Academics know a lot about the things we always get wrong when facing a crisis. However, we seem to be incapable of solving these problems. Why is that and is there nothing we can do? Christian Uhr is an associate professor at Lund University and studies emergency and disaster management.
Transcript
There's a lot of academic research on crisis management and humanitarian aid. A lot of it, to be honest, don't really make sense or seems to speak to somebody like me who is primarily a practitioner. But today's guest on Trumanitarian, Christian Uhr, is a associate professor at Lund University, and has always struck me as one of the academics who really come across as having a very profound empathy and understanding of the humanitarian or disaster management reality. His approach is multi-disciplinary and very practical, aimed not just at describing what crisis are like, but also trying to find out how to actually improve the way we perform during crisis. That's obviously a perspective that really speaks to me and I enjoyed this conversation very much (I hope it's not too nerdy or geeky for you), but that you also hear the quite profound lessons that Christian has around how we think about crisis and deal with them. Enjoy the conversation.
Christian Uhr, welcome to Trumanitarian.
Christian Uhr:Thank you.
Lars Peter Nissen:It's a pleasure to have you here. You are my favourite academics in the whole wide world. Christian, I don't know if you knew that. But you are. You are an associate professor at Lund University, where you study emergency management and disaster response. You also work part time with the Swedish National Disaster Management Authority, MSB, where you operationally have worked with a couple of forest fires, and lately with the COVID response as an analyst. So tell us a bit about your your academic interest. What did you study, what are the main themes you pick up, and some of the key lessons you see emerging from your work?
Christian Uhr:Well, I'm, I'm an generalist, that's what I am. I try to employ different theoretical tools in order to understand the real world when it comes to emergency disaster response. And my ambition, at least, is to try to use this knowledge and have it as a basic foundation for design, so to improve emergency disaster response. I think that it's so important that the research world actually moves beyond the descriptive side of things and try actually to move on and suggest solutions. So that's the thing. And I also think that in order to do that in a good way, you need a broad set of tools, analytical tools. That's why I think... well, I choose to be a generalist.
Lars Peter Nissen:And when you say generalist, you mean social scientist? Do you have an engineering background? What what's your background?
Christian Uhr:Well, actually, my background's quite mixed. I'm an engineer from the beginning, but also studied psychology and sociology. So I'm into organisation, I in to working processes, I'm into trust relations, into cognitive aspects like decision making, and I tried to find some way... a good mix. To play around with these tools that actually, I think, can help us to understand emerging disaster response management from a broader perspective. It's so easy just to dig deep into one aspect and get stuck there.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, and I think what you said about not just describing the way things work, but really trying to make yourself part of the mess and changing things, that very much corresponds to my experience of you and your research and the way you talk about it. And so, the obvious question is, so how does it work? How does disaster management work? What do you see coming out of your research?
Christian Uhr:Well, one thing that I have seen, and during my studies... Now, I must admit that this is a kind of a descriptive reasoning. So what I've seen, based on studies of real disaster response, when I read different governmental reports, research reports, UN reports, FEMA reports, and so on, MSP reports, I see that we experienced the same challenges over and over again. And we have done this since the 60s or since the 50s when we begin doing research on this. And it's a bit... I'm not saying it's surprising, but it's a fact that I don't think all people involved in this business actually considered. It's nothing new.
Lars Peter Nissen:So what are these challenges? What is it what are the problems we are unable to solve?
