I remember coming across a figure of hundreds of different organizations responsible for some part of the San Francisco Bay Delta–municipal, state, federal, private, more–and wondering how was it ever possible to coordinate all these different entities for the purposes managing the delta smelt collapse then underway. Only later in our research on a Magnitude 9 earthquake in the US Pacific Northwest did I realize I had jumped the gun and misstated the coordination problem.
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When it comes to the projected M9 events, we learned Oregon and Washington State had a huge diversity of different organizational and network formats to address the events. Here is a sample of a few different formats interviewees mentioned in no order:
the Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency as a special district (and other district types, like special purpose districts); a Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization with members from multiple jurisdictions and with special committees and subcommittees; the Pacific Northwest Economic Region, a longstanding multi-state statutory entity that takes a regional economic perspective on inter-infrastructural emergencies; an intergovernmental and water coordinator funded by a consortium but located in a utility; a multi-country water suppliers forum; a citywide disaster policy council; federal defense staff embedded in a state and other emergency management units when liaising over a catastrophic event; a multi-agency coordinating group at the state level, whose members change with type of incident; an infrastructure working group and a critical infrastructure branch at the Oregon state level; the Western Region Mutual Assistance Group dealing with electricity; a disaster resilience action group across one city’s agencies; a watershed-based water providers group; a senior policy group in a large electricity transmission provider; special state task forces, e.g., to “restore power and roadways at the same time” as one state emergency put it; a water utility with a dedicated account manager in the electric utility; and a Statewide Interoperability Coordinator as well as a State Resilience Officer for the state of Oregon, among others.
Given different contingencies and local contexts, such diversity in organizational formats is what we would expect when requisite variety is key to immediate response and initial service restoration. Success again is defined as the match between then-existing task demands and then-existing response capabilities. Indeed, we would expect to find many more, real-time functioning formats, not just by location but also by type of sub-event. Ensuring local or regional requisite variety in options and understanding they necessarily include on-the-fly improvisations is not helpfully understood as first and foremost “a coordination problem.”
This also means counseling against any dismissal of such variety as “unnecessary organizational duplication” or in need of “organizational consolidation and integration.” The worst thing to do is to impose central command and control on the real-time need for requisite variety, case by case.
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Another feature of having diverse organizational and network formats is they enable participants to wear different hats for different occasions–another kind of requisite variety. The department head who is also a member of the city’s emergency management working group is able to speak with his or her citywide hat on in ways not open to them as a department head only. The statewide emergency manager having responsibilities for firefighting is also the liaison on such issues in the state’s emergency coordination center; other statewide managers shift to being boots on the ground with respect to their function.
More formally and to revert to formal terminology, the single resource—in this case, the professional—provides multiple services as demands change, which in turn is crucial for meeting real-time matches in requisite variety. There are downsides, of course, to wearing multiple hats when it comes to emergency management. One interviewee noted a possible reluctance of city officials to have a new full-time emergency manager position because there were occasions when city officials considered that function to be part of their job. Another interviewee, however, thought it was a good thing that a wide range of departmental staff had emergency management duties, even if it took up a small percentage of their time.
Source: The above two sections are 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 
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