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2. Decision Making During Disasters
and Emergencies
Robert C. Chandler, Ph.D.
Director, Nicholson School of Communication

3. About Everbridge
• The Global Leader in emergency and
incident notification systems
• Fast-growing global company with
more than 1,500 clients operating in more
than 100 countries
• Serve the Global 2000 enterprise,
corporations, healthcare systems, state
and local governments, federal
government, military, financial services
firms, and universities
• 100% focused on incident notification
solutions that merge technology
and expertise
3

4. Agenda
Part 1: Presentation
• Behavioral & psychometric issues that occur during
emergencies
• The critical challenges to decision making during
disasters and other emergencies
• How to anticipate and mitigate barriers to making
quality decisions
Are you on Twitter? Follow
us at @everbridge and
Part 2: Q&A share webinar insights
with your friends using
hashtag #everbridge
4

5. Note:
Q&A slides are currently
available to download on
blog.everbridge.com
Use the Q&A
function to
submit your
questions.
5

6. Decision Making During
Disasters and Emergencies:
BracingResearch Findings and
for the 2010
Hurricane Season to Enhance
Applications
Performance
Dr. Robert Chandler
University of Central Florida

7. Human Factor Errors and Disasters
• Human factor errors including diminished cognitive performance and
poor decision making in critical situations – (FAA Study)
• 66% of air carrier accidents
• 79% fatal commuter accidents
• 88% fatal general aviation accidents
• Human factors errors can be costly in surgical operating rooms,
emergency response, EOC/Command Centers, disaster
management teams, military/law enforcement, and other crisis
contexts

8. Diminished Cognitive Capacities
During emergencies and
disasters, decisions must
typically be made
unexpectedly with little
advance notice, high
stress/distress context,
little time for thorough
deliberation, and often
with high (life and death)
negative consequence
risks

9. Basic Facts About Crisis Stress
• Effects of stress are cumulative
• Effects of stress are interactive
• Uncertainty amplifies stress effects
• New experiences/Situations amplifies stress effects
• Tasks and Deciding may be stressful
• Stress affects different people differently
• Individuals have different levels of “stress hardiness” or stress affect
resilience
• Stress symptoms manifest both behaviorally and cognitively
• Hyper-stress consists of CCS , SRT, Concentration, INE, DLR, SDM,
ITP, Time Stress

10. CCS – Cognitive Capacity Sufficiency
Although the human brain has tremendous potential cognitive
capacity - Psychometric researchers assume that each individual
has baseline use and peak use cognitive capacities and that
there is a sufficiency threshold for effective decision making
Complex Critical Events
can tax (over-tax) these
capacities

11. CCS – Cognitive Capacity Sufficiency
Research on decision making in complex systems provides
insight into the factors that negatively impact successful
cognitive performance and decision making
• Maximum Adaptability Model
• Compensatory Control Model

12. Decision Making in Critical Contexts
When there is little time, little information,
substantial time constraints, and with high
negative consequences for the
decisions – these ‘external’
factors affect (impact) the
‘internal’ mental processes
of decision making

13. SRT – Simple Reaction Time
• Tendency for cognitive delay (freeze)
• Increases in time required for decisions, response, behavior
performance
• SRT linear correlation with Hyper-stress
• SRT has most dramatic impact on more complex tasks

14. Concentration (Mental Effort)
• Hyper-stress negatively impacts one’s
ability to concentrate on the decision or task
• Both cognitive processing and cognitive
control are impacted by hyper-stress
• Affective (emotional) processes can also diminish ability for
sustained attention to a task or decision (wandering minds)
• Personally high salience and valence emotional considerations
decrease the ability to concentrate on the task or decision

15. INE – Intense Negative Emotions
• Distracting
• Reduces Focus
• Changes processing pathways
• Disrupts goal-oriented behavior
• Less optimal for task completion
• Psychosomatic symptoms arise
• Disrupt sleep and sleep cycle
• TSD
• PTSD

16. DLR – Diminished Logical Reasoning
• Information manipulation tasks or Logical Reasoning tasks are
diminished by hyper-stress
• Delayed processing (increases in time and effort) affect the quality of
cognitive processes
• These diminished processes appear to most effect cognitive
performance in situations which require rapid decisions or when the
individual attempts to achieve their “low stress” (typical) response
times (increases in frustration and more stress)

17. SMD – Stress Diminished Memory
• Stress Diminished Memory and
Information Recall
• Hyper-stress Diminished Memory and
Information Recall Ability Effects

18. ITP – Implicit Temporal Processing
Compressed time frames for decisions independently impact the quality
of decisions and our perception of time itself
• Perceptions of “time” affect our abilities for pattern
recognition, time-dependent decision-making,
awareness of synchronized processes, and
decision priorities
• Hyper-stress negatively impacts our ITP and
diminished ITP negatively impacts our ability for making
decisions
• Significant negative affect on “multi-tasking”
performance

