Crisis Collaboration Exercises: Are They Useful?

Abstract

Introduction:Crisis collaboration exercises are perceived as developing and testing cross-sectoral team integration, preparedness efforts, and response. However, the general problem is that crisis collaboration exercises may tend to produce results with limited usefulness in actual crisis work. The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental, survey-based study was to examine to what extent there was a statistically significant relationship between participation in Norwegian maritime crisis collaboration exercises and the perceived levels of learning and usefulness in an actual crisis. The scope was limited to relevant public, military, and non-governmental exercise participants.Method:Surveys were electronically distributed among participants in three 2016 Norwegian maritime crisis collaboration exercises. The data collection instrument was the Collaboration, Learning, and Utility scale (Berlin & Carlström, 2015). The CLU-Scale is specially designed to measure collaboration exercise participants' perceived levels of learning and utility. The scope was limited to relevant public and non-governmental exercise participants including health, law enforcement, and military stakeholders.The effects of collaboration, learning, and usefulness were tested in two bivariate regression analyses, where the first tested the relationship between collaboration and learning, and the second tested the relationship between learning and usefulness. To measure the linear dependence between the variables, Pearson’s r was calculated. The coefficients of determination (r2) were calculated to determine what proportions of the variance in the dependent variables could be considered predictable from the independent variables.Results:The joint collaborative characteristics predicted 27% (r2 = 0.27) of the learning variance, which meant that the remaining 73% of the predicted variance was unaccounted for. The perceived learning items predicted 34% (r2 = 0.34) of the usefulness variance.Conclusion:This study found a moderately strong statistically significant relationship between participation in Norwegian maritime crisis collaboration exercises and perceived levels of learning and usefulness. More focus on collaboration learning techniques in exercise planning and evaluation is recommended.