We Really Are Improvising to Stay Alive

This morning - Friday September 3, 2021 - I fed the dog, made the coffee, got the newspapers from the front porch (yes, we still get the Chicago Tribune and New York Times delivered everyday), opened up the Times and read this headline in the Business section:

“Improvising to Stay Alive.”

The article is about a food service organization that has had to adapt and change through the pandemic and how the Delta variant is requiring even more resiliency and more improvisation to keep their business from going under.

I expected to do a joke post on Twitter about this, which I probably will do later in the day, but as I started my workday and opened up my email, I saw that two Swedish scholars had approved my request to get access to the full text of an academic paper they had published a few years ago, the tile of which is: “Resilient Emergency Response: Supporting Flexibility and Improvisation in Collaborative Command and Control.”? The scholars are Jiri Trnka and Bj?rn J. E. Johansson of the Swedish Defense Research Agency.

Okay, so - yes - I subscribe to a handful of academic websites, in this case, Academia.Edu, where I am always looking for old and new research on improvisation - applied and otherwise. My nerdiness is confirmed.?

But the paper was, indeed, about improvising to stay alive. The authors were looking at how to approach high level design problems in emergency situations. For this study, they looked at Swedish local and regional emergency response organizations responding jointly to an emergency, a medium sized forest fire.?

The article is very technical and I share the concluding paragraph below. But, in less academic jargon, the authors note that the most effective way to design effective joint responses to these kinds of emergencies is by blending top down, data driven systems - with individual and group improvisation.?

We literally need to improvise to stay alive.

Here’s the conclusion drawn by the authors:?

“The chapter demonstrates how such analysis can be performed by using a scenario based role-playing simulation and a combined set of bottom-up data driven and top-down methods. The study shows that the involvement of real commanders, real C2 structures and constraint-bound tasks makes it possible to identify and analyze situated actions and emerging individual and team adaptations and improvisation. This type of analysis, thus, describing how commanders adapt and improvise in specific situations represents an essential input for the design and development of ICT for emergency response. From a research perspective, the study provides new insights about the interactions and processes that take place in joint emergency response operations.”