ABSTRACT
The emergency management operational activity, especially local incident command activity, remains a fundamentally human endeavour. This chapter focuses on identifying the decision processes associated with more versus less effective incident command at fires. Effective incident command obviously requires considerable technical knowledge of fire chemistry and physics, suppression equipment capabilities, and standard operating procedures. The effective incident management involved rapid extraction of the most relevant features from the information array. Effective incident commanders functioned as if they had a good practical understanding of the limitations of their information processing system. Some emergency incidents were too complex for simple recognitional rule-based decision making. The chapter describes that the most important psychological "drivers" of an incident commander's performance involve three aspects of the human information processing system. They are rule-based decision making is appreciably faster than knowledge-based decision making, the limited capacity of working memory, and effective decision making is dependent on regulation of arousal level and negative emotions.
