communication
exchanges help people to make sense – to deal with interpretative frames
that provide the context for creating, managing and understanding
information in emergency response settings.
Information and Communication Exchange
In order to understand how people who work in emergencies make sense
of what is going on, we interviewed many humanitarian actors working in
the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We specifically investigated the
information and communication that actors exchange for sense-making. We
could distinguish three different activities in which such exchanges are
important for sense-making: noticing, interacting and enacting [5].
Noticing is the first important activity for sense-making. Environmental
stimuli can be noticed through the actor’s own efforts and observations, by
attending meetings, keeping an ear on the radio, reading email, physically
observing the emergency and browsing the Internet. But as it is impossible
for an individual person or organization to monitor everything that is
happening, we observed that actors make use of a wide variety of sources to
assist them in noticing what is going on around them. These sources act as
cues through which actors notice stimuli. This noticing takes place through
both formal, established channels, such as inter-organizational structures,
and informal channels, such as personally based contacts. What was
especially interesting to hear in the DRC is that actors actively keep an ear
on the rumors – what they call the news of the streets.
Confirming the important role of the social context in sense-making, we
observed that people actively interact to reduce ambiguity and equivocality.
In the DRC we found evidence of several specific uses or goals of interaction.
Foremost, people interact to update one’s understanding of the situation, to
stay informed and to triangulate the available information and negotiate
what is going on. There are many information exchanges with colleagues,
partner organizations and friends, both formally through meetings and such
and informally through chats over coffee; other people are contacted to
contribute and compare information. Interaction is also a means to inquire
about specific things actors want to know. People are directly contacted
when actors think that they might have more information than the inquirer
or when they are regarded as more knowledgeable or experienced in a
specific topic. Interaction also serves a purpose of verification of the source
of information, its accuracy and its implications. Finally, we found that actors
interact with friends and colleagues for advice and to reflect on the decisions
they face. Our research indicated that emergency responders in most of these
interacting activities revert to a limited number of tools, usually just the
mobile phone, as they need fast, easy and direct contact when faced with an
emergency situation.
The third communication activity – enacting – is when people
communicate to enable action.Action is of crucial importance in emergency
response. The lack of appropriate action worsens an emergency and makes
it more difficult to get it under control. Communication can generate new
information, take away misconceptions and help formulate frames of
reference. Enacting usually happens under time pressure in emergencies
when people need to rapidly assess the situations. When rumors indicate that
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there is a threat, one actor told us that he would first send a text message to
his staff members and engage in verbal communication at a later point in
time. Engaging in this communication could provide him with feedback,
enabling better understanding of his enacted environment.An obvious
important caution to be made here is that dependency on a single tool may
create a deadlock situation in emergency environments as for example when
the network breaks down and people cannot use their mobile phones.
Sense-making Support Systems
Actors need appropriate support to make sense of what is going on and to
deal with problems of ambiguity and equivocality. Information systems can
make it easier for actors to create and adapt frames of reference in emergency
situations [6]. When specifically looking at ambiguity, information systems
can prevent information overload and filter out information by focusing on
specific cues. On the other hand, information systems can also provide access
to appropriate contextual information. This access will assist emergency
responders in creating a good picture of what is going on, a suitable frame
of reference for their operations. In order to construct frames of reference,
information systems also can enable storage of historical information and
the incorporation of lessons learned. We have seen earlier that retrospection
is an important property of sense-making, and the importance of experience
in emergency response is widely acknowledged.As emergency response
organizations typically face high staff turnover, information systems can
play a role in maintaining the organizational knowledge.
Sense-making is at least as challenging when there are multiple and
possibly conflicting frames of reference in the emergency. Emergencies are
unique and dynamic events, and planning for emergencies is therefore
difficult, with expectations of other actors – perhaps guided by previous
experiences, agreements or common sense – not always met.As events
unfold over time and understanding of events constantly needs to be updated,
flexible systems are needed to support changing frames of reference.Also,
every emergency is different in cause, circumstances and actors involved.
