The Common Operational
Picture as Collective
Sensemaking
Jeroen Wolbers* and Kees Boersma**
*Department of Organization Sciences, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: j.j.wolbers@vu.nl
**Department of Organization Sciences, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: f.k.boersma@vu.nl
The common operational picture is used to overcome coordination and information
management problems during emergency response. Increasingly, this approach is incor-
porated in more advanced information systems.This is rooted in an ‘information ware-
house’ perspective, which implies information can be collected, sorted and exchanged in
an accessible and univocal form. In practice, however, professionals interpret similar
information differently.Therefore, we focus on how emergency responders develop col-
lective sensemaking from information.We employ a ‘trading zone’ perspective, in which
information is negotiated, to study information management in an ethnographic study of
disaster exercises in the Netherlands. Our analysis shows how professionals attribute
different meanings to information that distorts the coordination process. We end by
stressing the importance of actionable knowledge and reflexivity.
1. The problem of information
management during
emergency response
‘Once asbestos is part of the incident a whole new
procedure has to be started up. What I need is our
hazardous materials expert on the spot as soon as
possible. I know about some of the asbestos proce-
dures, and what should happen, but I think it is very
important for us to ask for expert knowledge. I had
the feeling the fire officer made the decisions very
quickly by himself. He has taken measurements
because of the asbestos: he took care of the decon-
tamination on the street. It was like:“I do this” and “I
do that” . . . I had the feeling that the fire fighters
were not collaborating with others. If I knew about
that asbestos earlier I would have responded differ-
ently but they didn’t tell us. “You didn’t know this
was relevant for us? Excuse me!”’
1
T
his quote is from an officer who represents the
municipal authorities. He made this remark as a
reaction to a fire officer’s action during a training
session. It indicates that emergency response organiza-
tions rely upon each other’s information to align work
processes. At the same time, the quote reveals that
the representatives of the different professions often
‘forget’ to share information because they tend to
operate within their own professional ‘silos’.
It is well documented that emergency response
organizations struggle with information sharing, com-
munication and coordination (Bharosa, Lee, & Janssen,
2010; Comfort, 2007; Netten & Van Someren, 2011;
Quarantelli, 1997). During emergency response opera-
tions, organizations with different backgrounds, special-
ized operational expertise and different professional
languages need to coordinate their actions across juris-
dictional and organizational boundaries (Comfort &
Kapucu, 2006).This coordination problem is even more
Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management Volume 21 Number 4 December 2013
©2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DOI: 10.1111/1468-5973.12027
challenging because each response organization has
operational field units at different levels, different func-
tional command structures and separate back offices
for information and resource management (Kapucu,
2006; Moynihan, 2009).
Adequate information management is regarded as
crucial to overcome problems with coordination and
information sharing between different organizational
domains (Donahue & Tuohy, 2006; Manzi, Powers, &
Zetterlund, 2002) and is an important part of the
response organizations’ information sharing culture
(Marincioni, 2007; Schooley & Horan, 2007). Encourag-
ing the willingness to share information is believed to
support collaboration and could foster organizational
learning and facilitate adaptation and improvisation
(Waugh & Streib, 2006). However, failing communica-
tion and inadequate coordination between organiza-
tions, across levels and between back offices are also
often blamed for problems with information manage-
ment, such as information overload (Bharosa et al.,
2010), difficulties with information technology in-use
(Quarantelli, 1997), insufficient evaluation/validation of
the information (Rake & Nja, 2009) and insufficient
attention for sharing data with others (Dearstyne,
2007).
Paradoxically, information management is seen as
both the problem and the solution for reaching suffi-
cient situational awareness to support coordination.
Emergency management agencies try to solve the infor-
mation management problem by advocating more
advanced and better-equipped information systems.The
promise is that these systems should support its users
to reach shared situational awareness by creating a
common operational picture (COP) (Comfort, 2007;
Endsley, 1995). Examples are time critical information
systems (Schooley & Horan, 2007) and systems from
the logic of Netcentric Enabled Capabilities (Boersma,
Wagenaar, & Wolbers, 2012). To solve the information
management problem, the focus is put on building
system architectures, in which the need is stressed for
integration and linkage of information, fast access, time-
liness, updating of information and standardization of
information (Meissner, Luckenbach, Risse, Kirste, &
Kirchner, 2002).
