During and after Hurricane Katrina, some organizations responded miserably despite experience with other major hurricanes and other organizations performed well. This research asks what makes the difference. Why do some organizations learn from past disaster while others apparently suffer from amnesia? How do organizations learn from their own past involvement in catastrophes---or fail to do so. Even when individual organizations have the necessary knowledge, they may not communicate it to those who need it. It is important to understand how organizations do (or don't) learn from each others' experiences. To test our theories, we will investigate one actual disaster (Hurricane Katrina) and one potential disaster (grave earthquake and flood threats to the California Delta area).
This project draws on several fields of scholarship: organizational behavior, economics, engineering and legal policy. It includes five interlinked studies. Study One shows how gaps between agencies and organizations prevented learning in the New Orleans and California flood control communities. Study Two addresses behavioral organizational learning from crises. Study Three examines how disasters like Katrina affect other citizens as measured by sales of emergency supplies in other localities. Study Four asks how to design legal and institutional relationships that will foster organizational learning and effective information management. Study Five uses a laboratory for social science experiments to analyze how incentives drive information exchange and learning. The knowledge gained from these studies should help organizations learn from past disasters rather than repeating the same mistakes that have already been so costly to our society.
