–Given the centerstage that improvisational behavior has in establishing and maintaining interconnectivity between infrastructures during shocks, it is unreasonable to assume that infrastructure operators and emergency managers can un-learn and un-experience cases where even the best plans did not mitigate the disaster as it unfolded.
–“I can’t say enough good things about planning and how important it is,” a state emergency manager in the Pacific Northwest told us.
“But you realize the gaps in plans when you’re dealing with such catastrophic events that we’ve dealt with in the past 18 months to two years…There’s a lot that needs to be decided on the fly because it hasn’t been planned for or it’s not going to work, the plan didn’t consider all the factors because every emergency is different”.
–The preceding seems obvious, but the implications aren’t as readily recognized. For one thing, it implies that there isn’t a “life cycle” of a critical infrastructure, if by that is meant one stage follows another until it, the single now-mature infrastructure, is superseded by something better. Infrastructures are like other complex organizations in that they shift in response to changes in their wider task environments, include sudden changes. That again implies the centrality of improvisation.
–“What does success look like?” a senior state emergency manager asked rhetorically, and answered: “Success in every disaster is that you didn’t have to get improvisational immediately. You can rely on prior relationships and set up a framework for improvisation and creativity.”
Success, in other words, is when pre-existing interconnectivity between critical infrastructures does not altogether disappear, however reconfigured. Otherwise, the interconnectivity would have to be improvised by micro-coordinating to match just-now demands with just-now capabilities. It is a shared error not to recognized the latter for emergency preparedness and management.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 