Towards a New Approach How to Respond to the Emergency with Crisis Using SSM

Although Weick (1995) argued the importance of right sense-making to the situation of emergency, might it be possible that people facing to the crisis accompanied by the unexpected risk recognize the situation rightly? This is a reason why we have to distinguish between the risk management which can be dealt by reactive science and the crisis response which may be used with a kind of proactive intuition.

Checkland (1981, 1990) proposes “Soft Systems Methodology: SSM” as the guideline to deal with ill structured or ill defined problematic situation, which could be introduced subjectivity or tacit dimension rigorously. The central concept of this thought, I think, would be “accommodation” which means “to live with different worldviews based on co-owned common tacit knowledge”, rather than “consensus” which means to share the common worldviews. Nonaka (1994) also suggested this kind of sharing tacit knowledge in his theory of knowledge management as a case of Japanese innovation process.

It seems to me that this kind of sharing tacit knowledge of “accommodation” will be the condition to carry out the sensemaking to the situation of crisis which Weick referred. Because, while the case of emergency with crisis, it is impossible to adapt the situation analytically but it is necessary to coherent with situation proactively and to carry out sensemaking for action intuitionally on the condition of “accommodation” beforehand.

The SSM workshop can be useful tool for co-owning the tacit knowledge through seeking “accommodation”.

In this session we propose three parts; firstly we will explain the importance of “accommodation” to response to emergency with crisis theoretically (30min.), secondary we will show you some example using few cases namely 3.11 disaster nursing, Fukushima nuclear reactor accident and SSM team emergency response workshop in Mizushima chemical plant complex (30min.), and finally in the Q & A session (30min.) all the participants will discuss how to respond to emergency with crisis freely. (total 90min.)