Christian Uhr:Well, we have some examples that I tried to dig out from different reports, and challenges that interes-... well that interests me because they connect to my different aspects of disaster response management, the different angles I try to approach this field from. I... Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is, we're always surprised. You know, the Black Swan analogy... It seems to happen all the time. So if you read reports, key decision makers are surprised. 'How could this happen?', 'We were not prepared' and so on. This is not to say that no one was prepared but key decision makers quite often claim that were not prepared. And they were surprised what was going on and what's about to happen, and so on. The second thing that I can see is, we are not going fast enough. Establishing management function in a major emergency or a big disaster is not going fast enough. It takes too long time to establish. And we have known this since the 50s. It doesn't really matter if we're in China, in South Africa, in South America, in Sweden, US, Germany: you can see this type of challenges problems occurring time to time. And also, there seems to be a lack of knowledge about the system. And now it's hard to say, What is the system, then? Now, but the different national systems, for example, they look quite different in different countries but many reports shown that people actually working within those systems have don't enough knowledge about their own systems. A lot of different organisations are involved in a disaster response, it's not easy to have to grasp the whole complexity. But there is a lack of knowledge about existing systems. And you can see that also in different countries. And you have seen that since, well, since the 50s, since the 60s, when we began doing studies
Lars Peter Nissen:Is that it? Do you have more?
Christian Uhr:Oh, I have more! We tend to focus on the difficulties with parallel authority structures...
Lars Peter Nissen:Just explain what that is, the parallel authority structures.
Christian Uhr:A paralell authority structure is that we tried to... well, we have arranged many of our different response organisations in a command and control structure. It's a hierarchy. And it's... well, it's suitable and it's quite logic from a certain perspective. but it also creates some challenges from a holistic perspective, when we have these different parallel authority structures coming together one time, it... well, it leads to challenges. I think all people who are working with international disaster response, they're quite aware of those challenges. That's nothing new. It's just a fact. That's how it is. And we're not going to change that. That's how it is. We need to cope with it. If I continue with its challenges, I also seeing that so many reports from today, and 50 years ago... we have a hard time achieving coordination. Doing things in the right order, helping each other when we can, avoiding being in each other's way, and so on, are different ways of to actually define coordination, but doesn't really matter. We have a problem of achieving it. And it's been a problem, yeah, since we began studying this. And another thing that's not really problem... it could be a problem, but we can also see it in different reports, and it seems to be, all around the globe as well is, it's about knowing the right people. And I'm not sure that we have the right strategies in order to achieve that. But when you ask people working in disaster response, many of them... most of them would say, well, it's about knowing the right people. And there are many, well, challenges with this fact. But still, it's there. And we need to cope with it. So that's... I'm not saying that is... it could be a problem from a democracy perspective, for example, but it is what it is, and we need to work with it. So I think we have... I can probably give you 10 More examples or things that we have seen like the past 70 years.
Lars Peter Nissen:I think it's plenty, I think this... otherwise, we're going to have an extremely long episode here. But I think if I can just recap what you... what I heard you saying is that the black swans are black swans, and we seem not to be incapable of remembering that they do happen. So we get always surprised when it happens. And then when we are on our heels, because it's a Black Swan, we don't... we have a lack of agility, we don't get on top of things quick enough, we don't gear our capacity up. We don't really understand the machine how it works also, because the machine is probably changing because of the Black Swan as it evolves, or at least it functions differently, in a crisis than it does in everyday life. We have all these parallel structures that don't quite... it's a round peg, square hole or whatever, the other way around, doesn't fit at least. And we get obsessed with coordination. It's never enough. We... At least the story we tell afterwards about the crisis is we didn't coordinate this well enough. And finally, it's the old boys or old girls club that runs the show, you go to the people you know, not the people you should, and that potentially produces suboptimal outcomes.
Christian Uhr:May I object? [laughing] You... well, is not a really hard objection. But you used the word machine. To me, that's a bit of a trap. I believe that this world... we cannot treat the resources as a machine. It's a living thing. And treating it as a machine will lead you the wrong way, I think, when it comes to management,
Lars Peter Nissen:I agree and I stand corrected. I... and I'm really highly annoyed right now because it's a point I often make. It's not engineering, it's gardening. And so I'm with you, we're dealing with a complex system and the metaphors we should be looking for is much more than that of an ecosystem, a garden, something like that. You can prune it, you can weed, you can sow new things, you water it and then you see what happens. So I'm with you, 100%. And I apologise for my lack of precision. But that's all well, and good. Question. We've now done what everybody else does, we have diagnosed all of the problems. Now you had the audacity to claim that you want to change things at the beginning of this conversation. So how do we change it?
