I
From our interviews with infrastructure control room operators and emergency managers, real-time surprises are widespread in flooding, wildfire, road and other transportation disruptions, levee breaches, and transmission failures in electricity and water.
But, as many also told us, there is an urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time or just-for-now interventions in some cases. Better put, what needs to be done is at times evident to front-line infrastructure staff and emergency management professionals, when not so to those in incident command centers or higher-level management or official positions.
More important, where these and like sequences are clear, urgent and known to front-line staff, then errors to be avoided in operations and response are also evident to experienced front-line staff.
II
We found:
–Under conditions of changed interconnectivity, it would be an error for infrastructure operators and emergency managers not to establish lateral communications with one another and undertake improvisational and shared restoration activities where needed, even if no official arrangement exists to do so.
–In addition, there are also errors of anticipation and planning. It would be a management error in anticipation and planning not to provide robust and contingent inter-infrastructure communication capabilities, including phone connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is also greatly facilitated by establishing lateral inter-infrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies
–Further, it would be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and recovery activities such as vehicles, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.
While these three errors are not the entire set, our interviews and prior research convince us that they are of primary and are to be avoided because they seriously degrade effective resilience in emergency prevention and responses.
III
“Error avoidance,” though, hits a sore-spot when it comes to managing for infrastructure safety and reliability: namely, around the pros and cons of admitting error by front-line staff. One interviewee said “error avoidance” was like saying we were doing something wrong. Another told us bureaucratic hierarchies are wary to admit mistakes. A third interviewee provided a way to recast this, however: Emergency managers don’t like to call it error but rather missed opportunity.
Following on this shift in terms, what is most important about error avoidance is missing those real opportunities that shouldn’t or can’t be missed where the logic, clarity and urgency of in emergency response and initial service restoration are evident. Such include, as we just saw, taking advantage of any opportunities to improvise and maintaining lateral communications, as well as having distributed equipment and supplies along with robust communications. To equate this specificity with respect to known errors as “managing risks” is misleading.
IV
Put this way, there is a role for forward planning in anticipating and taking advantage of these opportunities as they emerge. Within our wider high reliability management framework, the latter resonates with “bandwidth management under prior anticipatory analysis.” That type of management by infrastructure control rooms and wraparound support staff is, we found, ‘highly error-intolerant.”.
Indeed, to miss out on prior anticipatory analysis and its intersection with a now-existing opportunity is an error–a controllable error as another interviewee put it. For example, it would be an error not to put into the mandated county/city hazard mitigation plan a proposal to replace a majorly vulnerable culvert with a new bridge, should the former be washed away in new flooding and when federal funds would be available for this replacement under those conditions.
V
Keeping to the bandwidth management terminology, the preceding also means that in the absence of prior anticipatory analysis and from the perspective of infrastructure control rooms and their wraparound support units, we should expect to see more “bandwidth management under active analysis.”
For example, a rural town that did not anticipate accelerated gentrification after a major wildfire in its hazard mitigation plan will “respond in ways that buffer or tolerate input variance, including that arising from mistakes or errors” that emerge with that gentrification (e.g. newly added residential water and wastewater demands).
From this perspective, the mandated hazard mitigation plan is a problem definition, parts of which are latent until activated during immediate emergency response, initial service restoration or longer-term recovery. The plan, while incorporating streams of activities already budgeted for, becomes further operational when an emergency triggers release of funds contingent on that emergency.
Where that happens, we then have a positive instance of what has been pejoratively termed in garbage-can theory as, “solutions in search of problems.” It is a latent problem definition in search of an emergency to activate it. It, however, remains an open question whether other city/county/state plans, e.g., for “building in resilience,” are also functional in this way.
VI
So what?
In our 2008 High Reliability Management, we talked about no-go areas for policy and management, i.e., topic areas where there were no reliability professionals or equivalent. Indeed: “Reliability professionals. . .need to be engaged to help identify no-go areas for policymakers.”
In contrast, the notion of pre-existing or mandated hazard mitigation plans as latent problem definitions activated by emergencies–in particular, replacing legacy structures with new, more advanced ones–implies there are also go-now areas for policy and management. That is, infrastructure operators must now manage newer infrastructure components that replace older systems and practices.
Source: Paul Schulman is not to blame for my construal of his wording and ideas!
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 