19. Time Stress
Time Stress independently negatively impacts decision quality and
cognitive performance
• Requiring tasks and decisions to be
completed with short and finite time
windows (with penalties or negative
consequences for failing to meet the
fixed critical deadline).
• The inverse speed-accuracy tradeoff
• Diminished measures of “mental
workload capacity” correlated with
Time Stress

20. Passing the Stress Test
• Formal training in handling stress increases resiliency (constructive
ways of coping with hyper stress can be learned – and dysfunctional
ways of coping can be avoided)
• Learning strategies for side-stepping hyper-stress environments
typically provide better benefits and more bottom line results than
stress coping skills alone
• Hyper-Stress management training provides
an additional benefit – better routine stress
management skills in daily life

21. Training the Managing Hyper-Stress
Although we insist on extensive training for various technical and
professional skills and abilities – learning to manage the impact of
hyper-stress is usually left entirely to chance

22. Strategies for Stress
• Recognize and avoid hyper-stress contributing factors
• Include stress factors in training exercises and simulations
• Prepare protocols and procedures in advance – and follow them
during hyper-stress environments
• Immunize yourself
to the effects of
hyper-stress
• Stick to the plan
• Maintain control

23. Train the Brain
• Research confirms that under conditions of hyper-stress, the human
brain tends to favor rigid “habit” memory over more flexible (and
requiring more mental effort) “cognitive” memory (hyper-stress results
in more acting than thinking)
• One can train their brain to react from
habitual memory to perform and complete
complex tasks quickly and accurately
during hyper-stress contexts
• The value of repeated training is
confirmed by the research studies

24. Effective Decision Making In These Conditions
• In real world crisis and emergency contexts, at peak periods of hyper-
stress; decision makers are not usually capable (less or more so depending
on the individual) of framing tasks in logical ways - taking into account all of
the available information and situational variables and establish comparable
(logical) alternatives to evaluate and from which to ‘chose’ a decision.
• Rather, they more typically assess of the dynamics of a situation which they
recognize from previous experience and using their past experience and
any crisis decision training – act (“decide”) by imagining event trajectories of
a given decision/action (results and implications) contextualized (compared
with) how they believe a situation is likely to evolve.
• Effective decision makers tend to rely more on their “problem solving”
tendencies based on past experiences to blend a “solution” – since the
logical and rational processes of traditional cognitive decision making are
frequently disrupted.

25. Five Quick Recommendations
1. Select the right people (assess, screen and test for KSAs for
cognitive processing and decision making under hyper-stress
conditions.
2. Provide extensive training and preparation for problem solving in
hyper-stress contexts.
3. Teach the “right stuff.” Include specific training for stress
management, coping skills, teach methods to stay calm so as to act
with poise and capability to make decisions in stressful conditions.
4. Ensure realistic training to help create level of “stress inoculation” –
this is a major short-coming in most training, mocks, drills, and
exercises.
5. Minimize traumatic hyper-stress exposure and conditions as much
as possible – “de-stress” the environment, processes, and context
as much as feasible.

26. Incident Notification
Candace Green
Senior Online Marketing Manager, Everbridge
26

27. Incident Notification Solutions Address
Common Communication Challenges
• Communicate quickly, easily, and • Reduce miscommunications and
efficiently with large numbers of control rumors with accurate,
people in minutes, not hours, making consistent messages
sure that the lines of communication
are open
• Satisfy regulatory requirements
• Receive feedback from your with extensive and complete
messages by using polling reporting of communication attempts
capabilities and two-way acknowledgements
from recipients
• Ensure two-way communications
to get feedback from message • Deliver refined, prepared , timed
receivers messages to each pre-designated
audience group, by scenario
27

28. Key Evaluation Criteria for an Incident
Notification System
• Experience and expertise
• Ease of use
• Ability to reach all contact paths, including voice,
email, native SMS (over SMPP and SMTP), IM, and
more
• Ease of integration
28

29. Q&A Note:
slides are currently
available to everyone on
blog.everbridge.com
Use the Q&A
function to
submit your
questions.
29

30. Communication resources
Contact information Upcoming webinars:
9/11 – Looking back on what has changed in
the last 10 years (September)
White papers, literature, case studies
www.everbridge.com/resources
Robert C. Chandler, Ph.D.
Follow us:
rcchandl@mail.ucf.edu
blog.everbridge.com
1.407.823.2683
twitter.com/everbridge
facebook.com/everbridgeinc
youtube.com/user/everbridge
Marc Ladin
marc.ladin@everbridge.com
1.818.230.9700
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