You're faced with an emergency scenario. How do you ensure quick decisions without sacrificing accuracy?

Collecting and synchronizing information into actionable, shared situational awareness is critical to timely and effective critical thinking and decision-making. Know your sources beforehand, ensure that these sources are used by your watch center or duty officer, cross check information, and then distribute information to crisis management team members for review, if time permits. Accuracy also comes by the way of a collaborative, multi-disciplined approach where all stakeholders participate in the development of actionable situational awareness thus giving all players a seat at the decision table. The disparate activities of each agency/division/group then become organized as decision making becomes a unified, collaborative activity.

The idea is to develop a culture of "situational awareness" within the organization before an emergency situation occurs. Train your team to stay abreast of what is happening and gather information on the ground truth from trusted sources so that informed decisions can be made.

In an emergency situation, ensuring quick decisions without sacrificing accuracy involves a balance of preparation, situational awareness, and structured decision-making processes. Regular practice and exercises aid in conditioning reactions and developing faster and more precise decision-making during high-pressure situations. Prioritize the situation by concentrating on the most influential actions initially. Develop uniform protocols and checklists to streamline the decision-making process by providing a clear, step-by-step guide for common emergency scenarios. Incorporate fresh data, which aids in swiftly and precisely adjusting decisions Distribute responsibilities among team members according to their individual skills

The importance of pre-established guidelines cannot be overlooked. As an example, running "sandbox" training scenarios with agencies within your jurisdiction will help develop these protocols and allow those involved to see what assets the others possess. Running "worse case scenario" training will test your flexibility and force you to think outside the box, resulting in streamlined protocols that can be implemented when a real emergency occurs.

As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. When making decisions in a crisis, all you can do is use the best information available. There will be time to reflect during after-actions reporting and evaluation, but it’s important to stay focused when setbacks occur.

This question is the reason we have resiience programs. We build in advance everything that we will need to ensure that, when the stuff hits the fan, our people know what to do, who’s doing what, when, where, why, how, and we practise, practicse, practise to build muscle memory, so we can minimise the number of ad-hoc decisions to be made whilst under duress. Any remaining decisions then become less overwhelming and more situational based, working from a point of relative strength rather than unknowns and chaos.

Totally agree with Glen. The difficulty is getting data custodians to understand the importance of that data and ensuring it is accurate and clean. AI may help with this rather mundane task, but its only help, its taking responsability for it.