Emergency Decision Making and Metacomplexity
With the advent of the 1980s…
The components of decision-making based on complexity theory principles had been well supported by research and further training to improve decision-making using these principles had been shown to be effective.
Crisis decisions are most effectively made by humans. Unfortunately, however, human decision-makers are, at times, less than perfect. [The] majority of disasters (e.g., in aircraft crashes) are due to human error (not due to mechanical failures) and in some cases, e.g., the Three Mile Island accident, the [stressor levels] far exceed the response capacity of human decision-makers as well as their available knowledge.