Yet, the focus on building system architectures over-
looks the social aspect of sharing and interpreting infor-
mation. The different expertise of the emergency
responders requires them to first develop common
ground from which they can interact with each other
(Clark & Brennan, 1991). For example, Morris, Morris,
and Jones (2007) described that the reason behind the
success of the coast guard forces in accomplishing one
of the few effective initial responses to hurricane
Katrina was the attention to cooperation, adaptation,
and flexibility in the work of the coast guard that
‘embraced the many languages of other stakeholder
organizations’ (Morris et al., 2007, p. 101). Learning how
to bring together each other’s complementary skills,
learning from the experience of others and closely
examining information (Moynihan, 2008) is regarded as
highly consequential for successful information sharing.
Therefore, in order to understand how first responders
interpret each other’s needs and requirements for
coordination, a sensemaking perspective on information
sharing is necessary to capture the ambiguity of infor-
mation, the presence of multiple perspectives and the
role of representations in the common operational
picture (Houghton, Leedom, & Miles, 2002; Weick,
Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 1999).
In this article, we are interested in the question how
the different emergency response organizations share
information about their actions and the ongoing crisis,
how they give meaning to the information, and how the
information, is articulated in their narratives. Our main
question is: How do emergency responders make sense of
exchanged information and how does this affect their shared
situated understanding of the emergency situation and
response?
The data collection for this article took place in the
Netherlands during exercises for commanding officers
in a field command centre aimed at creating a common
operational picture. As the coordination problems
between Dutch emergency response organizations are
not unique (i.e., they also exist elsewhere), we think this
article has more general lessons to offer.
The article is organized as follows. We will first
present a theoretical discussion to uncover the differ-
ent perspectives of information sharing in the emer-
gency management literature. Next, we will explain
our methodology in Section 3 and continue with the
description of the findings in Section 4. Here we will
present three cases that illustrate how sensemaking
plays a crucial role in the information sharing practices
of emergency responders. We end our argument by
presenting a discussion about the importance and impli-
cations of taking a sensemaking perspective on infor-
mation sharing in emergency management research.
2. From an ‘information warehouse’
towards a ‘trading zone’
The COP is considered as one of the most promising
solutions in emergency management to improve
the quality of information sharing and to support the
development of situational awareness (Comfort, 2007).
The COP is often manifested as a geographical repre-
sentation combined with a checklist that describes the
characteristics of the response operation. Despite its
common use in emergency management, a univocal
definition of the COP lacks both in the field and in the
literature. There are disagreements as to whether the
COP is a product, process or operating environment
The COP as Collective Sensemaking 187
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Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management
Volume 21 Number 4 December 2013
(Copeland, 2008). Roughly two types of definitions can
be distinguished: one that focuses on capabilities of
information dissemination and another that stresses
the need for reaching a sufficient level of shared
understanding.
An example of the first type of definition is the way
in which the COP is described in the US National
Incident Management System: ‘a common operational
picture is established and maintained by the gathering,
collating, synthesizing, and disseminating of incident
information to all appropriate parties involved in an
incident. Achieving a common operating picture allows
on-scene and off-scene personnel to have the same
information about the incident, including the availability
and location of resources, personnel, and the status of
requests for assistance’ (FEMA, 2009, p. 4.5). In this
definition, the COP is treated as a means to capture
information and putting it in a place where it can easily
be accessed. The COP is treated as a solution to the
problem of incomplete information, whereby making
information better and more widely accessible solves
the issue at hand. As a result, the current generation of
COP is treated as an ‘information warehouse’ where its
users can select the information that is appropriate for
them to perform their tasks (Leedom, 2003). In the
information warehouse, ‘information useful to pro-
cesses is stored . . . in an easy and accessible form’
(Davenport, 1993, p. 89), whereby the modular nature
of the warehouse supports self-synchronization. Yet,
the warehouse metaphor overlooks that different
actors give different meanings to information at differ-
ent points in time.
