A technique for acquiring tacit knowledge retained by a group of people.
Published in Chapter:
Identifying Resilient Actions in Decision Making During Emergencies
Marcelo Índio dos Reis (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Marcos R.S. Borges (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and José Orlando Gomes (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-843-7.ch050
Abstract
All emergency management phases demands knowledge that is embedded in procedures and also in the minds of people who handle them. Specifically in emergency response, a great amount of contextual information is generated which results from the development of the event, including the unplanned remedial actions carried out by the teams. Part of these remedial actions and decisions are made on the fly because they are not part of the formal procedures. After the event, the understanding and the analysis of these situations are important to refine the emergency plans. Many emergency investigations do this, but they usually concentrate on failures. Our approach is to concentrate on those actions that resulted in success. Telling stories is a natural way of transmitting tacit knowledge among individuals and groups. Stories are great vehicles for wrapping together elements of knowledge such as tacit knowledge, emotion, the core, and the context. They are a very powerful way to represent complex, multidimensional concepts. While a certain amount of knowledge can be reflected as information, stories hold the key to unlocking vital knowledge, which remains beyond the reach of codified information (Ruggles, 2004).