Divergent images of decision making in international disaster relief work
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Divergent images of decision making in
international disaster relief work
Sidney W. A. Dekker
Lund University School of Aviation
Nalini Suparamaniam
DNV Det Norske Veritas
Technical Report 2005-01
Lund University School of Aviation
Address: 260 70 Ljungbyhed, Sweden
Telephone: +46-435-445400
Fax: +46-435-445464
Email: research@tfhs.lu.seDivergent images of decision making in international disaster relief work 2
Abstract
Decision making by teamleaders in international disaster relief work is formally guided by
procedure, protocol, overspecified plans, hierarchy and organizational structure. Yet
disaster relief work in the field is about managing surprise, resource shortage, and
capitalizing on local political opportunity. This leads to two profoundly different images of
relief work. Situating decision making in an environment that calls for both adaptation to
contingency and constraint and bureaucratic accountability leads to a dissociation of
knowledge and authority. People in disaster relief either have the knowledge about what to
do (because they are there, locally, in the field) but lack the authority to decide or act on
implementation. Or people have the authority to approve implementation, but then lack
the knowledge. Knowledge and authority are rarely located in the same actor. Local
pressure to act produces systematic non-conformity as teamleaders drift from procedure
and protocol to get the job done. While this can get referred to as “violations”, this
wrongly locates the source of deviance in individual actors. We describe how its origin
instead lies in the dynamic interrelationship between organizational structure,
environmental contingency and practitioner experience.
Keywords: decision making, procedure, violation, organizational structure, resilience
Running head: Decision making in relief work
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Introduction
Organizational theory (e.g. Turner, 1978; Rochlin, 1999; Pidgeon & O’Leary, 2000) and
recent evidence (e.g. Shattuck & Woods, 1997; Snook, 2000; McDonald et al., 2002)
indicates that the distance between work as people imagine it to go on, and how that work
actually goes on, says something about an organization’s resilience. Resilience refers in part
to the ability of an organization to adapt effectively to changing circumstances and
emerging threats. Resilience is seen as a critical attribute of performing safe work in
complex, dynamic systems (see Hollnagel et al., 2005). The larger the distance between
actual work and work-as-imagined, the less likely it is that people in decision-making
positions are well-calibrated to the actual risks and problems facing their operation. A large
gap between work-as-imagined and work-as-done downgrades an organization’s ability to
adapt to new operational realities, as mismatches in understanding how people create safety
and manage hazards in daily work can lead to missed opportunities and even increased
risks when task demands and operational settings shift and change.
Man-made disaster theory (Turner, 1978) has always related to a gap between how people
believe work goes on versus how it really goes on. Accidents represent a significant
disruption or collapse of existing beliefs and norms about hazards and ways of dealing with
them. Such a collapse cannot occur if there is no distance, if there is no gap to collapse
into. The divergence between beliefs and actual risks can grow over time, as normal
processes of organizational management, politics and power distribution contribute to the
construction and maintenance of different versions of reality (Gephart, 1984; Pidgeon &
O’Leary, 2000).
Commercial aircraft line maintenance is emblematic (see McDonald et al., 2002). A job-
perception gap exists where supervisors are convinced that safety and success result from
mechanics following procedures. For supervisors, a sign-off means that applicable
procedures were followed. But mechanics often encounter problems for which applicable
or useable procedures do not exist; the right tools or parts may not be at hand; the aircraft
may be parked far away from base. Or there may be too little time: aircraft with a number
of problems may have to be turned around for the next flight within half an hour.
Mechanics, consequently, see success as the result of their evolved skills at adapting,
inventing, compromising, and improvising in the face of local pressures and challenges on
the line—a sign-off means the job was accomplished in spite of resource limitations,
organizational dilemmas, and pressures. Those mechanics who are most adept are valued
for their productive capacity even by higher organizational levels.
Unacknowledged by those levels, though, are the vast informal work systems that develop
so mechanics can get work done, advance their skills at improvising and satisficing impart
them to one another, and condense them in unofficial, self-made documentation
(McDonald et al., 2002). As elsewhere, the consequence of a large distance appears to be
greater organizational brittleness, rather than resilience. The job perception gap means that
incidents linked to maintenance issues do not generate meaningful pressure for change, but
instead produce outrage over wide-spread violations and cause the system to reinvent or
reassert itself according to the official image of how it works (rather than how it actually
works). Weaknesses persist, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the
system successful (and what might make it unsafe) is reinforced (i.e. follow the procedures
and you will be safe). Such “cycles of stability” (McDonnald et al., 2002, p. 5) sustain
fundamentally different versions of working reality. In one, people create safety and
maintain rationality by following rules. In the other, people create safety and efficiency by
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making professional, experience-based judgments about what resources to assemble (other
people, unofficial documentation, tools, own history, even procedures) to get the job done.
