Past Has Gone but Present Is Yours: Debunking Post-Mortem Process by Safeguarding Lessons Learned during Disaster

Abstract

Many organisations across disaster management disciplines have formal processes for identifying, documenting and disseminating lessons from disasters or incidents in anticipation that they and others will be able to learn from past experiences and improve future responses. However, reports on lessons learned are completed after few hours or days after full disaster recovery from the incident but not during the disaster recovery, in which, leads to missing valuable information. Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) from a psychological context was used as role of theory to safeguard lessons learned during Disaster Recovery (DR) activities. An Action Research (AR) approach with interviews and focus group techniques was employed to understand DR process challenges in client organisation. The DR lessons-learned process was simplified and tested successfully via four simulations and the results demonstrated an improvement in error reduction, which lead to time and cost savings.