Christian Uhr:Well [laughing], of course, it's a tricky question. How do we change this? Well, first of all, we have to diagnose the problems. And as I said before, we have seen these problems and conditions for at least 70 years. Actually, the first research on disaster response was around the 20s, 192Os, seminal prints, dissertation, but... cocktail knowledge. But still, we have known things for a long time. What's happening is that we tried to solve these problems. We're not living with them, we try to solve them. And I think that's the wrong approach. We need to find strategies actually to work with the problems, not having the idea that we solve them as we solve a machine, or solver problem machine. We need to deal with them.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, but I would put it this way, I think we often seek complicated solutions to complex problems.
Christian Uhr:Yeah. Yeah. And we... Yeah, and we are reinventing things. So we have different type of solutions to what we see as challenges or problems or however you like to frame it. And I can see that we are reinventing things. That's always... well, they have been invented before, and been implemented but forgotten.
Lars Peter Nissen:Give us an example of that.
Christian Uhr:Well, it's about structures, is about processes, titles, and so on. We invent things, we just give them a new font, or new new symbol, and so on. We go back to the idea of bringing order through a command chain, for example. After every crisis, after disaster, you can see in the newspapers, you can see among different agents, that we need someone in command, and so on. And it's been like that for 50 or 70 years. We have the discussion, and then we try to employ the solution with someone at the top, more authority, and so on. And we have another crisis and we are, 'Ah, maybe this didn't really work out as well as we thought'. We go back to a more agile idea of things should be organised. That that's one example. And we've tried so many ways of working in different processes, like staff management processes has been around for a long time, we changed some squares, some some arrows, and we, 'well just we do this in this order, instead, things will go better.' But I think we're moving in circles a bit. Sometimes we also reinvent problems that need new reinvented solutions, like the focus on operational pictures, for example. 'Oh we just need more information or to understand the problem better so we can solve it.' But now we have technology that gives us so much information, we just got stuck in information, and we're not acting because we are just drowning in information. So I think it's a bit... maybe it's a bit harsh to say that we run in circles, but to a certain degree, I think we need to change our mindset, that we need to work with skills.
Lars Peter Nissen:Okay, because I think what I would love to do is let's try to do some kind of manifesto or whatever. Because it's a massive problem that the story we tell ourselves about crisis is the wrong one. And I think that's what it boils down, right? That these are not bugs, these are features. This is how the world works when it's in crisis. And so let's come up with a manifesto. What do we... What is the story... What are the rules that we need to apply to get out of this cyclical nature of continuously not solving the same problems? Number one is what?
Christian Uhr:I think it's changing the way we treat knowledge. That is... now it's easy for me to say since I represent some kind of academic world, but to me, it's really important to actually change how we approach and deal with knowledge. We need to be more strategic, understand that it takes time to implement stuff. You need to get knowledge to the right people. The bureaucratic top notes, the high bosses in organisations, need to be more aware how crisis and disaster to actually function, work. We need to build some kind of hands on knowledge to deal with this complexity. We can't organise away the complexity, we need to work with it. So it's about skills, knowledge and skills.
Lars Peter Nissen:That speaks to me. Because whenever we talk about knowledge management in literally all the organisations I've worked in, then somebody starts thinking about how do we structure the shared drive. And that's not how we share knowledge. We sit around the campfire and we tell stories. You go in and you have a cup of coffee with your colleague in the next door room. And so it's a much more organic process. It's storytelling and it's tacit knowledge that is in our heads, not in some file that nobody can find anyways.
Christian Uhr:No. That's... I agree, completely agree. And knowledge of skills, it has to do with how we actually think about the world. I really like that discussion about how we actually try to break down complexity. And the difference between breaking down the complexity of a machine or to a living system. That's a way of thinking. These types of discussions, these type of... all that to me is a conceptual skill. Actually working with complexity, understanding complexity, cause and effects... Really hard problems understanding cause and effect, for example. That's one skill that's so much needed much more important than, I think, understanding all different bureaucratic structures everywhere.