“Violations” and work-as-done versus work-as-imagined
An intimately related conceptual issue is at stake here. The notion of “violations”,
popularized by structuralist accident models of the 1990’s (e.g. Reason, 1990) represents an
attempt to make sense of, or simply label, the gap between work-as-imagined and work-in-
practice. “Violations” were added to the system failure vocabulary to claim a social-
psychological corner of a field owned by cognitive psychologists, and to cover the distance
between work-as-deemed-necessary (by designers, managers, regulators) and work-as-done
by operators (see Reason, 1990). Violations, in this tradition, refer to deliberate departures
from written protocol, adding to the cognitive model of performance a motivational
dimension that had been underplayed up till then. Human factors has tended to treat
“violations” as a self-evident category of human work, conceptually non-problematic and
sufficiently distinct from other forms of putative deviance (e.g. “errors” as actions that
deviate from somebody’s plan or intention) to deserve its own classification in for example
performance coding schemes. The label “violation” may give the impression that operators
knowingly put themselves above the law for motives of expediency. People do not do the
work managers or designers or regulators expect them to do because they have discovered
quicker, easier, and perhaps even more effective ways of getting the job done.
Defining violations as both “deliberate” and “not necessarily reprehensible” (as Reason,
1990, p. 195, has done), represents a framing that has helped scholars of human
performance and decision making mobilize some of their favorite explanatory mechanisms.
First, human factors’ reliance on the notion of violations as “deliberate” sustains rational
choice assumptions about means-ends oriented social action: decision makers have the
freedom and full rationality to decide between right and wrong alternatives—between
following or violating the rule. Decisions to violate can be explained by the amoral
calculator hypothesis, a form of rational choice theory (see Vaughan, 1999). Decision
makers, when confronted with blocked access to legitimate routes to organizational goals
(or what decision makers see as organizational goals), will calculate the costs and benefits
of using illegitimate means. If benefits outweigh the costs, decision makers will violate.
And, depending on the circumstances, the amoral calculator hypothesis can also predict
that decision makers, provided with opportunities to meet personal goals (e.g. getting out
of work more quickly), will assess the benefits of pursuing those personal goals against the
cost of sacrificing organizational goals. If organizational goals can still be met—sort of—or
if not meeting them can be muffled away somehow, and hidden, then personal goals will be
awarded precedence.
Even beyond its lack of practical utility, there is no conceptual cause to cling to the rational
choice explanation when it comes to that dark, left-over human performance corner of
“violations”. Rational choice is no longer seen as reasonable assumption for understanding
decision making in context. Students of decision making in psychology abandoned the
economic model in the seventies and eighties (Simon, 1983; Fischoff, 1986) and moved
toward more situationally and socially patterned variations on that model. Subsequent work
on ecological psychology (e.g. Vicente, 1999) and naturalistic decision making (e.g. Klein,
1998) has affirmed how aspects of the environment can shape cognitive limits to
rationality, and sociology has extended our understanding of decision makers as embedded
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in systems of social relations that help determine contingency and constraint (e.g.
Granovetter, 1985).
Second, seeing violations as “not necessarily reprehensible”, confirms the etic (or outside-
in) orientation of human factors psychology towards understanding performance (Dekker,
2005). Understanding violations in human factors not only entails an external matching of
action against protocol (if they mismatch, there is a violation), it apparently also involves
making outsider judgments about how benign or malign the deviant actions are. This
undercuts opportunities for more idiographic understandings of violations as socially
negotiated or constructed phenomena. By defining violations as “not necessarily
reprehensible”, their meaning is appropriated entirely by outsider interests, with no room
left for any consideration of what “violations” mean to those who “commit” them. How
do their actions, in other words, look from the inside-out? Why do they make sense—clear
of wrong-footed amoral calculator suggestions? The informal networks of work created by
aircraft maintenance mechanics, for example, allow them to meet technical requirements
even under severe production pressure and resource constraints (limited availability of
time, tools, equipment, manpower, expertise, lack of useful guidance on how to actually do
the job). This informal work looks, from the outside, like a massive infringement of
procedure. Reprehensible violations, in other words. But from the inside, these actual work
practices constitute the basis for mechanics’ strong professional pride and sense of
responsibility for delivering safe, quality work that exceeds technical requirements while
beating the odds of production pressure and resource constraints (see McDonald et al.,
2002). The ability to improvise, invent and adapt, then, becomes not only a highly valued
skill, but an inter-peer commodity that affords comparison, categorization, competition,
cooptation and a foundation for the emergence of unofficial documentation as well as
master-apprentice relationships. Those actions that appear as large-scale non-compliance,
as all-too-convenient and potentially dangerous shortcuts from the outside, constitute
normal professional daily work from the inside.