This constant change means that the associated management of the
emergency and the supporting systems must be adapted to that situation.
Information systems should facilitate interaction and collaboration by
supporting timely and valid information exchange and facilitate the
organization of all information available [7], enabling actors to construct the
best possible frame of reference. But most importantly for creating and
comparing frames of reference, people need to be able to freely exchange
information in their social contexts. Our research indicated for example that
humanitarian organizations were able to adequately operate in the region
provided they had an extensive network of contacts. Colleagues and
organizationally established structures are evidently important in this regard,
but even more striking was the importance of informal contacts. Through all
their contacts with embassies, NGOs, UN organizations, media, army and
the local population, actors build up networks of work-related contacts.
Maintaining these contacts is also important and happens through attending
meetings, staying in touch with the embassy, going out to mix socially among
the other international staff working in the country and employing local people
as staff members. Setting up and maintaining a trust-based network of contacts
appeared to be a vital component for successful sense-making. Especially
when faced with an acute crisis situation, actors would fall back on their
informal contacts in order to obtain more information. This contacts-driven
infrastructure for sense-making could be supported by social networking
tools. Maintaining their network through a web-based Internet platform such
as Facebook, complemented by real-time information and communication
exchange tools, emergency responders would be able to optimally use their
network to exchange information in times of acute emergencies [5].
Sense-making for Coordinated Action
So far we have only discussed sense-making by a single actor. Emergency
response, however, requires intense coordination of actions among all actors
involved.All actors involved in the response need to share the same frame of
reference, a common operational picture of the emergency and the response
that is being developed. For the particular challenge of coordinated action
leading to common sense-making, our ongoing research points at some
important challenges to avoid suboptimal decisions being made.
Response organizations cannot make the right decisions if their
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understanding of the situation is not based on the information that is available.
At first glance, one would believe that unconstrained information exchange
would solve this problem. However, research [8] has shown that suboptimal
decision-making will also happen if the available information is misinterpreted
or misrepresented. Even when actors jointly have all the necessary
information to make a decision and there is an infrastructure in place for the
actors to share all information, suboptimal decisions are still often made.
These decision situations are addressed in academic research through so-
called hidden profile experiments.
A hidden profile exists when team members individually have possession
of only a part of the information required to reach an optimal decision or
solve a problem, and therefore the group collectively needs to pool and
process this information to solve the problem or discover the optimal decision.
In hidden profile experiments, individuals have common information which
is known to every group member, as well as unique information only known
to single individuals. With the common information supporting a suboptimal
decision, the group needs to pool the unique information to find the true,
optimal decision – the hidden profile. Experimental findings as well as our
own research suggest that actors are focused on the common information
much to the neglect of particular information owned by one or more
individuals in the team and therefore disregard the construction of other,
possibly more complete, frames of reference.
In conclusion, adequate sense-making requires an open mind to all
possible scenarios, good management of information and free exchange of
information to support the construction of these frames. In the absence of
these conditions, the actors’ failure to make sense will most likely result in
a suboptimal response to an emergency.
Acknowledgments
The research reported here is part of the Interactive Collaborative
Information Systems (ICIS) project (www.icis.decis.nl/) supported by the
Dutch Ministry of EconomicAffairs, grant number BSIK03024. ￿
M U H R E N a n d V A N D E W A L L E , c o n t i n u e d
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Resources Mentioned in the Article
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[4] Zack, M. H. (2007).The role of decision support systems in an indeterminate world. Decision Support Systems, 43(4), 1664-1674.
[5] Muhren,W.J.,Van Den Eede,G.,&Van deWalle,B.(2009).Making sense of media synchronicity in humanitarian crises.IEEETransactions on Professional Communication,52(4),377-397.
[6] Muhren,W. J., & Van de Walle, B. (2010).A call for sense-making support systems in crisis management. In R. Babuska, & F. C.A. Groen (Eds.), Interactive collaborative information
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Sense-making and information management in emergency response.

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