“What does success look like?” a senior state emergency manager asked, and answered from his experience: “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.” Why? Because contingencies that can’t be planned for require improvisation. “I was lucky,” reported a statewide emergency manager involved in an ice storm that happened during the Covid-19 lockdown as “my neighborhood was only out of power for six hours. . .”
Contingency—happenstance, accident, chance, coincidence—will mater even more for the Magnitude 9 earthquake in the US Pacific Northwest: “What side of the river will I be on?” replied an infrastructure operator to our question of what would be a performance standard in the M9 events. Being at work, holding water in the main reservoirs, and getting some of the wells up and running would be a success, the interviewee added. Opening a road from point A to point B, that’s a success, to paraphrase a state emergency manager for highways. “Doing the best with what we have” was the frequent response. “Being here and do as best as we can, would be considered a win,” put one infrastructure operator. But how can we know that the “best” was done? The best with respect to what?
“Doing their best” has very specific meaning by way of being a performance standard for immediate response and initial service restoration: It is when responders find or create a match between task environment demands and response capabilities. More formally: Effective performance can be understood as the contingent correspondence of task environment demands and the response capabilities (resources, skills, options, strategies) to meet those demands in real time. The term, “contingent,” conveys the sense that the conjunction of capabilities and demands can be fortuitous and is by no means assured through pre-disaster mitigations, formal preparedness plans, and other agency arrangements, like mutual aid agreements.
Seeking requisite variety in matching unpredictable/uncontrollable task demands with highly contingent resource capabilities is, we argue, a strategy and performance standard appropriate for both immediate emergency response and initial service restoration. This is because skills in assembling options under highly volatile conditions remain central to enabling joint improvisations across the interconnected critical infrastructures.
All easier said than done, of course. The fact that there can be no guarantee the shared infrastructural improvisations—these impromptu but major interconnections between and among infrastructures—will be effective means there is a premium placed on people already skilled in improvisation. This is why newer infrastructure employees and emergency staff may well not (yet) have those skills. It accounts for the much-remarked-upon people, outside the emergency management infrastructure, whose life skills in working with what is at hand step forward and do the needful in a disaster.
An emergency planner and coordinator remarked, “I think what makes a good emergency manager is you feel uncomfortable being off-balance. . .That’s one of the reasons I was drawn to the field. When nobody has the answer that’s when I feel most capable in my job”. Activation of the Incident Command System helps provide some structure to trying to meet the challenge. What achieving requisite variety provides is time-, duration- and site-specific organization that can add up to some semblance of stability. As one state coordinator put it: “My responsibility on the response side leading into recovery is stabilization, [which means] this is not going to get any worse. We’ve restored a foundational level of service, whether that is permanent or temporary. . .”
Source: The above is a slightly edited extract from E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf). Research design, references and other particulars can be found there.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 