Improving the Crisis to Crisis Learning Process

While crises may appear to be event-driven, post-mortem accounts often identify factors that accumulate over time and increase the likelihood of failure. These factors are particularly difficult to anticipate when multiple organizations are involved in crisis preparation and event detection. Through the development of a systems-based model of crisis management, we learned that knowledge sharing can be accelerated or inhibited by the development of trust among organizations through the management of events. Is it possible to operationalize this finding? This hypothesis is being integrated into our current research in progress, a multi-national Community of Practice in disaster management.