The document summarizes the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand and examines whether successfully managing a prior lesser crisis (the 2010 earthquake) better prepared the University of Canterbury to manage a subsequent greater crisis (the 2011 earthquake). It discusses how the university responded well to the initial 2010 earthquake but faced a much more devastating 2011 earthquake that changed the operating environment. While the experience of the first earthquake helped with operational aspects, it may have made management less flexible in adapting to the very different challenges of the second, more catastrophic earthquake.

1. The 2010 and 2011 Canterbury Earthquakes and
organisational learning at the University of
Canterbury: does practice make perfect?
Professor Nigel Healey, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Nottingham
Trent University / Adjunct Professor, University of Canterbury

2. Health warning (1)
• The limitations of critical self-reflection as a research
methodology
• The illusion of objectivity in ethnographic studies:
– „candid ethnographer‟
– „chaste ethnographer‟
– „fair ethnographer‟
– „literary ethnographer‟
• Nonetheless…
…this approach provides rich insights into understanding the
management of a natural disaster which could not be achieved by
an alternative, more remote methodology
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3. Health warning (2)
• Aim is not to assess whether management could have done
„better‟ with 20:20 hindsight
– the management team worked tirelessly and professionally, using
their best judgement in a difficult situation
– it is always be possible to choose better strategies ex-post, based
on full information, than ex-ante, based on partial information
• Aim is to examine, using the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury
earthquakes as a case study, whether the successful
management of a prior, lesser crisis better prepares
managers to deal with a subsequent, greater crisis
• Interesting question: because the answer seems so intuitively
obvious
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4. Overview
• University of Canterbury
• The 2010 and 2011 earthquakes
• Managing after the major earthquakes
– September 4, 2010
– February 22, 2011
• The changed environment post February 22
• The impact of the changed environment
• Unintended consequences
• Conclusions
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5. The University of Canterbury pre-September 4,
2010
• Medium-sized, public comprehensive university
• 15,362 enrolments (EFTS) in 2010, of which:
– 13,960 domestic students
– 1,402 international students (9.2% of the total)
• Based in western suburbs of Christchurch
• Christchurch is a city of 325,000 people
– Major international tourist gateway
– Major international student destination: two universities, one
polytechnic and number of prestigious high schools which attract
international students
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6. The 2010 and 2011 earthquakes
• Pacific Plate moves 37-47mm
pa against the Australian Plate
• 37-47mm per year = 3.7-4.7m
per century
• Many of the fault systems from
Alpine Fault are not fully
mapped
• “Most probable date of next big
shock is tomorrow”
• Strict building codes since 1931
Hawke‟s Bay earthquake
(M7.8)
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7. The September 4, 2010 earthquake
• M7.1 at 4:35am on Saturday, September 4, 2010
• Epicentre 40km west of Christchurch, near the town of
Darfield
• 2 injuries, no directly-attributable deaths
• Earthquake occurred during mid-semester break
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8. The September 4, 2010 earthquake
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9. The February 22, 2011 earthquake
• M6.3 at 12:51pm on Tuesday, 22 February 2011
• Epicentre 10km south-east of Christchurch
• 181 fatalities, from 20 countries; approximately 2,000
injured
• Fatalities included many Japanese, Chinese and other
international students studying English in a collapsed building
in the city
• Second day of academic year
• Height of tourist season
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10. The February 22, 2011 earthquake
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11. The February 22, 2011 earthquake
Liquefaction
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12. The 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes in
context (nb, Richter scale is logarithmic: M6 is 10x M5)
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13. Managing after the earthquakes
• UC had a very sophisticated emergency management system
pre-September 4 with:
– Incident Management Team
– Emergency Management Centre (generator, secure server, CCTV,
two-way radio, remote campus control)
– Strategic Emergency Management Team
• Management teams had practised for emergencies using
simulations – earthquake, plane hitting the campus, bomb at
graduation, shooter on campus
• Emergency response mobilised instantly after both major
earthquakes
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14. Key question: does successfully managing a
prior, lesser crisis better prepare organisations
to manage a subsequent, greater crisis?
