Sensemaking in Public Safety Ecosystem’s Use of Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS)
All of us try to make sense of the world. As globalization and interconnectedness increases across the spectrum of our lives, a shift in thinking is needed to accommodate more and more complexity. This is true in a personal and professional lives in the 21st Century. In the uncrewed aerial systems world, for the most part, businesses have the added cushion of time and long-term strategy to build their products and services.
However, the use of uncrewed systems in public safety has no such luxury since, in many circumstances, the services they provide must be done in environments of unknown-unknowns and emergent crisis. They surf the edge of chaos in complexity terms. The term edge of chaos is used to denote a transition space between order and disorder that is said to exist within a wide variety of systems.
In this article, I go beyond the ecosystems of clear understanding of simple cause and effect dynamics and leading by expertise in complicated environments to explore how to “make sense” of the context of ecosystems where complex and chaotic issues are explored and navigated. At the intersections of airspace, technology and people lies increasing complexity. Understanding the context and actions to navigate public safety complexity is an agile skill greatly needed as we move forward towards innovation and successful mitigation and response to our greatest challenges. The industrial age with its linear frameworks is a fundamental mismatch to global volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity challenges in the years to come.
Contextual Definitions
Sensemaking is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. As humans, we do this through our default patternicity of the brain, mental models, heuristics, social identity, and social narratives.
We all seek to “make sense” of the increasingly complex and chaotic world around us. Novel and emergent issues challenge our collective human experience and our understanding of how the world works lacks clear direction in increasing complexity. Systems thinking means adapting to complexity by understanding that a system is a set of parts that perform some collective function. Sensemaking and systems thinking are both part understanding complex systems, part of complexity science.
An understanding of these dynamics and complexity science is needed as a buffer against problems in use of public safety uncrewed aerial systems, which increasingly are more and more complex and chaotic .
We now live in a VUCA world. VUCA is a term that describes situations or environments that engender high levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The common usage of the term VUCA began in the 1990s and derives from military vocabulary, where it refers to the experience of officers in operations. It tries to capture the uncertain and dynamically changing situation of a military engagement where there is a lack of information. Events often just happen in a chaotic and unpredictable fashion in what is also called the “fog of war.” Military commanders describe this as being in a world of unknown unknowns — this is the extreme version of a VUCA world. This kind of emergence and “fog of war” happens in the public safety environment as well. First responders of all types enter environments and situations where the unknown is always present, they enter a VUCA world of complex systems due to their inherent dynamic nature of rapid change transitions and systemic shocks.
Volatile: In systemically volatile environments, change is a constant and strategy needs to evolve from resisting it to working with it. This means creating public safety responses that are resilient through their agility and capacity for adaptation. The strategic emphasis shifts from creating fixed well-defined goals and plans to trying to create agile organizations led by a clarity of vision and effective communications, so that it can be very clear about its values and objective but very flexible in how it implements capabilities and achieves its vision.
Uncertainty is the inability to know everything fully. This uncertainty is derived from the large number of elements within the system, their nonlinear interactions, and their capacity to adapt to local events as they evolve over time, this means that in these complex systems the future emerges, the outcome to an emergent process cannot be known beforehand. Trying to compute the actual details and define a single future scenario is a lost endeavor. In environments where uncertainty is pervasive, our traditional risk-based analysis of the future breaks down. The only way to respond to this is to perform multiple simulations and experiments that will allow us to explore how things will really play out on the ground and to maintain a diverse and complementary system that can respond to several different possible environmental conditions.
Complexity: When people talk about complexity within the VUCA framework they are referring to interconnectivity and interdependence. The nonlinear interactions and interdependencies within complex organizations render our capacity for control over the system through direct intervention limited. In complex systems, we cannot always know what the outcome to our interventions will be due to these nonlinear interactions and interdependencies. Thus, our capacity to directly align the elements of the organization towards some desired future goal is limited. The main response to this is for a leader to focus on creating the context that enables the organization to succeed.
Ambiguity: Ambiguity is the quality of being open to more than one interpretation. When environments become complex, simple linear cause and effect descriptions of events break down and ambiguity arises due to this lack of models to explain the observed phenomena. Resolving ambiguity means understanding the context within which the event takes place. It requires systems thinking to see the interconnections, to gain different perspectives to build up the full context within which an event can be properly understood.
Applying a Sensemaking Framework to Understand Contextual Complexity
Most of us think that we are rational people making rational decisions. We assume that when presented with a problem, we just need to analyze it from all angles and decide on how to address it. This assumption is based on the thought that we can identify cause and effect readily. But the world is becoming increasingly more and more complex and a different way of thinking and responding is necessary.