Lars Peter Nissen:All right, so I think we... so our first point on the manifesto is, brains not hard drives.
Christian Uhr:Yeah. Yeah. Agree.
Lars Peter Nissen:Okay, good. That's a good one. So let's send the second one... You talk about complexity. For me, that's about having a high tolerance for ambiguity.
Christian Uhr:Yep.
Lars Peter Nissen:And I think one of the paradoxes I see in in the way the business is developing these days is that we work in incredibly unpredictable, ambiguous situations. And yet the people we hire and promote are the most risk-averse people we can find.
Christian Uhr:[Laughing] The most risk-averse?
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, I mean, the people who like to control details and make sure that... and I think a lot of that... I mean, I understand why I think a lot of it is around to sort of the hardcore accountability around the financial and narrative reporting, not making mistakes, not getting in trouble with the donors, all of that stuff. So there are good reasons for it. But I think it comes back and bites us. Because if you are risk-averse, you tend to not have a high tolerance for ambiguity, you tend to want to control it to grab it. And I don't think you can grab these things.
Christian Uhr:And I don't think you actually train that skill. I think the conditions we live in now, especially when it comes to people quite far up in the organisations like the top nodes again, I think they they are so filled up with every everyday management problems, navigating in the field of internal politics, or external politics, or tearing down building up their bureaucratic complex. It creates some kind of fickle or unstable environment. And it's not really good for strategic acknowledgement and knowledge development. That's what I see. It's very hard to get access to people high up in the organisation and talk about this is what we should know. This type of knowledge is key.
Lars Peter Nissen:So if you had unlimited access to the top 10 decision makers in the humanitarian sector for two weeks, what would you do with them? How would you enhance their tolerance for ambiguity?
Christian Uhr:That's a challenge. I would probably begin with arranging a session about the knowledge (What can we expect from knowledge?). And talk about like things like evidence (What is science? What can we actually expect from science?). So a more of a broad approach. And then I will talk about the field, the knowledge field, of disaster management. There are so many things that we know and if people in those positions had that knowledge, I'm pretty sure that they would act a bit differently. Quite hands on.
Lars Peter Nissen:But you would put them in a classroom and talk on them. You wouldn't have them dance tango or, you know, play with Lego or something like that?
Unknown Speaker:Well, not playing Lego I think. But perhaps actually a mix, sitting down in an environment, drinking coffee, but talk about knowledge, talk about the need of knowledge, and the strategy actually to develop knowledge and keep knowledge in an organisation. So it's not this type of unstable environment. So we can create some kind of stability when it comes to how we actually develop knowledge and how we use knowledge in order to improve our capabilities and so on. But I think as I said before, since we know that networking and knowing the right people is a kind of a key feature in disaster response, I think maybe dancing tango or talking about things that has not to do with disaster response might be a thing as well. Human skills. This is... Yeah, we all know that human skills is key.
Lars Peter Nissen:Okay, so firstly, we think differently about knowledge management, we understand that it's all about people, we take aside the top-level decision makers, and we give them a one-on-one on what disasters actually mean. And we... I do want a bit of Lego and Tango in ther, can I have that?
Christian Uhr:[Laughing] That could fit in. Yeah.
Lars Peter Nissen:All right. And then I think it's... a lot of what you speak to, and one of the first thing that struck me when I met you was that you speak about trust as something you can actually study and see, because we all know how important trust is, but I think we we tend to think of it as something that's just there. But how do you actually... how do you grow trust? How do you grow social capital? How do you create an environment where people trust each other?