• Considerable management literature:
– ‘Failing to learn and learning to fail (intelligently): How great
organizations put failure to work to improve and innovate’ (Mark
Cannon and Amy Edmondson)
– ‘Lessons we don’t learn: A study of the lessons of disasters, why
we repeat them, and how we can learn them’ (Amy Donahue and
Robert Tuohy)
• Most of the literature focuses on obstacles to learning:
organisational amnesia
• Canterbury earthquakes provide a valuable case study of an
organisation recovering from two similar disasters within five
months
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15. Managing after September 4
• University closed for one week
• Building checklist:
– checked by engineers for structural integrity
– inspected by volunteer managers for hazards
– cleaned up by volunteer staff
• Most buildings reopened within one week
• General sense of relief that such a major earthquake caused
no loss of life and little structural damage
• Second semester timetable slightly adjusted to allow for
missed week, no discernable impact on student academic
performance in end-of-semester examinations
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16. Managing after February 22 (1)
• View established early in the SEMT that we had a successful
„roadmap‟ for managing recovery
• Recovery management almost immediately jumped to the
end-point reached post-September 4:
– twice daily meetings of IMT and SEMT discontinued
– communications to staff restricted to „customised‟ corporate
messages
– messages limited to what was known to be true
• …and SEMT immediately back on sushi diet
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17. Managing after February 22 (2)
• Managers acted professionally and in good faith
• But in applying lessons of September 4:
– recovery management arguably set in a more inflexible framework
post-February 22…
– …despite operating in a very different environment
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18. The changed environment post-February 22
• Many deaths and injuries – almost everyone at UC knew
someone who had died
• Staff fatigued after September 4
• Many staff (and students) living in damaged homes without
power, water or sewage – degraded resiliency
• Two major buildings declared „safe‟ after September 4
collapsed on February 22 – loss of public trust in engineering
assessments
• Widespread sense of despair – many people left Christchurch
to avoid aftershocks
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19. The changed environment: Canterbury Memorial
Day, March 18, one week after Japanese tsunami
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20. Impact of the changed environment
• Building checklist on campus:
– amended to include modelling for integrity in event of another
major earthquake (positive response)
– but lengthy process
– many buildings required repairs with uncertain timelines
• Corporate messages to staff inevitably provided limited
information
• Very limited opportunities to bring staff together to provide
mutual support – important with so many foreign staff
• Decision-making controlled by senior management for much
longer than post-September 4
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21. Some unintended consequences
• Less staff engagement in the recovery process than post-
September 4
• Frustration by academic staff over both communications and
decision-making
• Academic Board went through a period of difficult relations
with senior management
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22. But senior management did act decisively to
address severity of crisis UC faced
• University faced crippling loss of student enrolments
• Senior management moved quickly to:
– order large number of marquees so that teaching could resume on
campus within three weeks
– begin construction of approximately 100 portacoms (12m x 12m
units) to provide replacement open plan offices, teaching rooms
and computer labs
– arrange for UC students to study at other NZ and Australian
university as „no fee‟ exchange students in semester I
• Facebook was used effectively, as post-September 4, for two-
way communications with students
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23. The impact on domestic Equivalent Full-Time
Students
-1,500 EFTS
= -11%
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24. The impact on international Equivalent Full-
Time Students
-400 EFTS
= -30%
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25. And a huge positive outcome…
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26. Conclusions (1)
• UC had strong disaster management systems in place pre-
September 4
• Widely recognised that UC dealt well with the September 4
earthquake
• February 22 earthquake was profoundly more devastating
• Senior management acted to deal with the greater crisis,
drawing on the experience of September 4
• Key question:
– did the learning from September 4 make the organisation better able
to manage post-February 22?
– or did the learning from September make the organisation less flexible
in adapting to a very different operating environment?
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27. Conclusions (2)
• Managing through a disaster may be like managing through a
divorce
• Managing one divorce better prepares you for the operational
details of the next (lawyers, financial settlements, etc)
• But every divorce has a different context and dynamic
• Successfully managing an amicable divorce may:
– help you with the operational details next time
– but make you less able to deal with the unexpected acrimony of
your next divorce
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