Situated response and learning of distributed bushfire coordinating teams

Abstract

Previous studies on coordination have emphasis on managing coordination where conditions are stable and goals are well defined. In this study, we approach coordination from the perspective of a system working together as a whole rather than simply the parts themselves. We argue that organizational and individual actors' behavior depends on the total structure and changes in structure could have impact on the changes of behavior. The behavior depends on how the parts are connected, rather than what the parts are (O'connor and Mcdermott 1997). Here, we argue that organizational learning prior to disaster have impact on the performance of a coordinated response. We apply coordination theory and network concepts to explore the problem of effective coordination for distributed bushfire teams. We present a network enabled coordination model suitable for dynamic disaster environments such as bushfire for exploring the value of coordination for effective response. We provide empirical investigations focusing on relationship between network and potential for coordination and suggest that facilitating network performance correlates to increasing coordination performance. Our findings highlight that network performance and organizational learning (in this article, training and education) correlate to the effectiveness of a response network.