Crisis Management in Hindsight: Cognition, Communication, Coordination, and Control

This article argues that cognition is central to performance in emergency management. Cognition is defined as the capacity to recognize the degree of emerging risk to which a community is exposed and to act on that information. Using the case of Hurricane Katrina to illustrate the collapse of the standard model of emergency management without a clear focus on the role of cognition, the author reframes the concept of intergovernmental crisis management as a complex, adaptive system. That is, the system needs to adjust and adapt its performance to fit the demands of an ever‐changing physical, engineered, and social environment. The terms of cognition, communication, coordination, and control are redefined in…