Decision Making / 4 / 4.2

4.2 BRIEF REFLECTION ON THE BLACK HAWK HELICOPTER CRASH

If we had had the responsibility of commanding either of the Army units involved, designing and managing training overall of this Counter Terrorist (CT) /Special Recovery Operations (SRO) training activity, in particular, in the days, weeks, or months before 12 June 1996, what would we have done? Of course, we would have no knowledge of the catastrophic events that were about to unfold, but we would be faced with various warning signs and symptoms.

The risk-management and decision-making tasks in our spotlight are complex. They are complex because of their detail and how they change over time, that is, their dynamics. Despite commanders and staff officers being well trained, the problems they had to manage eluded their efforts and their considerable intellect. Generally speaking, as workloads and stress increase, and dynamic feedback structures, inherent in the problems, begin to manifest themselves, decision making and management become messy. Managers become less able to cope effectively. In turn, they place greater reliance on their individual and privately held knowledge, experience, judgement, and intuition. Often, as the accident case studies suggest, this may not be enough. Indeed, when it comes to dealing with dynamic complexity, it may be quite inappropriate.

As explained earlier, complexity is not the only issue here, there are many others including:

• limited access to, or availability of, relevant information;
• erroneously reported information;
• information deliberately withheld, such as through fear, ignorance or uncertainty, or simply because its significance is not understood;
• ambiguity;
• conflict between stakeholders;
• limited span of responsibility which precludes taking an ‘arms-length’, holistic view;
• limited influence;
• assumptions developed from prior experience that are not completely relevant, are incorrectly interpreted and applied, or even erroneous; and
• thinking in terms of ‘gold nuggets’ that is, believing that extant problems can be corrected if a single cause can be removed.

The list above has been developed primarily from observations made during research of many case studies. At this point it is sufficient to recognise that these issues exist and that their importance should not be underestimated. Others such as Nutt (1989) have developed their own lists and proffer them as reasons for poor decision making or failures in organisational change interventions. They are omnipresent; it is only the extent of their impact that varies. They have a significant impact on the way we might set about designing risk-management strategies.