The second type of definition stresses the need for
shared understanding and treats the COP as a way to
‘achieve a sufficient level of shared information among
the different organizations and jurisdictions participat-
ing in disaster operations at different locations, so all
actors readily understand the constraints on each and
the possible combinations of collaboration and support
among them under a given set of conditions’ (Comfort,
2007, p. 191). But also more generally, the ‘common
operational picture was specified as individuals knew
who was doing what, who knew what; i.e., individuals
had an accurate transactive memory’ (Carley, 2002,
p. 3). These definitions do stress the importance of
shared understanding. The COP is not just an ‘infor-
mation warehouse’ that supports self-synchronization
but also a tool that supports its users to understand
each other’s needs and constraints during their col-
laboration. It recognizes that there are likely to be
differences in mutual knowledge, belief, customs, and
assumptions between different communities (Bechky,
2003) that cause conflicting interpretations of informa-
tion that need to be made workable in order to organ-
ize a coherent response operation (Artman & Wærn,
1999).
Although the second type of definition subscribes to
the importance of developing a level of shared under-
standing, they still overlook the way in which shared
understanding is reached by using the COP. To get a
deeper understanding of the problem of information
management, we need to open the black box to see
how information sharing supports shared situational
awareness.
Building a sufficient level of shared understanding to
us is a sensemaking process in which organizational
members (de/re)construct information influenced by
their institutional background to find out what is
going on in times of uncertainty (Weick, Sutcliffe,
& Obstfeld, 2005). This sensemaking process is
based upon the knowledge responders have gained
through (1) education, including training/exercises;
(2) (war)storytelling; and (3) past experiences (Endsley,
1995; Taber, Plumb, & Jolemore, 2008). Emergency
responders have to constantly make sense of the situ-
ation because of the rapidly changing environment.
During crisis management, not just individual
sensemaking processes are important, but even more
important is collective sensemaking, that is, how
members from different communities try to generate
shared understanding for coordinated action (Maitlis &
Sonenshein, 2010). Collective sensemaking in emer-
gency management is about combining different cues,
roles, scripts, and actions that arise from the actors’
different institutional backgrounds (Weber & Glynn,
2006) into a collaborative time critical response (Faraj
& Xiao, 2006).
Weak collective sensemaking is a major problem
during crisis situations. For instance, Weick’s (1993)
analysis of the Mann Gulch fire shows that the lack of
group level sensemaking processes resulted in poor
decision-making and eventually in the loss of the lives of
13 fire fighters. Weick (1990) also made a similar analy-
sis of poor sensemaking between the pilot crew of a
KLM 747 moments before they crash into a Pan-Am
747 on the Los Rodeos airport in Tenerife. The co-pilot
of the KLM flight stated ‘we are now at take-off’, while
the tower and the Pan-Am crew interpreted this as
being in the take-off position, the KLM crew had actually
faulty initiated the take-off run.
While these sensemaking problems arose among
actors with a similar institutional background,
Dearstyne (2007) claims that sensemaking issues
between actors with different institutional backgrounds
lead to inter-organizational coordination problems. He
shows that fire departments and police had trouble
collaborating and sharing information during the World
Trade Center attacks. Especially striking is his note that
fire commanders on the ground experienced a lack of
information about the burning towers, while police heli-
copter crews were filming them from above. These
kinds of coordination problems between actors with
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different institutional backgrounds are central to large-
scale emergency response operations.
Coordinating between actors with different institu-
tional backgrounds is described by Faraj and Xiao
(2006) as a process of dialogic coordination. By engaging
in dialogue, professionals are able to confront their
different professional languages (jargon) through
epistemic contestation and achieve joint sensemaking.
During the process of collective sensemaking, emer-
gency responders need to coordinate their actions
temporarily and locally across their organizational
boundaries, in which they must navigate their differ-
ences in norms, meanings, and interests with members
from other organizations to achieve a shared goal
(Kellogg, Orlikowski, & Yates, 2006). This is especially
challenging because in fast-paced environments, goals
can be translated as such only in a limited amount of
time as the emergency situation changes, and the goal
becomes outdated. As a consequence, actors often
‘forget’ to share information because in their view infor-
mation is no longer significant or is outdated. In this
way, the perceived relevance of information is compro-
mised at different points in time, resulting in a dynamic
information sharing situation that is constantly in flux.