The Harvard Business Review article, “The Leader’s Framework for Decision Making,” explores the complex dynamics of decision making related to complexity theory and sensemaking. The authors, David Snowden and Mary Boone utilize the Cynefin Framework, to help leaders understand the context of operations in certain domains. According to the Welch/English dictionary, Cynefin (ku-nev-in) is a Welch word that means “haunt, habitat, acquainted, accustomed, familiar,” and is socially constructed to denote a decision-makers “sense of place” from which to view their perceptions. The term also signifies multiple factors in an environment that influence us in ways that are unpredictable and hard to understand.
The framework has four domains, simple, complicated, complex and chaotic.
Dave Snowden created the Cynefin Framework in 1999 when he worked at IBM. He currently is the founder and chief scientific officer of the Cynefin Company. The Cynefin Company, was created in 2005 with the objective of building methods, tools and capability to develop insights from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. He talks about his framework of “sensemaking” in complex and chaotic environments in the video below.
Four Operational Domains
Each operational domain requires different actions. Key to understanding the domains is that for many public safety drone operations are based on fact-based management using traditional management techniques. However, many of the current challenges for public safety pilots come from an unordered and unpredictable world. The Cynefin framework helps pilots understand how the social complexity and adaptability of problems fit into defined categories and what behaviors arise as problems emerge to become increasingly more complex.
Simple: The Domain of Best Practices
In the simple/obvious we see known-knowns. This is where checklists and best practices live alongside good practices. We have loads of these in the drone world. The situation is stable, and the relationship between cause and effect is clear: if you do X, expect Y. Ordinary management techniques live here with all the vaunted “lessons-learned” formats. If you solve the problem, you simply go back to status quo. Historically and tragically, this is the category that many first responder organizations use to understand problems. The “right” answers live here.
Complicated: The Domain of Experts
The complicated domain consists of the “known-unknowns.” In this domain we can still clearly see cause and effect which requires analysis or expertise. This is the context where you seek out the best and most experienced public safety pilots for a challenge. The complicated domain is where one can assess the facts, analyze, and apply the appropriate good operating practice. At least one right answer exists. In the complicated domain is where there is a tendency to be at risk for “groupthink.” When experts get together, they tend to reinforce their existing already strongly held beliefs.
Complex: The Domain of Emergence
The complex domain represents the “unknown-unknowns.” Here’s where things start to get confusing. It is in this domain where cause and effect can only be seen in hindsight. According to Snowden and Boone, “patterns … can emerge, if the leader conducts experiments that are safe to fail.” In the framework process, this is called “probe–sense–respond.” In the complex domain, right answers are hard to identify. Climate change, terrorism, increasing natural disasters and emergent disease processes are examples of the complex domain. The uncrewed systems technology of all types can be a useful tool in all of these emergent and complex environments, especially for public safety pilots.
Chaotic: The Domain of Rapid Response
In the chaotic domain, cause and effect are very unclear. Events in this domain are “too confusing to wait for a knowledge-based response,” writes organization expert and author Patrick Lambe. “Action — any action — is the first and only way to respond appropriately.” Snowden and Boone note, “in this context, public safety professional must “act–sense–respond.” In other words, one can act to establish order; sense where stability lies and respond to shift the chaotic domain into the complex domain. In “Surfing the Edge of Chaos,” authors state that “in the face of threat, or when galvanized by a compelling opportunity, living things move toward the edge of chaos. This condition evokes higher levels of mutation and experimentation, and fresh new solutions are more likely to be found.” In this context, there is opportunity for new ways of thinking, as well as threat.
Disorder
In the middle of the domains is the area of disorder. Here is where all the problems that are yet to be determined in which domain, they belong live. This is the whirling sea of complexity.
Secret Sauce
The “secret sauce” of using the Cynefin Framework as a sensemaking tool is understanding it enough to know when you’ve moved from one domain to another. When one can sense the dynamics of the various domains, then one knows the danger signals and what response is appropriate. When crisis occurs, many public safety professionals address the complexity of the challenge and respond in ways that are incongruent to the crisis. However, the ability of pilots to sense, analyze, respond and act correctly to the presenting environment lessens mistakes leading to disorder and helps guide decision-making.
Additionally, leading across the four domains with the ability to shift back and forth creates pattern-based leadership, extremely helpful with the changing environment of many public safety professionals using uncrewed systems to gather data and respond to emergent situations. All situations and problems are not created equal, so having a framework that helps to understand that different situations and responses is incredibly powerful.
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Angi English is and Adjunct Professor for Idaho State University in Homeland Security and Emergency Management, the former Chief of Staff at the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and a HSx Founding Scholar for Innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Center for Homeland Defense and Security (HSx 1701). She has a Master’s in Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) (MS 1303/1304)and a Master’s in Educational Psychology from Baylor University. She’s also a graduate of the Executive Leader’s Program at the Naval Postgraduate School (ELP 1201). She currently is a contractor subject matter expert for the Executive Education Team at NPS. She is a Certified Part 107 Unmanned Aerial Systems pilot and serves as an Advisory Member of the DRONEREPONDERS and a finalist for Women to Watch Global UAS Awards, 2021. She lives in Austin, Texas.
