This document presents an overview of a cross impact scenario model for organizational behavior in emergencies. It begins with an introduction to the topic and outlines some key questions around determining success or failure in emergency preparedness and management. It then provides details on the cross impact model, including source events and assumptions, dynamic events during response, and outcome events. Tables are included to outline the different events and their relationships. The document also references background literature on topics like the Turner stage model of failures and organizational challenges. Overall, the document aims to describe a cross impact scenario modeling approach for analyzing organizational factors in emergency situations.

1. © Murray Turoff 2013 (Educational use
allowed with attribution)
11
A Cross Impact Scenario Model of
Organizational Behavior in
Emergencies
Murray Turoff
http:/is.njit.edu/turoff
Use: murray.turoff@gmail.com
For slides and related papers
Presented at
ISCRAM 2013, Baden Baden, Germany
May 12-15, 2013

2. © Murray Turoff 2013 (Educational use
allowed with attribution)
222

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33
Clear Failure
of
Emergency
Preparedness
and
Management
How do we
determine
success or
failure?
Did we do
the best we
could?!

4. The response must be comparable to the disaster!
© Murray Turoff 2013 (Educational
use allowed with attribution)
4

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5
Summary Report EM literature 50’s-70’s
Types of Organizations in Disasters
Tasks/
Structure
Expected Unexpected
Old Established
Example: Police doing
what they did before
the disaster and/or
in the same way
Extending
A group undertaking non-regular
tasks like a construction
company using men and
equipment to dig through debris
during a rescue operation
New Expanding
Example: Group
exists on paper only
until the disaster
happens, like the Red
Cross running a
shelter
Emergent
A new group made up of people
from many different
organizations or organizational
units, suddenly working together
to tackle the crisis problems.
Dynes, R. R. and Quarantelli, E. L. (1976) Organizational Communications
and decision Making in Crises, Report series 17. Disaster Research Center,
University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA.

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Established vs. Emergent
 Established Organization
 Line, Middle, and Upper Management
 Line takes Expected actions on Expected requests
 Line management passes unexpected requests
upward
 Middle Management analyses Unexpected Requests
 Upper Management decides on preferred actions for
unexpected requests
 All the above takes time inappropriate for disaster
response
 Emergent Organizations
 Authority to make unexpected decisions passes
down to Line Management
 Lateral Communications across line management
becomes critical to problem solving
 Middle management augments line management
 Middle management takes on new roles to support
response with needed resources (people or
equipment)
 Feedback established to determine correct or
incorrect actions and decisions (situation awareness)
 Upper management seeks more resources
 All try to determine and correct errors and mistakes.

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Cross Impact Model of the 1976 Paper
Source Events and Assumptions I
 Probability of being true/false at start time and
can not be influenced by any events
 S1: Decision Plans:
 The organizations have detailed plans defining all
requests and responses.
 S2: Process Plans:
 The Plans define the roles and processes for sensing
the situation and developing collaborative
responses.
 S3: Foresight of Threats
 The emergency taking place fits the description and
scale in the existing emergency plans and prior
preparedness and mitigation activities by the
organizations.
 S4: Sensing Current Reality
 There is an established information and
communication system for gathering and tracking
the effectiveness of responses to requests for
services, materials, and/or personnel to handle both
expected and unexpected situations.

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Source Events and Assumptions II
 S5: Continuous integration of EM professionals.
 There is free and on-going lateral communications
about plans, responses, and real or potential
problems concerning emergencies by managers and
professionals in different organizations or
organizational units.
 S6: Continuous integration of the public.
 There is the ability to integrate quickly individuals,
social media, and other organizations into the
Emergency Management Systems.
 S7: Ignoring Errors
 The organizations involved have a history of hiding
errors they have made in the past and not
encouraging workers to expose them for correction.
 S8: Maximizing profit
 Mitigation and Risk Avoidance have been sacrificed
as part of maximizing organizational profits or
reducing costs such as maintenance.

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Dynamic Events I: Events in
play during the response
 Can be influenced by the source events and other
dynamic events
 D1: Increased unexpected requests
 Unexpected requests for people, material, and
services far exceed the current capacity of the
organization.
 D2: Delegation of Authority
 Upper management passes the authority for
determining the response to unexpected requests to
the line management and professionals.
 D3: Middle level role changes
 Middle management and professionals are drafted
into taking online management responsibilities.
 D4: Upper level role changes
 Upper management takes on the role of finding
additional resources for response functions.
 D5: Degrading Quality of response
 More than a third of the emergency requests receive
inadequate responses.