The actors’ different institutional backgrounds and
the time criticality show that information sharing
cannot be reduced to gathering information from a
warehouse. We propose a different perspective on the
COP in which information sharing is about sensemaking
that is better characterized by using the metaphor of a
trading zone. In the literature, the trading zone is used
as metaphor to describe the process of negotiation
between actors from different communities in which
they work out ‘exchanges’ ‘in exquisite local detail,
without global agreement’ (Galison, 1997, p. 46). During
the exchanges, actors must make sense and reach con-
sensus about procedures of exchange in a mutually
comprehensible language. In emergency management,
trading is not just a metaphor because it sometimes
literally means that actors have to reach an agreement
on for instance the size of an evacuation zone. During
this process, actors have to share their expertise to
convince the other about the value of the alternatives.
In this way, actors exchange ideas, learn from one
another and make sense of each other’s position and
institutional background.Working out exchanges in this
way is useful in conditions of uncertainty and change
because the collaboration ‘doesn’t depend on shared
ideas, interests, or norms, which are difficult to accom-
plish when time is short, meanings are divergent, and
conditions are ambiguous’ (Kellogg et al., 2006, p. 39;
Vaughan, 1999).
In the literature, exchanges or trades often occur
through the use of a boundary object (Hsiao, Tsai, &
Lee, 2012; Kellogg et al., 2006). Boundary objects are
coordination mechanisms of representation, in which
coordination is reached by disseminating information
and providing a common referent as basis for aligning
work between organizations (Okhuysen & Bechky,
2009; Henderson, 1991). The COP can be regarded as
a boundary object because constructing a COP is about
sharing and constructing information about the
response operation in such a way that it enables its
users to continually redefine and mutually adjust their
relationships.The COP provides a platform that allows
experts to coordinate and negotiate their plurality of
points of view through general procedures of exchange,
without making their perspectives uniform or com-
pletely transparent to each other (Trompette & Vinck,
2009; Hsiao et al., 2012). In turn, the trading zone per-
spective provides a way of analysing how this exchange
process influences the actors’ sensemaking efforts.
In summary, for us, the COP resembles not an ‘infor-
mation warehouse’ but a form of materiality that facili-
tates the ongoing negotiation process that takes place in
a ‘trading zone’, in which actors share and give meaning
to information to synchronize their actions. How we
analysed the data by applying the trading zone perspec-
tive to the sensemaking processes of the officers-in-
command will be explained in the next section.
3. Methodology and cases: a narrative
analysis of the ‘trading zone’
Analysing the collective sensemaking processes (Weick,
1995) in the trading zone (Galison, 1997) requires a
perspective in which the negotiation of meaning of
information that is embedded in local contexts and
in multiple realities becomes visible. Therefore, we
adopted an ethnographic approach that allowed us to
study the richness of the sensemaking process and
grasp enough detail of the context in which these pro-
cesses take place (Yanow & Schwartz-Shea, 2006).This
approach (Hammersley, 1995) is especially useful in
unravelling the consequences of the actors’ different
institutional backgrounds as it enabled us to follow the
real-life conversations and negotiations between the
emergency responders.
We collected our data through visiting field
command centre exercises of the first response organi-
zations in different safety regions in the Netherlands, as
part of our contract research into the information
management practices during emergency response
operations. First results of this research are published in
Stuurman (2011) and Wolbers, Boersma, and de Heer
(2012). We observed 10 exercises in a field command
centre in which emergency officers in command of
police, fire department, medical, and municipal authori-
ties meet to share information and make decisions
during an emergency. These consisted of both scenario
driven and virtual (by means of computer simulations)
exercises. The 10 incidents included a collision at sea,
The COP as Collective Sensemaking 189
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Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management
Volume 21 Number 4 December 2013
gas explosion, railroad accident, highway accident,
hostage situation in a school and a helicopter crash on
a water treatment plant. For each scenario, the officers
practised delegating tasks through their teams by com-
municating with officers from other emergency ser-
vices. Although the incidents were fictional, the officers
were confronted with time pressure, information over-
load and, most important for our study, with profes-
sionals from other organizations than their own. We
therefore feel that the exercises illustrate the situations
in which responders get confronted during real
incidents and offer valuable research data (Latiers &
Jacques, 2009). However, we must also mention the
limits of using the data of exercises for analysis. Because
the scenarios are removed from reality, there is limited
recruitment delay, and participants are potentially pro-
tected from the ramifications of poor decision-making.
