# Information Sharing and Decision-Making in Multidisciplinary Crisis Management Teams

*Uitdewilligen & Waller · Team Learning, Safety & Error, Complexity & Systems · Journal of Organizational Behavior · 2018 · Paywalled*

A small study with one finding worth carrying: in crisis teams what predicted performance was not how much information people shared but the order in which they shared it. Uitdewilligen and Waller video recorded twelve multidisciplinary crisis management teams working through a simulated emergency at the Port of Rotterdam lasting about three hours, a large traffic incident with multiple vehicles, leaking chemicals and casualties, in which fire, police and medical officers each held a fragment of the picture and nobody held all of it. Communication was coded in ten second intervals into three levels of information sharing, facts, interpretations and projections, alongside decisions, questions, commands and other behaviours.

Three phases emerged: a structuring phase setting the shape of the meeting, an information sharing phase, and a decision-making phase. Teams the trainers rated highly spent longer in the first two and then decided faster in the third. The frequency of any single information behaviour did not separate good teams from poor ones. What did was a sequence: one member offering an interpretation directly after another member's interpretation, which the authors read as collective sensemaking, and which appeared nearly three times as often in high performing teams during the decision-making phase.

Projection sharing, meaning statements about what the situation could become, was close to absent everywhere. It did not occur at all in the structuring or information sharing phases and averaged between two and three instances per team in decision-making. Teams managing an unfolding emergency barely spoke about what might happen next, a result the paper reports without dwelling on and possibly the more uncomfortable one.

The scale is what to hold on to. Twelve teams, split into high and low performers by a median cut on trainer ratings, compared with Welch tests, in a simulation rather than a live incident. One coder did the bulk of the work and a second coded two of the twelve sessions for a Cohen's kappa of 0.74, which the authors call acceptable for material of this complexity and which leaves room for drift across the other ten. The whiteboard result, that schematic use of a shared whiteboard predicted sensemaking, reaches only p below 0.10 on twelve cases and is a hint rather than a finding. The bridge to psychological safety is that this puts the thing worth measuring inside the interaction: a team can be talkative and still not be thinking together, and it is what happens to a colleague's interpretation, not the volume of talk, that tells the two apart.

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/uitdewilligen-waller-2018/
- **View the source paper:** https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2301
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