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Dynamic Events II
 D6: Growing threat rigidity
 Individual stress via the threat rigidity
syndrome affects a significant number of
managers and professionals involved in the
response process.
 D7: Collaborative Problem Solving
 Problem solving collaborative groups are able
to form to handle new problems when required,
by networking those most concerned and
knowledgeable.
 D8: Information overload problem
 Information overload is a growing problem.
 D9: Increasing Decision Making Load and
Delay
 Delays between requests and responses grow
significantly with time.
 D10: Becoming Emergent
 Significant pressures (organizational stress)
exist to make the organization more emergent.

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Outcome Events: probability of being
true at the end of the response
 Can be influenced by both the source and
dynamic events
 Probability of being true or false at the
end of the response period
 O1: Excessive Damages
 Damages greatly exceed original expectations.
 O2: Minimum Recovery Efforts
 Recovery activities are limited to replacing
what existed before as opposed to improving
the prior conditions.
 O3: Major Mitigation Efforts
 Major efforts at future mitigation will be an
integral part of the recovery.
 O4: Emergent Organizations for Recovery
 Emergent organizations continue into the
recovery period.

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Getting Estimates of the relationships
 All probabilities are initially .5 (maybe).
 A person is asked to indicate what he or she
things the probability is of each event.
 If they say it is greater then .5 we tell them to
assume it is 0 and ask what impact that has on
all the other events.
 If they say it is less then .5 we tell them to
assume it is 1 and ask about the other events.
 They indicate a resulting new probability for each
event unless they feel there is no influence
relationship.
 This will produce the greatest range of influence of
one event on the other.
 This may be an individual's model or a
collaborative group model based on agreeing on
the events and the direction of influences for any
relationship between two events.

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Turner Stage Model (1976, page 381)
Stage The Sequence of Events Associated with a Failure of Foresight
I Nationally normal starting point: Initial culturally accepted beliefs about
the world and its hazards; Associated precautionary norms set out in laws,
codes of practice, mores, and folkways.
II Incubation period: The accumulation of an unnoticed set of events which
are at odds with the accepted beliefs about hazards and the norms for their
avoidance.
III Precipitating event: Forces itself to the attention and transforms general
perceptions of stage II.
IV Onset: The immediate consequences of the collapse of cultural precautions
become apparent
V Rescue and Salvage – first stage adjustment: Post collapse situation is
recognized in ad hoc adjustments which permit the work of rescue and
salvage to be started.
VI Full cultural readjustment: An inquiry or assessment is carried out, and
beliefs and precautionary norms are adjusted to fit the newly gained
understanding of the world.

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Features of Failures
Stage Feature (comments)
I Initial Beliefs
and Norms
Failure to comply with existing regulations (violation of
existing precautions).
II Incubation
period
1. Rigidities of belief and perception (Events unnoticed or
misunderstood because of erroneous assumptions)
2. Decoy phenomena (Breaking up a complex problem into
simple problems for separate treatment; that often does not
solve the original problem)
3. Information difficulties and noise (Difficulties of handling
information in complex situations)
4. The involvement of strangers (people without the same
cultural experiences and objectives)
5. Failure to comply with discredited or out of date regulations
(violations unnoticed because of cultural lag in formal
precautions)
6. Minimizing of emergent danger (a reluctance to fear the
worst outcome)
7. Save immediate costs or raise profits while reducing safety
and increasing risk (added by Turoff).

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Consequence of the Turner Stages
and Cross Impact Analysis
 Create two separate Cross Impact Model
 Stage I and II: Starting point and Incubation
period
 Stage III to VI: Precipitating event, Onset,
Rescue & Salvage (response), Full cultural
readjustment (recovery)
 The Outcome events of the first model can
be the source events for the second model
 Simple Integration of two models
 Can be applied to other complex problems
divisible into a series of separate stages.

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Lack of continuous or
adequate Planning and MitigationHe took the wheel in a lashing roaring
hurricane
And by what compass did he steer the
course
of the ship?
"My policy is to have no policy," he said
in
the early months,
And three years later, "I have been
controlled
by events."
"The People, Yes" Carl SandburgMurray Turoff, Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Victor Bañuls, and Gerd Van Den Eede,
Multiple Perspectives on Planning for Emergencies: An Introduction to the
Special Issue on Planning and Foresight for Emergency Preparedness and
Management, Technological Forecasting and Social Change

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Problem of Multi Organizations or
organizational units trying to collaborate
in planning or response

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Organizational Monkeys

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Organizational Hierarchy
No hear
problems
No Speak
problems
No See
problems

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Chinese version: 4 monkeys
Last one does nothing!
Questions and Comments

