Evaluation of work-as-done in information management of multidisciplinary incident management teams via Interaction Episode Analysis.

Overview

Multidisciplinary incident management teams (IMTs) are required to operate in resilient ways as emergency situations unfold unexpectedly. Although resilience in emergency management has been widely studied in many emergency contexts, the development of a new method to investigate actual resilient performance of the IMTs under realistic settings has been limited. To address such gap, this paper first introduces Interaction Episode Analysis (IEA), a novel approach to capture and describe emergent team performance. As an exploratory observation study, we apply the IEA to an information management aspect of the IMTs in two emergency exercises carried out in a high-fidelity environment. As a result, the IEA provides comparable sets of episodes as instances of work-as-done, rendering opportunities to further analyze essential elements of interactions between team members as well as information management activities. Moreover, the IEA enables comparisons between the observations and identification of challenges faced by the team in managing incident information and adaptive behaviors used to address the challenges. By gathering more evidences as well as addressing limitations identified in this study, the IEA is expected to serve as a method that facilitates the analysis of work-as-done of complex team work and the reconciliation between work-as-done and work-as-imagined to promote resilience in emergency management.