Managing Information Systems in Dynamic Conditions: Openness vs. Control

• In Event: Responding to Dynamic Environmental Risks

Abstract

Dynamic conditions create a unique tension for decision processes. As conditions change, decision makers need to remain open to incoming information and update their understanding of the operational context in real time. Yet, mobilizing response to changing conditions requires sufficient control over information to maintain a coherent operational framework and logic of action. This tension between openness and control varies with the intensity and severity of threat to operations and capacity of decision makers to comprehend the rate of change and adapt their actions accordingly.
This study explores the tension between openness and control that public managers confront in managing information for crisis events. The exponential increase in extreme events over the last two decades challenges current capacity to manage risk in communities exposed to recurring hazards. In California, recurring wildfires have exceeded previous cost estimates and acreage burned year after year. Ironically, recent years of drought have been followed by a season of relentless rainstorms in late 2022 and early 2023 that have deluged the entire state, triggering landslides and blocking roads with uprooted trees. This changing hazardscape demands a fundamental redesign in the communication and information management processes for crisis management to engage residents of communities at risk to achieve sustainable risk reduction. A major goal is to shift the perspective from reaction to extreme events after they occur to anticipation of risk and mitigation of potential losses before hazards occur, but this shift requires communication of timely, valid information to multiple groups in the community to achieve collective response to shared risk.
We propose a complex systems approach to hazard reduction across multiple scales of risk by identifying networks of information search and exchange that validate the flow of information across different groups that vary in types of exposure, degrees of knowledge, and capacity for action. Using a theoretical framework of complex adaptive systems, we investigate whether community learning processes that focus on cognition and action to mitigate a specific risk, wildfire, in the short-term lead to sustainable adaptation to changing conditions in the long-term. The study focuses on communities as the primary level to initiate broad, sustainable change in managing risk, and expanding collective learning capacity by using advances in smart technologies and interactive exchange with community partners. We use the threat of wildfire across Alameda and Marin Counties in northern California that represent successive scales of decision making as community engagement study sites. We will draw on data from three sources -- formal laws, policies, and procedures, informal interviews with collaborative community partners to identify local leaders, and a set of semistructured interviews with leaders from three types of community groups -- formal, informal, and institutional (10 x 3 = 30) to identify a set of interacting community networks engaged in risk mitigation. This inquiry will focus on what kinds of technologies are available to different groups in their search and exchange of risk information. Assessing the interaction among these networks, we anticipate tracking the flow of information among different groups in the community to generate a community learning process to change behavior and culture for risk reduction.
Monitoring climate change means tracking visible extremes in real-time, acknowledging uncertainty, and noting ambiguity regarding future trends. These dynamic conditions challenge public managers to determine what balance of openness and control is appropriate for informing community residents regarding the risks they may incur and what actions may reduce them. Scientists have reliably documented the changing climate (IPCC 2022) but reports are less reliable in projecting current trends, the anticipated severity of risk, and the impact on specific communities. Public managers confront the task of informing their constituents regarding the status of risk and what actions are practical for specific types of risk. Too little information may lead to complacency and inaction; invalid information may lead to distrust; ambiguous information may be transmitted to others as inaccurate or disinformation that erodes trust in public agencies’ capacity to respond.
We anticipate that access to a range of tested information technologies will enable practicing managers and community residents to exchange timely, valid information and balance the tension between openness and control in managing the dynamic risk of wildfire. Creating a learning process that engages the whole community in sustained efforts to comprehend how interactions between the physical environment and social infrastructures both lessen and increase risk leads to resilient communities. This study is supported by NSF grant #2230636.

Author

• Louise K. Comfort, University of California, Berkeley