ABSTRACT
Observations of group decision at the frontier of human experience promise insights into how human collectives anticipate and respond to highly non-routine events. In the case of decisionmaking by emergency response organizations, prior experience is expected to be relevant, despite the sometimes considerable difference between those experiences and the emergency situation at hand (Earley, 1985; Salas et al., 1992). Understanding how knowledge gleaned from these experiences is used (or misused) in restoring services disrupted by emergencies should deepen our insights into how collective creativity and joint expertise may contribute to organizational resilience.
