ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the decision making strategies used by Operational Incident Commanders (OICs) in an emergency situation. The non-technical skills relevant to OICs in nuclear emergency response teams had earlier been identified as being decision making, situation awareness, communication, leadership, and teamwork and stress management/personal limitations. The Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) approach has been used as the framework for this study. The role of experience in the decision making process is emphasised in many NDM theories. The working memory approach appears to provide a useful paradigm through which to examine OIC decision making under stress. The suggestion is that the OICs access a generalised knowledge base, developed during normal operational role, from which they can abstract prototypes or response patterns to guide the course of action. Experience of emergency decision making, that is, schema development, and guided feedback in training, leads to the development and sustainment of available response patterns.