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Background articles I
 Turoff, M., White, C., Plotnick, L., Dynamic Emergency Response
Management for Large Scale Decision Making in Extreme Hazardous
Events, in Burstein, F., Brezillon, P. and Zaslavsky, A., edt., (2010),
Supporting Real Time Decision-Making: The Role of Context in Decision
Support on the Move (Annals of Information Systems), Springer-Verlag
New York, Inc.
 Focuses on the decision problems of Emergency Managers
 Turoff, M., Hiltz, S.R.: The Future of Professional Communities of
Practice. In: Weinhardt, C., Luckner, S., Stößer, J. (eds.) WeB 2008.
LNBIP, vol. 22, pp. 144-158. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg (2009)
 The problem information overload that faces emergency managers based upon
a Delphi for NIH on 37 EM practitioners (full report on my website).
 Turoff, M., Hiltz, S. R., White, C., Plotnick, L., Hendela, A., Xiang, Y.,
The Past as the Future of Emergency Preparedness and Management,
Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management,
1(1), 12-28, January-March 2009.
 Introduces the concept of the “science of muddling through” and its similarity
to “High Reliability Theory” in EM
 Turoff, M., Organizational Factors Inhibiting the design of Effective
Emergency Management Information Systems, 45th
HICSS January 2012,
pp 402-411
 A detailed examination of the BP disaster
 Van de Walle, B., Turoff, M. and Hiltz, S. R. eds. Information Systems
for Emergency Management, In the Advances in Management
Information Systems monograph series (Editor-in-Chief: Vladimir
Zwass). Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 2010.
 A good reference book on the design of EMIS.

22. © Murray Turoff 2013 (Educational
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Background articles II
 Turoff, M., Chumer, M., Van de Walle, B., Yao, X., The
Design of a Dynamic Emergency Response Management
Information System (DERMIS). Journal of Information
Technology Theory and Application (JITTA), Volume 5,
Number 4, Summer, 2004, pp. 1-36. (http://www.jitta.org
).
 This paper has received considerable attention and is on
my website in both English and Chinese.
 Turoff, M., Chumer, M., Hiltz, R., Klashner, Robb, Alles,
Michael, Vasarhelyi, M., Kogan, A., Assuring Homeland
Security: Continuous Monitoring, Control, and
Assurance of Emergency Preparedness, Lead article for
a special issue on Emergency Preparedness for JITTA,
Volume 6, Number 3, Fall 2004, 1-24.
 This discusses at length the concept of emergency
preparedness audits and provides more detail on the design
of an EMIS system started in the prior article.
 Turner, B.A. (1976), The organizational and inter-
organizational development of disasters, Administrative
Science Quarterly 21: 378-397.
http://difi.uniud.it/tl_files/utenti/crisci/Turner%201976.pdf
1/29/2013.
 A classic and important paper.

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Background Papers III
 Linstone, Harold & Turoff, Murray, Delphi: A brief look
backward and forward, Technological Forecasting and social
Change, (2011), 2010.09.011 (in the special issue on the Delphi
Method).
 This issue of 21 papers covers the history of the method
since the 1975 book on the Delphi Method available on my
website.
 Bañuls, Victor, and Murray Turoff, Scenario construction via
Delphi and Cross-impact analysis, Technological Forecasting
and Social Change (2011), 2011.03.014. (example used is the
software development process)
 There is a growing set of articles on dynamic cross impact
modeling that allows any user create dynamic scenario
models and get an analyses of their underlying influence
factors between any two events based upon their subjective
probability estimate. It can also allow a group to merge
their estimates into a collaborative model. The group may
also go through a collaborative process to develop the
events that are to be used in the model.
 You may contact me if you have trouble finding any of these
papers. Email me at murray.turoff@gmail.com

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Background papers IV
 Banuls, V.A., Turoff, M., Hiltz, S.R., Collaborative scenario modeling in
emergency management through cross-impact, Technological
Forecasting and Social Change, For special issue on Planning in EM to
appear early 2013 (paper available on TFSC website)
 This shows the collaborative estimation process and develops a
model of the results of a dirty bomb explosion in an urban area
during the first 24 hours. The model contains source events that
are true or false at the beginning, the dynamic events during the
dynamic period, the outcome events at the end of the period.
 Turoff, Murray, Gonzalez, J.J., Hiltz, S.R., Modeling Organizational
Behavior in Emergencies, NOKOBIT 2012, Universitetet i Nordland,
(Norway), November. ISBN 978-82-321-0185-6, pages 213-224.
 This is a design of a working model based upon early findings in
the period of 1950 – 1975 on why certain public or private
organizations succeed for fail in their response to a disaster. See
the next article.
 Dynes, R. R. and Quarantelli, E. L. (1976) Organizational
Communications and Decision Making in Crises, Report series 17,
Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware Library, Newark,
DE, USA.

http://putnam.lib.udel.edu:8080/dspace/bitstream/handle/19716/1264/RS17.pdf?seq
1/29/2013.
 Turoff, M., Hiltz, S. R., Bañuls, V. M., and Van Den Eede, G., Multiple
Perspectives on Planning for Emergencies: An introduction to the
Special Issue on planning and Foresight for Emergency Preparedness
and Management. To appear in early 2013.
 Message me for a copy of this draft introduces the 15 papers and why they are
important.