Christian Uhr:Well, I think that's... I'm not entirely... I don't know, my exam is not in sociology, but I might have ideas, but to begin with, I would like to say that we need to... of course we need to grow trust. But we also need to understand the effects of trust, we need to understand it, how it actually influenced a complex system. The trust relations actually influence how the system will behave. And that is more of an analytical skill. I wouldn't say that that is a social skill. Then in addition to that, we need a social skill in order to build trust and keep it. In order... And do that in a democratic way, so to say, because, as you said, it's easy to just foster or to bring energy to those boys clubs or girls clubs. So it's a balance. It's it's a tricky question. And we cannot build a complete response capability based on trust relations. That's... it's probably not a good idea.
Lars Peter Nissen:So what... how do you then position trust in... you worked with with a number of different agencies in strengthening their capacity to work with crises. So what is the role of trust? And how do you concretely build it into a programme?
Christian Uhr:One thing you do in order to build trust is knowledge about people, knowing people, starting out just trying to know who's who. And based on that, of course, you build trust relations on. but trust is also you can talk about Swift trust, it's something that occurs during an acute event, but you can talk also about trust that's something that hsa developed on... under a longer time period. And to me, it is a slippery discussion, because there is a downside with this trust focus as well, as I said before, so just trying to build trust relations, and not seeing those downsides, like 'We are creating another network of certain type of people are thinking the same way.' We have to be analytical as well as social at the same time. So some self-criticism in this discussion is also quite important, I think. I don't have a clear answer, actually, how to build trust in a good way. So maybe you, with your experience, have some ideas, Lars.
Lars Peter Nissen:Well, I think there's... I think it's... your right to focus on the two different kinds of trust. On one side, you have the swift trust, which I see as the situations where it's less risky to trust somebody than not to trust somebody. So you're really in trouble. And you don't know what to do. And this guy doesn't seem to be an active idiot, so he might be able to solve the problem. And anyways, if I don't trust him, what am I gonna do? So I trust him and see what happens. That for me is swift trust, right? It's it's the least risky option. And I don't know that you can shape that. I don't... Because I think that's quite unpredictable and we... that that's just somehow the situation you end up in. But the other kinds of trust, I think, is the one that develops over the years where you have a professional community that bump into each other, either because they physically work in close proximity to each other... I think Geneva is an obvious example of a hub like that, where we tend to bump into each other and when we then suddenly all are surged out to the Philippines, then, you know, we know each other an that really greatly facilitates things. I also do see the downside. I do think that, for example, if you surge 20 people from Geneva to the Philippines, they become a bubble that don't connect properly with the Filipino setup, right, with the domestic setup, potentially. And so you have to be really careful with the exclusive nature of trust. Also, I guess, if you trust some people, there are implicitly also people that you don't trust, right? So you grant access to certain people and that, of course, reinforces existing power relations. So I think I do agree with you that it is a problematic concept in that sense. At the same time, I can't help feeling like we don't work deliberately enough with creating environments where trust can emerge. I've sometimes sat on the planning of big conferences, and I've thought, Okay, I think the best thing we can do here is just double the length of the coffee break.
Christian Uhr:I agree. I just want to add this. I was looking for a word here, but if I... the really downside, the really downside with trust, would be corruption. And we don't want to end there. It could lead to corruption, but I believe that building trust also is so necessary. You can see research. There've been many reports on many dissertations on trust, and trust in the crisis management or disaster management, and one thing that you can see, for example, Mishra (quite famous researcher dealing with trust issues, connecting it to crisis management) says that you need trust in order actually to be able to communicate in a fast, clear way during crisis. So that's one thing. You can see that trust relations actually lead to better coordination. And that is a problem we've seen, yeah, for 70 years. So there are many arguments why trust is good. It feels good to trust people as well. So many different aspects of trust that you can consider as key features in crisis management or disaster management, but on the other hand, and as the coin always has two sides, as... Yeah, it's corruption. So we have to be aware. And I think that it goes back a bit to the question you had. How would I treat the top notes in order to actually increase their capabilities or their knowledge? And, well, exercising. I say, exercise, train. I believe that those type of activities are so important. Maybe it's better to spend two more hours on exercising training, a scenario or whatever, then to just study more abbreviations and organisational charts.
