Organizing to Save Lives: Post-Inquiry Sensemaking & Learning in Bushfire Emergency Organizations

Abstract

We examine how emergency management organizations in the state of Victoria in Australia implemented recommendations made by an inquiry into a major bushfire disaster – known as ‘Black Saturday.’ Learning from rare events like Black Saturday is often difficult for organizations and, yet, it is crucial if lives are to be saved in future fires. We adopt a sensemaking perspective that also takes into account organizational learning to examine the post-inquiry situation i.e., how emergency management practitioners implemented equivocal recommendations in their organizations with a view to ensuring that they would be better prepared and better equipped to deal with similar incidents in the future. Our findings show how retrospective and prospective sensemaking after the inquiry resulted in four different types of learning that enabled practitioners to implement the recommendations in their organizations. We develop a model of post-inquiry sensemaking and learning, integrating the traditional sensemaking literature with more recent theoretical work that draws on Heidegger’s work.