Global Situational Awareness

I picked this site up off a tweet. This will no doubt be of interest to those supporting global interests.

Havaria Information Service

More on the OODA Loop

Observe Orient Decide Act are the famous stages of combat decision making and they can be underpinnings of any crisis decision making program.

One of the primary reasons Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) penned this system was to provide discipline to the process of making decisions under stress. By applying discipline and making the steps repeatable you create an ingrained process that continues even under the stress of combat. Taking that ingrained, disciplined process into your own crisis management processes will serve you when challenged by pressures of a crisis.

One of the key benefits of this disciplined approach is to speed up the decision making process with the intent of "getting inside your enemies OODA loop". While the enemy for our purposes might be a BCM issue, a fire or flood; making fast and informed decisions helps with establishing control of the situation and gives the organization confidence that its leadership has a grip on the situation. In other words getting inside the OODA loop. This attitude of not surrendering the initiative to the event is what I believe is key to my concepts of crisis action management.

The kind of organizational agility that allows you to make and implement decisions in a crisis will put you out in front of the crisis, helping your organization return to normal as quickly as possible and possibly ahead of your competition.

Some Thoughts on Sense/React

In a comment to my post on "Crisis Management and Resilience" Ken Simpson introduced the concept of situational awareness and Sense/React. I want to provide a few thoughts on this along with a more expanded look at React.

Firstly I want to state that in my view sense/react is an oversimplification. It misses the key steps of taking what your sensors identify and turning it into usable information which informs the react function.

Looking at this in reverse order I will briefly discuss react. I don't like that term as it implies that the situation is the master and the organization is purely reacting to situation. In principle I belief this surrendering of the initiative can lead to complacency and resignation.

When looking at the sense function, we can see how this might challenge an organization during a crisis. It is the sense function that provides the raw data that makes up an organization's situational awareness. In normal times, we have research departments, corporate relationships and other sensors that provide input to situational awareness and help the decision-maker "react". When a crisis occurs many of our normal channels of situational awareness are non-effective or operate at reduced effectiveness and here is where I believe most organizations are vulnerable.

As I mentioned earlier, the concept of sense and react is a simplification of the process of decision making in a crisis. I would like to expand that to Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. This theory know widely as the OODA Loop was originally penned Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) for air to air combat and has become one of the seminal concepts of decision making theory.

Introduction to the OODA Loop



I will provide a further blog on how the OODA Loop can take a crisis management program from normal to extraordinary.

Recovery in Haiti

As a natural disaster recovery professional I am following the efforts in Haiti with interest. There is no doubt the the effort will take years and will from time to time be difficult. By difficult I mean it will call for decisions that will have impact on the entire society of Haiti or the at least those in the disaster zone.

The recent report in Time: Scientists: Why Haiti Should Move its Capital is one of those decisions. As scientists and outsiders providing assistance to the Haitians it is easy to make grand recommendations. However from my own personal experience, relocating disaster victims from their "normal" is a challenge. A challenge in which no amount of money, arm twisting or common sense will influence those that chose to resist the idea that somewhere else is better than rebuilding what was lost. There are a number of issues that must be taken into account as those leading the efforts attempt to influence the reconstruction effort:

There is a societal wide rush to return to normal with little thought on how to prevent future issues. Self recovery is already well underway and unless the national recovery effort catches up, the momentum of self recovery will surpass the inertia of government decision making and the potential for a rift in the efforts increases.

To offset the rush to self recovery, there will be a segment with victim paralysis. These folks will be unable to make decisions and even when pressed to contribute to their own recovery, will find even the simplest decision beyond their grasp.

Finally, I have found that without including the local population in the major recovery issues you will only create resentment. It is very easy to foresee the Haitian people getting fed up with outsiders telling them what is best for the country and society. The best solutions are those that come from the grass roots and are adopted by the local leadership.

While it might be wise to move the capital, without a locally lead buy in for the concept it will be beyond reasonable for most. Would we be happy if someone told us to move Washington DC or Ottawa or London because our ancestors screwed up?

Crisis Management and Resilience

I have been back reading a number of blogs by Ken Simpson and I came across his review of some work on economic resilience by Adam Rose a Research Professor at USC. (linked)

Ken Simpson makes some insightful observations of Rose's work but what interests me is that Ken identifies that (according to Rose) there are two types of resilience: inherent and adaptive resilience.

While Ken Simpson's blog identifies a number of interesting lines of thinking from Rose's work I am most intrigued by the concept of adaptive resilience. My initial view is that adaptive resilience that is a true measure of the deep resilience of an organization and that it will separate winners from losers in a major catastrophe.

This concept looks like an endorsement for crisis management as a key system to improve organizational agility and adaptive resilience. I will continue to research the idea of adaptive resilience as a key to survival in a catastrophe.


What are the parts that make up adaptive resilience?


What are the characteristics of organizations that demonstrated adaptive resilience during a disaster?

Are decision making processes different during a disaster? Are they different in organizations with adaptive resilience?

Grand Strategy?

As I continue to explore Palin's ideas and concepts for Resilience as a Grand Strategy for a nation, I can't help but let the cynic in me have a post.


Is it really possible to have "grand strategy" in a modern, information age democracy? My experience indicates that governments at every level have very little appetite for conflict with its constituents and seek the middle ground even when idealistic visions are at stake. It appears that government policy and "strategy" are aimed solely at winning the next election. Instead of seeking power to impart ideological direction on a nation, it seems that in this age, seeking power has become the self-licking ice cream cone. (this phrase came to me at some time in my army career but like FUBAR I can't remember where I heard it first) Satisfying in and by itself with little need for much else!


In an era of polling, polls and special interest lobbying, is there a realistic chance that a government will set a nation on a course of doing what's right regardless of the political costs? I look south from my frozen backyard and watch with interest the recent attempts at ideological change of our neighbors and wonder what will be the ultimate outcome.

I warned you, the cynic has spoken. Now I can get back to considering resilience and its applicability to my work and studies.