Lars Peter Nissen:So we agree on the Lego, actually.
Christian Uhr:Hm, yeah.
Lars Peter Nissen:I'm thinking... When I'm looking at the list of challenges and the things we get wrong all the time, I'm thinking, Yeah, it's no wonder that we always get surprised, that we like agility, that we don't understand the system, because it's a big cuckoo clock, that we have constructed for something else that, you know, we get obsessed with parallel authority structures... You know, these... you're describing how a bureaucracy reacts to chaos. That's what you're describing. And a bureaucracy is is created to create predictability, right? When you push the button, you want the blue candy come out every time.
Christian Uhr:Yeah, it's a machine.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah. And so aren't we caught in the situation where, unless we find a fundamentally different type of organisational setup, it's not going to change. These problems that you have listed and that you say we've been battling with for decades, they will stay with us, unless we find a different habitat.
Christian Uhr:Yeah, I think to a certain degree, we have to live with them. We have to... really, the first thing I would say in a course is we have probably to live with these challenges. We need just a way to work with them. Like your... The problems are a part of your garden. And you need different tools in order to deal with these challenges or problems. Yesterday we talked about problems like, if you're a hammer, every problem will look like a nail, and I really liked that metaphor, because I think it's so valid both while in the academic world, and in the more professional world. I would say that, don't be a hammer, be a Swiss Army Knife and more when you walk around in garden and try to do stuff, both before something happens and during an event. So that's another way of, I don't know, changing the mindset. We need to expand our, broaden up our, mindset, and what type of different tools we can have in order to work with this living organism that's there during a disaster response. Because it's not a machine.
Lars Peter Nissen:So I'm trying, I'm trying to think through different options for institutional design, right? Because on one side... One strategy would be to work within the existing hierarchies and say, yeah, let's get the top guys out and get... enhance their tolerance for ambiguity and get them some knowledge and some skills so that they get better. Or you could say, No, we need the special ops here. We need that little... Totally... we need the skunkworks, in a sense. We need that little group of highly specialised people and the only thing they do is that when the balloon goes up, they run around and garden the humanitarian garden. They weed it out, they... you know, they sow some new stuff, they make sure that flow is reestablished, in a sense. And then if we have that little specialised unit then it doesn't really matter that the mainstream is bureaucratic and slow, that they're surprised, that they lack knowledge of the system, because there's a gardener running around making sure that the worst problems are weeded out.
Christian Uhr:I think it's not black and white. And I think it's all about perspectives. For some people, for some resources, you don't have to consider the complexity. You can just be a very hands on manager, dealing with a limited amount of the total problem area. One weed, for example, in a garden, you can deal with that without really grasping at the complexity. But if you're like a disaster manager, trying to understand different resources at the same time, or just operating with different rationalities, you need this complexity... complex understanding. And so it's about perspectives. To me... well, you can say it's ontological question from a scientific perspective, that the world is complex, our disaster response system is complex. But you can also see it from a epistemological perspective, meaning how do we understand this? How do we perceive this? And some people, some managers, may not need to really grasp this complexity, just focus on their little thing and that's not really needed to understand how everything is connected to everything. So it's a matter of perspective. And I think, for a manager, quite what... covering, trying to understand the whole garden, if you use this metaphor, you must be able to understand the different perspectives. At one point to stand there just looking out, see the whole garden, on another time point, you just have to go down to the weed and just see the weed and what to do with the weeds. You need to change perspectives. And that is another key skill, I would say. To me, that's a conceptual skill, thinking abstractions on one hand, and then just move down and work with your hands. And you need to be able to do this. So I think shifting perspective is is such a key thing and understanding different perspectives at the same time is a skill that we need to develop and that's also a thing that I would bring up with the senior managers, top notes, in the different organisations.
Lars Peter Nissen:So you started many different systems. Where do you think they got it right? What's your... Which country or which organisations have you seen where you're like, 'Yeah, these guys, they know what they're doing'?
