Joeri van Laere

Wandering Through Crisis and Everyday Organizing; Revealing the Subjective Nature of Interpretive, Temporal and Organizational Boundaries

The results of a 6‐year action research study on developing crisis management preparedness in Swedish municipalities reveal strong connections rather than sharp distinctions between crisis and non‐crisis on interpretive, temporal and organizational dimensions. Confusion and debate about what is labelled as a crisis, when everyday ends and crisis begins, and who and who are not involved, may illuminate different views on what the scale, scope and inherent complexity of ‘our’ system is in crisis and in non‐crisis. Crises are not only a brutal audit for the practitioners involved, but also for the scientific theories that explain crisis behaviour. Current definitions of crisis understate the subjective nature of interpretations of crisis and organizing. To better understand the muddiness of organizing, crisis management researchers might aim for portraying more feed‐forward messiness in crisis study descriptions and applying less hindsight bias in their analyses. Such images could help practitioners realize that organizing is more complex and less controllable than currently might be pictured and assumed. A deeper exploration of concepts like duality, competing values and complex adaptive systems could serve both practitioners and researchers.

Understanding Champion Behaviour in a Health-Care Information System Development Project – How Multiple Champions and Champion Behaviours Build a Coherent Whole

Champions are commonly suggested as a means of promoting the adoption of information systems. Since there are many different definitions of the concepts of champion and champion behaviour in the literature, practitioners and researchers may be confused about how to exactly use these concepts. A qualitative analysis of a single case study in a Swedish health-care organisation enabled us to explain how different champion behaviours relate to each other and how multiple champions interact. Combining our rich case observations with an analysis of champion literature reveals how champion behaviours form a coherent and meaningful whole in which networks of different types of champions at different levels in an organisation utilise their network of relations, their knowledge of the organisation and their insight into strategic decision-making politics to time and orchestrate the framing of innovations and the involvement of the right people. In conclusion, championing is a complex performance of contextually dependent collective social interaction, varying over time, rather than a heroic act of one individual promoting an idea. Future studies need to focus more on how the relations between different champions and their behaviours develop across innovations and over time, in order to develop a richer understanding of championing.

SMARTracIn : a concept for spoof resistant tracking of vessels and detection of adverse intentions

The aim of maritime surveillance systems is to detect threats early enough to take appropriate actions. We present the results of a study on maritime domain awareness performed during the fall of 2008. We analyze an identified capability gap of worldwide surveillance in the maritime domain, and report from a user workshop addressing the identified gap. We describe a SMARTracIn concept system that integrates information from surveillance systems with background knowledge on normal conditions to help users detect and visualize anomalies in vessel traffic. Land-based systems that cover the coastal waters as well as airborne, space-borne and ships covering open sea are considered. Sensor data are combined with intelligence information from ship reporting systems and databases. We describe how information fusion, anomaly detection and semantic technology can be used to help users achieve more detailed maritime domain awareness. Human operators are a vital part of this system and should be active components in the fusion process. We focus on the problem of detecting anomalous behavior in ocean-going traffic, and a room and door segmentation concept to achieve this. This requires the ability to identify vessels that enter into areas covered by sensors as well as the use of information management systems that allow us to quickly find all relevant information.

Combining Work Process Models to Identify Training Needs in the Prehospital Care Process

The prehospital process is complex and covers a wide range of locations, healthcare personnel, technologies and competences. Enabling high quality holistic training is hence a challenge. Process models are efficient tools for representing reality, but no single modeling approach can cover the complexity of prehospital care. In our research, we have investigated the possibility to combine various process modeling techniques in order to identify training components and as many perspectives of the prehospital process as possible. Results show that combining different approaches and adapting them based on the need at hand is a successful strategy for enabling an of the prehospital care process from multiple perspectives, including identification of holistic, realistic and engaging training components. Future work can utilize our results to build training scenarios that can be implemented in training using for example simulation.

Using a mixed-methods assessment approach in a gaming-simulation environment to increase resilience

Critical infrastructures for fuel, food, transport and the payment system become inceasingly entangled. Disruptions in the payment system can quickly lead to cascading effects and even the responses of actors in the various sectors are interrelated, which can cause escalation if the collaborative responses are not well-aligned. Our contribution to the track of Human Factors and simulation discusses how gaming-simulation can be used as a training environment where groups of practitioners can learn to develop in-depth understanding of system behaviour (i.e. cascading effects of disruptions) and learn how to develop collaborative resilience across many different critical infrastructures. More specifically, our paper focuses on the development and application of a mixed-methods assessment approach in the simulation-game. The assessment method captures qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of resilience and team-work. It can be used to assess the value of our simulation-game and to increase insight in what collective resilience actually implies.

Cultivating a longitudinal learning process through recurring crisis management training exercises in twelve Swedish municipalities

This study illustrates how crisis management capability is developed in series ofrecurring exercises, rather than in one single exercise. Over one hundred table-topand role-playing exercises were p ...

Analyzing the Implications of Design Choices in Existing Simulation-Games for Critical Infrastructure Resilience

A literature study has identified the major impacts of important design choices in simulation models and simulation-games that model critical infrastructure resilience. The four major groups of design choices discussed in this article are: (1) the chosen learning goal (system understanding or collaboration training), (2) realism and time scale of the scenario, (3) design of player roles and communication rules, (4) number of action alternatives, replay-ability and richness of performance feedback while playing. Researchers and practitioners who build simulation-games for studying critical infrastructure resilience can use the accumulated insights on these four aspects to improve the quality of their game design and the quality of the simulation models the game participants interact with.