Design and evaluation of a role improvisation exercise for crisis and disaster response teams

This paper reports a case study, which aimed to investigate what role improvisation plays in crisis and disaster response teams and how improvisation performance of such teams can be simulated in representative contexts and constraints. The case study is based on a single case, the Swedish Response Team, an international crisis and disaster response team. The presented work identifies what kind of improvisation occurred in two real response operations conducted by this team. It also presents design and evaluation of a simulation exercise, which set a stage for improvisation under constraints and contexts identified in the studied response operations. The study demonstrates how to create situations that demand improvisation similar to those in crisis and disaster response operations. The outcomes of the simulation exercise corresponded to the kind of improvisation that occurred during the studied operations, suggesting that the proposed exercise design is feasible for creating situations that demand improvisation similar to those in crisis and disaster response operations. The experience from this study highlights important areas for design of such exercises: design variables, information-injects, assessment of participants' improvisation, and representative contexts and constraints.