Trust in the Face of Adversity

The afternoon of February 6^th was routine – I made a fruit smoothie, chatted with my mother a bit, and afterwards I would prepare to go on a walk around the neighborhood.  The monotony was broken up when my sister came to the table with her laptop in hand, with what looked like a streaming website on the screen.  The stream was of SpaceX’s test launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket, carrying one of CEO Elon Musk’s luxury cars set to orbit the sun.  My mother and I had not heard of the event, and it was fascinating to see in real time.  It also made my mother very nervous.  She remembered what happened with Challenger over 30 years ago, and even though the Falcon Heavy rocket was unmanned, there was still a sense of tension that was hard to shake.  Thankfully, the launch was a success, and we left the table knowing we have a car orbiting the sun.  After that, I knew that at some point during the semester I had to read Kumar et al on Bounded Awareness and the Challenger disaster.  This blog post will take a look at that in addition to two other articles on KM in the context of disaster:  Chua et al on A tale of two hurricanes: Comparing Katrina and Rita through a knowledge management perspective, and Ibrahim et al’s Information sharing and trust during major incidents: Findings from the oil industry.

The morning of the Challenger launch was cold – far colder than previous launches had to deal with, and there was concern among the engineers that the ship’s O-rings would not function properly.  They implored management to delay the launch, but despite their concerns the launch proceeded as planned.  As the article points out, the managers were not merely business-people with no working knowledge on how rockets work.  On the contrary, many were probably engineers themselves at one point, and were highly knowledgeable people.  In this case, the managers were bounded by their own tacit knowledge gained from countless successful launches in the past.  They saw the information presented by the engineers through a different lens, and while not dismissive, they did not see it being as relevant as the engineers made it out to be.  To me this also indicated a lack of trust between the two parties.  The managers preferred to trust their own existing knowledge over that of the engineers, even though the engineers had the advantage of spending a much greater deal of their work time around the faulty equipment that ultimately caused the failure.

The next article I looked at examined a more recent disaster, hurricane Katrina, and compared it the far less devastating Rita that occurred shortly after.  Federal response to Katrina was slow, and for a while the various support organizations involved did not appear to be coordinating very well.  State and federal agencies acted independently, with multiple people seeming to be in charge.  This stands in stark contrast to the Rita response, where cooperation between agencies was high, and trusted each other enough to do their jobs.  This trust had not been established when Katrina first hit, but going through such a disaster together no doubt provided a powerful learning experience from which to base it around.  While other factors, such as the politics of the time, cannot be ignored, trust and the better organization that came with it played a significant role in Rita’s markedly quick response.

Often operating in relative isolation with dangerous machinery and chemicals, oil rigs must be well prepared to deal with a crisis.  In this environment where a mistake or misdirection could be life-threatening, trust between individuals is more important than ever.  Such was the subject of Ibrahim’s study.  One case study in particular was highlighted, where 13 firefighters died in the Mann Gulch disaster.  Communication broke down between the firefighters and the foreman, and orders were not followed.  The firefighters did not know the foreman, and what little communication occurred between them was not clear, and evidently did not inspire confidence.  It’s not as if the firefighters were not adequately trained, but there was no time to build trust and assure one another that they knew what they were doing.  Hindsight is 20-20 and we can talk about how the instructions could have been communicated differently, but it is at least clear that once again, trust is an essential component of successful information transfer.

Stephen summed up the Ibrahim article with:

“In disasters, knowledge can mean the difference between life and death, and so can the effective transfer of that knowledge.”

Especially after reading the three articles highlighted here, I’m inclined to agree.  Not only does knowledge have to be communicated effectively, but also very quickly.  Without trust between the acting individuals and agencies, there is not as much incentive to follow on the fly instructions, or there will be hesitation where such a thing cannot be afforded.  There is already so much uncertainty in an active disaster situation, and the consequence of communication failure can be fatal.

Chua, A. Y. K. (2007). A tale of two hurricanes: Comparing Katrina and Rita through a
knowledge management perspective. Journal of the American Society of Information
Science and Technology, 58(10), 1518-1528

Ibrahim, N. H., & Allen, D. (2012). Information sharing and trust during major incidents:
Findings from the oil industry. Journal of the American Society of Information Science
and Technology, 63(10), 1916-1928

Kumar J, A., & Chakrabarti, A. (2012). Bounded awareness and tacit knowledge:
Revisiting Challenger disaster. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16(6), 934-949.