Third, deviations from procedure and protocol that are judged for their reprehensibility
from the outside are possible only on the basis of externally dictated logics of action.
Laying down and detailing the work to be done a-priori is a human factors holdover from
century-old ideas about achieving order and stability in operational systems. Such
mechanistic assumptions about attaining control over human work stem in large part from
scientific management and tumble through the ages to affect how human factors values
task analysis and procedure design till today. The idea is that control can get implemented
vertically and the resulting operational tidiness guarantees predictability, reliability, safety
even. Violations represent a blot on efforts to minimize human variability and maximize
the rationalization of human work. But this external imposition of feed-forward control
through task-detailed procedure puts decision makers in a fundamental double bind (see
Woods & Shattuck, 2000). If operators avoid violations and their rote rule following
persists in the face of cues that suggests procedures should be adapted, this may lead to
unsafe outcomes. People can get blamed for their inflexibility; their application of rules
without sensitivity to context. If, on the other hand, operators attempt adaptations to
unanticipated conditions without complete knowledge of circumstance or certainty of
outcome, unsafe results may occur too. In this case, people can get blamed for their
violations; their non-adherence.
The fixed repertoire that follows on the choice to see violations as “deliberate” and “not
necessarily reprehensible”, then, is as well-known as it has proven counterproductive in
human factors. Tightening procedural adherence, through threats of punishment or other
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supervisory interventions, does not remove the double bind. In fact, it may tighten the
double bind—making it more difficult for people to develop judgment at how and when to
adapt. Increasing the pressure to comply increases the probability of failures to adapt—
compelling people to adopt a more conservative response criterion to the situation
developing around them (they will not deviate from protocol until the evidence is truly
overwhelming, which in disaster relief can translate into lives lost). People will demand
more evidence for the need to adapt, which takes time, and time may be scarce in cases that
call for adaptation. Merely stressing the importance of not violating can increase the
number of cases in which people fail to adapt in the face of surprise.
If we want to get a better grip on the gap between work-as-imagined versus work-as-
actually-done, we have to let go of the idea of “violations”, as it wrongly locates the source
of non-conformity in the vicissitudes of human intention, instead of in the socially
organized circumstances that help generate local behavior. The premise should be that not
going by the rules is a creation of the system. The gap between work-as-imagined and
work-as-done is not about people not knowing or caring enough about the organization.
Rather, it is about the organization not knowing enough about itself.
Studying the gap in international disaster relief work
Decision making in international disaster relief work puts the gap between different images
of work on full display. We did not know this when we started with our research. For three
years, we endeavored to understand how local field workers (particularly team leaders)
make sense of the multifarious situations confronting them in their work and arrive at
decisions to act, intervene, retreat, push forward, decline or take on work. We participated
in formal and informal meetings at all levels of disaster relief organizations, attended local
and international training exercises and disaster simulations, and reviewed considerable
archival material. We interviewed over 150 relief workers, team leaders and managers, and
ended up with thousands of pages of field notes and transcripts. We wanted to make
authentic contact with the perspectives and experiences of those involved with the work of
our interest; we needed a way to view their world from the inside-out; a way to see the daily
pressures, trade-offs and constraints through the eyes of those confronted by them. The
more we learned, the more we had to find out: besides raw data, informant statements were
a consistent encouragement to go deeper into the world of disaster relief work to discover
how people relied on social means of constructing action and meaning. Our analysis ended
up being cyclical: more findings would demand more analysis which would prompt further
findings. There was a constant interplay between data, analysis and theory. Where existing
theory was lacking, we generated and tested new concepts; where data was confounding,
we turned to theory to map, compare and contrast (cf. Strauss, 1987).
Parts of our findings are easy to reconcile with existing theory on naturalistic decision
making. Disaster relief work is, true to form, about the almost continuous management of
surprise and adversity, resource constraint and local political limits on action and initiative.
Try to envisage getting potable water to a refugee outpost where there are reports of an
impending cholera outbreak, the main road washed away by a flood (or its bridges booby-
trapped or blown out), the alternative reputedly occupied by a local warlord unfriendly to
the refugee population, most of your fuel spent or appropriated at an earlier road block,
and local truck drivers refusing to make the journey (at least without substantial bribes).
You, the teamleader, have the possibility of engaging members of a team from another
nation on the other side of the outpost, but because of long-standing neighborly
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embrouillements between their country and yours and the inevitable pressures to bolster or
protect an international reputation through the provision of humanitarian assistance, you
could get in trouble with your head office if you would hand the work to them.
Despite the multiple, nested varieties of hardship (or perhaps because of them), much data
about decision making in such situations find a comfortable home in theory about dealing
with unanticipated situations (e.g. Rochlin et al, 1987; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001), dynamics,
time pressure, uncertainty and high stakes of outcome (Orasanu & Connolly, 1993;
Zsambok & Klein, 1997), and the escalation of coordination and decision making demands
as the tempo of operations goes up (see Woods et al., 2002). The contingent responses we
saw to such privation and constraint were not theoretically novel or surprising either.
Consistent with predictions from the naturalistic decision making school, team leaders
spend a lot of time sizing up situations, making sense of their continuous development,
trying out different alternatives serially, often by mental simulation first. Then they try to
implement a course of action that seems reasonable, doable, plausible and manageable. It
does not even have to be locally politically sustainable, as long as you get away with it and
get to the goal—sort of. Perfection is no criterion in the field. And procedures, protocol,
and decision-making hierarchies, once supposedly the basis for action-in-context, evaporate
into a fantasy. They turn into faint echoes of a former, formal universe rendered beside the
point, overtaken and overruled by situational contingency and constraint.
Yet, the truer this would sound to those on the ground, to those doing the work, the more
foreign it could appear to those in home countries and central offices who commission and
sponsor participation in international disaster relief operations. To those who plan for
relief work and administrate it from distant head offices, success in the field comes from
sticking to the plan, from following protocol and reporting about progress in a way
consistent with hierarchy and bureaucratic rule. To those in the field, success has rather
different sources. These lie in adaptation, flexibility, experience. This tension between the
two images of decision making in relief work opens a window on a complex social-
organizational reality—an environment where local decision making is suspended between
the seemingly irreconcilable poles of contingency and surprise on the one hand, and
protocol and bureaucratic accountability on the other.
The formal image: deference to procedure and protocol
The formal image of decision making by team leaders in the field is one of deference to
procedure, protocol and hierarchy. Decisions on the ground get made with reference to
organizational structures, pre-specified written guidance, and detailed plans about what
actions to take where and when and in adherence to whose authority and which rules.
Much time during preparation and training, as well as during ongoing operations, is spent
on documenting and emphasizing authority relationships and organizational configurations.
Decision-making and authority are centralized. Plans are overspecified. Communication is
mainly downward: the top of the structure knows what must be done (Suparamaniam,
2003).
Despite Dynes’ suggestions to shift from “command” to “coordination”, and from
“control” to “cooperation”, and more recent research into the same types of problems
during relief operations (Operation Provide Comfort, or OPC in Northern Iraq in the early
1990’s, e.g. Snook, 2000), we saw little evidence of an awareness at higher levels in relief
organizations of the value of a more formally accepted auftragstaktik (or management by
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objectives, see also Rosenberg, 1988), which officially delegates considerable executive
authority and degrees of freedom to low-level team leaders as long as an agreed goal or set
of goals is met. To team leaders in the field, however, such an understanding of their work
is not at all alien:
“My responsibility as teamleader is to make sure the goals of the mission, as decided by
headquarters, are met. I am their tool. They trust me to do the job…” (Suparamaniam,
2003, p. 13)
Given the calls for local adaptation in response to contingencies and unforeseeable
constraints, higher-level partiality to procedure and protocol needs to find its dominant
explanation in sources other than realities on the ground. Our data point to three possible
aspects associated with the organization of relief work that can help explain the propensity
to centralize, regulate and overspecify. (There may well be more.) It is unclear from our
data which of these factors carry the heaviest explanatory load. Indeed, this may vary per
country or per combination of countries who participate in the operation.
First, deference to protocol, procedure and hierarchy is partly a by-product of the
background of many disaster relief workers (indeed, military). Exporting a set of standards
and practices from an inspirational or mother institution to another setting in which
members will work is not at all uncommon, even if these practices are not well-adapted to
the new setting. Organizations “incorporate structures and practices that conform to
institutionalized cultural beliefs in order gain legitimacy, but these structures and practices
may be inefficient or inappropriate to their tasks, so unexpected adverse outcomes result”
(Vaughan, 1999, p. 276). During preparation or even simulation stages, a facsimile of
military-style command and control is not really problematic. The professional
indoctrination of those who become team leaders (e.g. rescue services or military
personnel) as well as the training that prepares them for field work, stresses allegiance to
distant supervisors and their higher-order goals (cf. Shattuck & Woods, 1997). The
tendency to apply military-style command-and-control to relief work may get amplified
with an accelerating shift of some forces from fighting wars to dealing with the aftermath
of disasters and supporting nation-building (on the other hand, increasing experience with
such missions could, over time, help better adapt organizational and command structures
to the task). A high level of centralization, instituted to keep things from going wrong,
contributes to standardization, predictability and, ostensibly, greater control over factors
dear to the heart of organizational mandates—both expressed and tacit. But it also leaves
less flexibility. Cumbersome procedures stall decision making in situations that call for
rapid responses. Organizational policies, while consistent, are also forced onto specific
situations for which they are deeply inappropriate (see e.g. Staw et al., 1981).
Second, disaster relief work is only in part about providing local humanitarian assistance. It
is also about geopolitics. It is about spending and controlling separate national budgets;
about protecting or bolstering national reputations (India did not want to receive help with
the Christmas 2004 Tsunami disaster, instead it insisted on providing help to its neighbors;
Bangladesh made a point of donating 1 million dollars to the USA in 2005 to help it with
the devastation caused to New Orleans by hurricane Katrina); about making political
statements or investing in diplomatic capital. Such higher-level constraints on decision-
making (i.e. sensitivity to political, financial, or diplomatic implications of decisions), the
subtleties of which may elude or disinterest local team leaders, demand bureaucratic
accountability (cf. Vaughan, 1996) and centralization (Mintzberg, 1978). The
superordination of larger, global concerns makes sense from the perspective of those
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tasked with organizing relief work. Without political backing, without the requisite
diplomatic leverage, without financial resources, there would be no basis for relief work in
the first place, so sensitivity to these aspects (and to not squandering them) is
understandable. As a result though, the implementation of unplanned action and use of
unplanned resources (certainly from elsewhere) is almost never unproblematic, despite
compelling local convictions that such help may be critical. Relief worker training also
rarely touches on the possibility of conflict between demands for local action and global
interests held by stakeholders further up in hierarchies.
Third, relief worker preparation emphasizes loyalty to formal procedure and protocol since
team leaders may not know their team members, and team leaders may themselves have
little experience in the field. Their teams may also get mixed in with teams from other
countries. Given such uncertainties, a commitment to rule and regulation, to procedure and
protocol, ensures continuity of practice; a measure of order and predictability. It can
generate a form of “common ground”: a stable basis on which to form expectations about
the actions, intentions and competencies of other participants, even from other nations or
organizations. Commercial aviation similarly relies on procedure and protocol since
crewmembers, especially in larger carriers, rarely know each other. Knowing what the other
will and can do is based predominantly on procedure, protocol, a-priori role divisions (pilot-
flying and pilot-not-flying) and a formal, institutionalized command structure (Captain-
First Officer). But reliance on procedures and formal hierarchical protocol can become
brittle in the face of novelty and surprise. Indeed, while team leaders and team members
appear to use procedures and protocol as a dominant resource for action in the beginning
of missions, increasing experience with one another, and with typical problems, will make
them less reliant on pre-specified guidance. Practical experience (both with each other, and
with typical problems) gradually supplants “the book” and the official command structure
as a resource for action. According to one teamleader:
“Planning is a point of departure. It is all about flexibility, adaptability, adjustability”
(Suparamaniam, 2003, p. 106)
The brittleness of bureaucracy in the face of contingency and constraint
Once teamleaders hit the field of practice, tension between demands for local action
combined with local knowledge about what to do on the one hand, and deference to
protocol and hierarchy on the other, quickly builds. As one teamleader put it, referring to a
situation at a refugee camp:
“Headquarters wanted us to check first before we did something, and then we had to
report about every move we made. But we knew what was going on at the camp, and
headquarters didn’t. Yet they found it difficult to let us make the decisions”
(Suparamaniam, 2003, p. 63)
We found a remarkable paradox expressed by relief work. Situating decision making in an
environment that calls for both adaptation to contingency and constraint and bureaucratic
accountability leads to a dissociation of knowledge and authority. People in disaster relief
either have the knowledge about what to do (because they are there, locally, in the field)
but lack the authority to decide or act on implementation. Or people have the authority to
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approve implementation, but then lack the knowledge. Knowledge and authority are rarely
located in the same actor.
Interestingly, efforts to coordinate one with knowledge and one with authority (e.g.
through satellite connection, HF radio) do not seem to solve much of this central dilemma,
as communication technology cannot in itself deal with issues of hierarchy, goal conflicts or
authority dislocation. And as demands for coordination increase along with escalating
operations or criticality, more and more information needs to be fed through a narrow
technological bandwidth that allows only incoherent snapshots of a developing situation.
We saw many instances in which technology created data overload for decision makers up
the chain, yet still failed to communicate the essence of “being there” and seeing what was
necessary. And in reverse, team leaders and field workers proved hesitant to take orders
from a radio or fax machine. This profound inability to communicate the subtleties of what
it means to “be there” is captured in part by the idea of the “core set” (Collins, 1981):
practitioner-insiders who per definition cannot express their essential understandings to
others. Tacit knowledge—a concept central to understanding expertise—refers to intuitive,
or common sense understandings about practice that cannot be articulated, but that will, in
any given situation, direct where practitioners will look, what they will find meaningful (and
what meaning they will give it), and what they will see as rational courses of action. Take
one teamleader’s recollection of a growing problem at a refugee camp:
“I remember that I was on the phone and radio a lot during that time…trying to get
information and pass it on too. But this only made the situation more chaotic. We had to
have our guys back home involved, but it was taking time for everyone to have an idea of
what was going on. This was difficult and caused a lot of conflicts.” (Suparamaniam, 2003,
p, 60)
Conflicts and confusion can get exacerbated as an unintended side-effect of the formal
command structure governing much relief work. Delegating authority for decisions
upwards (as dictated by protocol in most organizations) can wind up in perpetual
organizational recursive self-reinforcement. Consistent with Weber’s warnings to that
effect, decision makers at all levels can become apt to bounce responsibility up yet another
level when there is insufficient certainty about the exact sort of situation (and which rules
or level of decision making it would fit). The overspecification of plans and organizational
charts does not help: the more detailed these are, the more quickly they get outdated. As a
result, teamleaders in the field get mixed messages about whose desk the decision should
really land on, and can get frustrated in not getting a straight answer out of anybody up the
chain. It is the irrational outcome of a bureaucratized-rationalized decision-making
structure:
“It looks fine on organizational charts and on paper, but we can hardly follow it. The
situations and problems we face call for us to act quickly. Often the mission would have
been greatly delayed if we had followed formal procedures.” (Teamleader, in
Suparamaniam, 2003, p. 104)
At the outset, when designing an organization that will deploy in a distant, uncertain
situation, it seems to make sense to specify, proceduralize, regulate, formalize, structure.
This will ostensibly lead to predictability, reliability, certainty. The organization is then best
equipped to achieve its aims. “Formal organizations are designed to produce means-end
oriented social action by formal structures and processes intended to assure certainty,
conformity, and goal attainment.” (Vaughan, 1999, p. 273). Once that organization hits the
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field of deployment, however, different effects become apparent. As Coleman (1974)
observed, the structural transformation wrought by organizations with legal-rational
authority profoundly alters social relations. Individuals interacting with organizations, and
organizations interacting with organizations, lead to both a perceived and a real loss of
power for individuals (see also Mechanic, 1962). Decision makers in the field indeed face
such a loss of formal power. But that does not mean they are powerless. On the contrary,
studying decision making in international disaster relief work showed us how quickly and
efficiently informal networks of decision making and authority distribution emerge to take
the place of deficient, inappropriate formal structures. Once in the field, the most powerful
attribute to be deployed is adaptation: adaptation of authority and organizational structure
to exigent contingency and constraint (cf. Mintzberg, 1978).
Relocating authority informally as adaptation to contingency and constraint
An imbalance between knowledge and authority creates pressure for change. Something
has to give. Not long after teamleaders get introduced into the field, drift from plan,
procedure and protocol accelerates, and in many cases becomes irreversible. While still
aware of what they “should” do, teamleaders borrow against an organizational credit
unknown and take local action anyway:
“When we run into problems that are not normal, then I have to check with headquarters
to find out what they want me to do. It is not always possible to do that, however, so
sometimes I just do what I think is right and tell them later”. (Suparamaniam, 2003, p. 13)
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Compelled to act eventually (or immediately), local team leaders frequently take charge
even where no formal authority is mandated to them. This typically occurs through a
process of mutual adjustment that involves a “flattening” or apparent disregard of formal
hierarchy, not unlike that described in contingency theory (e.g. Mintzberg, 1978). “Taking
charge”, however, hides a number of different adjustments that are made in such
situations. Indeed, knowledge of local problem demands is necessary but not sufficient.
Local availability of resources such as equipment (e.g. trucks, food, medical supplies, tents),
personnel (manpower), or expertise (functional specialization) is a major determinant for
the direction in which authority eventually moves. Knowing what to do is one thing; being
able to carry the actions out may be quite another. Knowledge and resources to act on that
knowledge may not be co-located in the same team leader either: further negotiations with
other team leaders may be necessary to coordinate the understanding of problem demands
with the delivery of resources to deal with those demands.
From such haggling about resources and knowledge about them (and where they are
needed) another interesting aspect of the different images of decision making emerges. A
distance between how hierarchies understand operations to go on and how they really go
on, can actually be a marker of resilience at the operational level. There are indications
from commercial aircraft maintenance, for example, that the relative cluelessness of
management about real conditions and fluctuating pressures inspires, and leaves room for,
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the locally inventive and effective use of tools and other resources vis-à-vis task demands.
Like other practitioners (from medical workers to soldiers) teamleaders sometimes “hide”
available resources from their leadership and keep them in stock in order to have some
slack or reserve capacity to expand when demands suddenly escalate. “Good” leadership
always extracts maximum utilization from invested resources. “Good” followership, then,
is about hiding resources for times when leadership turns out to be not that “good”, or too
demanding, or too stingy. Indeed, leadership can be ignorant of, or insensitive to, the
locally fluctuating pressures of real work on the operational end. Team leaders may hamster
a share of resources and hold it back for possible use in more pressurized times. Thus what
makes a system dysfunctional and irrational or inefficient also makes it work: without
hamstering, team leaders would be unable to respond to contingencies, and unable to
satisfy important organizational goals:
“If we are to be efficient or effective and all of that, we have to get as much as possible
when we can from the mother organization or any other agency that is ready to provide for
us. Just like the refugees or war victims affected in the mess out there, we are also hoarders.
We keep, hide. Of course, many times we share what we can, but there is prestige which
also means we have to show that we are successful. It means saving up for a rainy day like
in the bank.“ (Suparamaniam, 2003, p. 124)
Getting the job done is one important goal, but “prestige” is another, less explicit one: this
comes from being able to deliver the aid in defiance of local odds or even expectations.
Here teamleaders, and their work, clearly benefit from higher-level ignorance, and in the
end their organization benefits too. Shrewd usage of resources in the field, including
hiding, hoarding and piecemeal distribution, functions as vital instrument in the subtle
management of prestige and future access:
“Of course we are “selfish”. Come on. If we did not do it, then we’d have no reserves to
do what is necessary when our resources are low. And yes, that prestige thing—yes, only
share enough to look good, that happens too. Don’t give up your little extras. Then you get
in trouble with the home office, your team, your next door tent, when you run out
(Laughter).“ (Suparamaniam, 2003, p. 97)
Thus, team leaders sometimes make judgments about giving out just enough to meet
outsider (i.e. head office, media, national) definitions of relief effort success, while
preserving their own ability to act (and maintain local prestige and resource capital) in
unforeseen future situations and not getting trapped in local destitution where favors need
to be asked from the home office, the team, the next-door tent. Such local teamleader
judiciousness becomes possible only through the separation of formal and actual decision
making models. If head offices and their hierarchies would know more about local
fluctuating resource needs and operational pressures, they would probably try to adapt their
provision of resources to make a more rational-efficient match. This would of course end
in tears, as lags and imperfections in communication and transport would immediately
desynchronize and decouple resource supply from demand. Instead, the local creation of
and capitalization on resource slack may be a more adaptive response to the inevitability of
delay and doubt in disaster relief work. So teamleaders in the field not only do their part to
help create the gap between these two different images. They also reap substantial benefits
from the gap, they nurture it, can act on it and endow it with meaning in terms of their and
their organization’s goals—whether stated or not. Of course, from an organizational
perspective, such parochial and subversive investments in slack are hardly a sign of
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Lund University School of AviationDivergent images of decision making in international disaster relief work 13
effective adjustment. They once again confirm Weber’s pessimism about the “rationality”
of a formal-rational organization.
Conclusion
The mismatch between decision-making structure and decision-making environment in
international disaster relief work creates a strange paradox. Decision authority, informally
renegotiated to become located in actors in the field, must surely be a clear deviation from
design expectations in a hierarchical organization. But it is precisely this subversion of
official process that fulfills an important (and to many insiders and outsiders, the only)
organizational mandate: actually getting disaster relief work done. Thus, the power of lower
participants, neither initially assigned, organized for, taught, condoned, acknowledged or
encouraged, is what makes it work in the end. If operational success, rather than failure,
ensues, then this is due not to the formal organization, but rather to more distributed
lower-level adaptive processes that form in closer and more direct contact with the actual
constraints and situational opportunities present in day-to-day work. At the same time (and
perversely) local successes are no guarantee for global (geopolitical) acceptance of the aid
effort and in the end could even undermine the sustainability of that nation as assistance-
provider in such situations or those particular countries.
The informal relocation of authority would, on the face of it, represent a massive
infringement of procedure and protocol, one that could be seen as putting national
reputations on the line. But for teamleaders, “violating” rules and regulations does not
seem especially problematic, certainly no longer after an initial period of adjustment to
reality in the field. They will justify deviance from procedure and protocol, even hoarding
of resources, by constructing accounts that bring their actions into harmony with social
expectations: particularly getting the job of relief work done in that situation. They will also
point to the success of their (deviant) actions in terms of living up to what they see as the
ultimate organizational mandate (providing disaster relief).
Characterizing teamleaders’ initiatives in terms of “violations” (as even some on the inside
do) vastly overstates the role of rational choice on part of individual actors. Instead, their
rationality is determined by environmental contingencies and constraints. Disaster relief
takes place in an impossibly, irreconcilably configured setting, where the decision-making
environment fundamentally contradicts and countervenes the formal decision-making
structure. Yet without that formal decision-making structure and its trajectories for
bureaucratic accountability, the geopolitical basis for continued relief efforts could get
undermined, and an initial basis for interacting with unknown colleagues in an unknown
situation through procedure and protocol would be lacking.
As a result, two completely different images of relief work emerge. They get maintained
and nurtured through local reinforcement and perceptions of their effectiveness. The
difference between these two images is not the result of a few teamleaders who put
themselves above the rules and regulations, to do what they see fit given situational
demands. The data assembled in this research shows that the system responsible for the
divergence between these two images of work lies at the intersection of (1) the formality of
the planning and organization of relief work, (2) the adaptation demanded by
environmental contingencies in the field, and (3) the extent of experience of relief workers,
particularly teamleaders. In such a setting (if not all settings), the label “violations” is not
only misleading. It is useless.
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Progress comes not from nailing errant teamleaders. Progress comes from disaster relief
organizations learning more about themselves and about how to reconcile pressures for
getting the job done while remaining bureaucratically accountable. Such a route is
consistent with the commitment of resilience engineering, where organizations should be
concerned with monitoring the accuracy and relevance of their current models of
operational competence and risk (Hollnagel et al., 2005). If operational competence is
thought to express itself through an adherence to rules, and risk is thought to result from
people not doing so (see McDonald et al., 2002), then interventions to manage and adjust
the organization’s adaptive capacity may miss the mark. This is likely the case in organizing
disaster relief. Fundamental goal conflicts that find their source in structural oppositions
between decision making environment and organizational structure, remain
unacknowledged. They get pushed down into local teams, for them to sort out on the
ground. Systematic non-conformity, that accelerates with experience in the field, responds
to the dilemma that relief workers know what to do, but do not have the formal decision
authority to do it, and very limited means to push knowledge about what needs to be done
up the line to the one with decision authority (after all, communication is supposed to be
predominantly top-down, not bottom-up). While maintaining the fundamental goal conflict
(providing local help while answering global sensitivities) may seem the only rational way to
continue for relief organizations, it often ends up satisfying only one of the two major goals
dear to relief organizations: teamleaders are either effective in providing local aid, or they
are effective in satisfying bureaucratic requirements for information flow and decision
order. Being effective in managing pressures for bureaucratic accountability while getting
the relief job done, is an exceptional skill that seems to come only with considerable
experience in the field as well as inherent sensitivity to head office and mother organization
concerns.
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Table 1: Different images of decision making in relief work
Formal Actual
Allegiance to distant supervisors and Dissociation from distant supervisors
higher-order goals Higher-order goals less critical
Plans overspecified Plans brittle in face of contingency &
constraint
Adherence to procedure and protocol Drift from procedure and protocol
Deference to hierarchy and structure Deference to experience and resource access
Constrained by national and Improvisation across boundaries
organizational boundaries
Authority lines clear Authority lines diffuse
Ask before acting Tell after acting (maybe)
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