For this case material, we observed and recorded
conversations in ten exercises, and afterwards eight
officers were interviewed (see Stuurman, 2011) who
participated in the same group in multiple exercises.
The officers were selected based on their presence in
the same observed set of exercises and were asked to
reflect upon the collaboration, communication, and
their actions and decisions. In the observations, we
recorded the interaction, and in the interviews, the
officers were provided with parts of these dialogues
and situations. In doing so, we did not make an evalua-
tion as such, but our focus was on finding patterns in
the first responders’ actions and interactions in the
context of their professional routines. By reflecting on
actions and storytelling, we were able to unravel their
sensemaking efforts during the multi-organizational
response.
Besides the interviews and observations, we analysed
documents (including reports of the Inspectorate of
Security and Justice, and the Dutch Safety Board) with
the purpose of understanding the broader context in
which the exercises were taking place. In addition, these
reports were used to see whether our findings from
the relative small sample of exercises are also reflected
in real emergencies. Also, documents about pro-
cedures and responsibilities of the different emergency
response agencies were analysed to inform our data
analysis, as well as documents about the multi-
organizational coordination structure. Although these
procedures are not referred to directly in the article,
they did inform our analysis by helping us to get back-
ground information on the technical terminology (such
as evacuation standards or water screens) and help us
judge whether interactions between officers in the
trading zone were regarded as appropriate or not.
The data collection resulted in 70 pages of interview
transcripts and 140 pages of observation transcripts.
The fully transcribed exercises allowed us to recon-
struct the interactions of the officers with each other
and the COP chronologically. We analysed the tran-
scriptions by adopting an interactional narrative analysis
(Riessman, 2005). This type of narrative analysis zooms
in on the dialogue between teller and listener to analyse
the dialogue as a process of co-construction, where
teller and listener create meaning collaboratively
(Riessman, 2005). The transcripts from the interviews
and the data from the observations were combined
with the help of the data analysis tool MaxQDA to
inform this analysis and to guide data reduction.
Analysing narratives enabled us to zoom into the
underlying cues, roles, scripts, and recurrent action that
arise from the different institutional context of the
emergency responders, as well as their organizational
values (Gabriel, 2000). Through their narratives, actors
implicitly and sometimes explicitly negotiate about
their interpretations and actions (Czarniawska, 2004).
Implicit problem conceptualizations are made tangible
by signalling potential problems, clarifying misunder-
standings and exchanging information (Putnam, 1994).
We used these cues to inform our analysis and identify
challenges in sensemaking and negotiation between
officers. With the help of (lexical) search in MaxQDA
and close reading, we were able to identify interesting
narratives.
We will present our data by focusing on three more
in-depth narratives that occurred during the exercises
to allow for enough detail in the descriptions. These
narratives were selected based on the richness of the
interactions between the actors that illustrated the
negotiations of interpretations in the trading zone most
clearly. In addition, these three scenarios were chosen
because they are illustrations of how (implicit) contes-
tations had immediate impact on action. It shows that
the trading zone perspective is not just a scholarly,
analytical perspective: problems with negotiation have a
direct impact on the actual response operation.
4. Findings
4.1. Setting the scene: cross-boundary
coordination between Dutch emergency
management organizations
The Dutch emergency management system consists of
an emergent structure that can be scaled up after the
emergency response centre (ERC) alerts the police, fire
and/or medical services. The ERC follows a set of
pre-defined protocols to call the officers-in-command
from these organizations to the incident scene. Each
officer is responsible for commanding his or her own
operational units on scene. Additionally, the officer-in-
command is responsible for taking care of the inter-
organizational coordination with other emergency
services. To support this responsibility, a mobile field
command centre is installed on scene and staffed with
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Volume 21 Number 4 December 2013 ©2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd