There can be a tendency when planning events to prepare for the big dramatic 'what ifs' but ignore the smaller, less visible although more likely ones which collectively can cause serious problems
The United Kingdom Government maintains what it calls a “UK Resilience” presence on the United Kingdom Cabinet website (http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ukresilience/about.aspx).
The UK Resilience website is run as a news and information service for emergency practitioners by The Cabinet Office and provides advice for practitioners on the pre-emergency phase; advise for practitioners on the post-emergency phase and specific assessments and guidance.
What caught Honestly Lay Bare’s eyes was a recent series of studies released by UK Resilience which argued that focusing on technology instead of people is a key factor in events going wrong.
Compiled by researchers from the Leeds University Business School, the reports also claim that over-reliance on technical and IT solutions means we fail to learn the lessons from past disasters.
The Understanding Crowd Behaviours reports are the first to bring together sociological and psychological research on events and crowd behaviour, reviewing over 550 academic papers and drawing on in-depth interviews with 27 specialists in the field (police, emergency planners and event managers) to produce detailed guidelines for event organisers.
The researchers cite the recent debacle at the opening of Heathrow's Terminal Five as a prime example of a situation where faith in the power of new software and other technology meant that the importance of people – in this case, training and familiarisation in the new building and systems and involving those on the front line in decision making – was overlooked.
Researcher in Organisational Psychology, Rose Challenger, and colleagues Professor Chris Clegg and Mark Robinson, believe that an approach which treats technical and sociological/ psychological considerations in parallel – known in organisational psychology as a 'systems approach' – is the best preparation for a crowd event. It would also, they believe, help us learn lessons from previous mistakes.
"A systems approach is widely seen as best practice in organisational management, particularly in managing change – and is clearly applicable in crowd and event management as well," says Challenger, who led the research.
The United Kingdom Government maintains what it calls a “UK Resilience” presence on the United Kingdom Cabinet website (http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ukresilience/about.aspx).
The UK Resilience website is run as a news and information service for emergency practitioners by The Cabinet Office and provides advice for practitioners on the pre-emergency phase; advise for practitioners on the post-emergency phase and specific assessments and guidance.
What caught Honestly Lay Bare’s eyes was a recent series of studies released by UK Resilience which argued that focusing on technology instead of people is a key factor in events going wrong.
Compiled by researchers from the Leeds University Business School, the reports also claim that over-reliance on technical and IT solutions means we fail to learn the lessons from past disasters.
The Understanding Crowd Behaviours reports are the first to bring together sociological and psychological research on events and crowd behaviour, reviewing over 550 academic papers and drawing on in-depth interviews with 27 specialists in the field (police, emergency planners and event managers) to produce detailed guidelines for event organisers.
The researchers cite the recent debacle at the opening of Heathrow's Terminal Five as a prime example of a situation where faith in the power of new software and other technology meant that the importance of people – in this case, training and familiarisation in the new building and systems and involving those on the front line in decision making – was overlooked.
Researcher in Organisational Psychology, Rose Challenger, and colleagues Professor Chris Clegg and Mark Robinson, believe that an approach which treats technical and sociological/ psychological considerations in parallel – known in organisational psychology as a 'systems approach' – is the best preparation for a crowd event. It would also, they believe, help us learn lessons from previous mistakes.
"A systems approach is widely seen as best practice in organisational management, particularly in managing change – and is clearly applicable in crowd and event management as well," says Challenger, who led the research.
"Technical solutions will give you the engineering calculations to determine the ideal width of exits but you need to tie that in with understanding how people will behave and use those exits in given situations and how you will communicate with people in an emergency to ensure best use of them.
"Believing new technology can be the answer to all problems means we are more likely to overlook basic lessons from past events.
In the reports, the team highlights gaps in knowledge and areas where further research is needed, including more detailed analysis of the different types of crowd and their behaviour and better simulation models which take the complexity of behaviour into account.
Also identified is a need for more sophisticated risk assessment tools, which can ensure a full range of 'what if' scenarios are taken into account. The reports highlight how the chaos at Terminal Five was caused not because of one major failure, but when lots of smaller and otherwise manageable problems had a cumulative effect.
"There can be a tendency when planning events to prepare for the big dramatic 'what ifs' but ignore the smaller, less visible although more likely ones which collectively can cause serious problems," says Challenger.
"It's important to ensure your risk assessment isn't blinkered. For example, at Hillsborough there was an over emphasis on hooliganism as that was the big issue of the day, but other more generic safety issues were overlooked. Today, we may tend to focus on the risk of a terrorist attack and ignore more banal risks such as power or transport failures or a gas leak." (The Hillsborough Disaster was a human crush that occurred on 15 April, 1989, at Hillsborough, a football stadium, the home of Sheffield Wednesday F.C, resulting in the deaths of 96 people, all fans of Liverpool Football Club. It remains the deadliest stadium-related disaster in British history and one of the worst in international football).
The reports are available on the Cabinet Office UK Resilience website (http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ukresilience/news/crowd-behaviour.aspx ).
**
As Honestly Lay Bare read the reports it was struck by how little we apply the principles of risk management to the dynamics of something that happens every moment of every day of every year somewhere in the world – the gathering of a crowd whether it be at a planned event or spontaneously.
We cannot expect of a discipline such as risk management that it will be all things to all people and perhaps therein lies its flaw.
The discipline of engineering CAN be all things to all people – a bridge is a bridge is a bridge.
Therein lies the expectation gap between thinking that we know and knowing what we know.
Post based on “Losing Sight of People In A Crowd Can Spell Disaster, Warns New Report” by Science Daily – 13th July 2009
0 comments:
Post a Comment