Christian Uhr:Well, I'd probably put it the other way around. If I studied different systems... You can see many differences around the world how the countries have designed their response systems, how they have designed their societies. And you can see different cultures, and you can see different ways of dealing with knowledge and work with knowledge. But at the same time, you see these problems that I just have listed, and you see them everywhere. So it doesn't really matter [laughing], to be a bit cynical here. I don't think there is a perfect solution. Because if there were a perfect solution, one country or two would probably have found it at this stage. That's what I mean that we have to live with those problems, not trying to just wipe them away. We need to work with them. It's a part of your garden. And... many metaphors here. but I think it's... that's a key message here. We think that, yeah, in Sweden, for example, we... quite often we glance at the US and they have their Incident Command System, and at the moment now people are talking about NATO, the way your... NATO are arranging staff functions, management functions, it's it sounds cool, and it's very functional and so on. And it's... I think it's like that around the globe. We have ideas of others doing stuff in the right way, but when you look at, for example, the US, they also have these problems, though they have ICC.
Lars Peter Nissen:I think you just have to explain what ICS is.
Christian Uhr:ICS is Incident Command System. Well, it's a long story. But it's the... well, the US system for organising and dealing with emergencies and crisis.
Lars Peter Nissen:Okay, so you're the, you're the academic here, I'm the layman. Let me give you my version of what ICS is, and you can contradict me, right? Whoever gets there first puts on a t-shirt that says incident commander [laughing]. And the only rule is that when you show up, you go look for the guy with the t-shirt. And you say 'Hi, incident commander, I'm so-and-so unit, I can do this and this for you. What you want me to do?' And he tells you where to go and what to do. And if somebody more qualified comes in, then the incident commander takes off his t-shirt, and gives that to the new guy and says, 'Hey, congratulations, you're now the incident commander.' So you have a... you have a system that evolves according to which capabilities are there. And you have a unified command structure. And the only thing people need to know is who has the t-shirt.
Christian Uhr:I think you have to offer your services to FEMA. Give them a call [laughing]. Yeah, I agree. That's probably... that's one way of understanding it. Yeah. And you can see this type of solutions... That's what I meant in the beginning. You can see many versions of this type of solution, but still, we have those problems in the garden we need to deal with. So I'm not saying that if you have my system, or if you have... if you employ in NATO's version of trying to arrange a staff function or whatever, you will get rid of those problems. That's not true. You will probably will deal with those problems in a better way if you enhance your skills. And you enhance your skills by better thinking, and more... another way of dealing with with knowledge. It's the way how you think and act, not so much about the formal systems.
Lars Peter Nissen:What I hear you saying is that it's a craft, not an academic exercise.
Christian Uhr:Partly, yes. But I will not really exclude academic part of it now. I'm very biassed, of course, but I think that being able to think complexity is a skill that you develop within academia. So I'm trying to connect, well, the real problems here, with the more theoretical discussions we have in academia, [inaudible] in the academic world. But I think that it's a mistake to polarise saying, Oh, we have the real world and we have the academic world. I think the academic world actually tries to understand and tries to develop tools to understand and improve the professional side. So um... but I'm also a bit critical to how some academics, actually, are approaching this because it's a difference between an academic and professional crisis manager.
Lars Peter Nissen:So I feel terrible, we started the manifesto and I feel like we got lost in a very interesting discussion. So I think we might have to finish that another day. But I... for me, the overarching thing coming out of this is that we have to think about the way in which we think about crisis, the story we tell about crisis, and the way we handle knowledge and pass that on and create, across the many different actors that collaborate in a crisis, a shared understanding of what this elusive thing called the crisis actually is.
Christian Uhr:I agree. We have to create an environment where knowledge is developed, not only is... is not only a seasonal thing. So I think that that's why I'm... I'm so keen on reaching those top nodes. Because they have the mandates to actually to create this setting, the stable setting, that is necessary to actually create and develop knowledge. So I think that's so important. And yeah. They're in the front line for the development, that's how it is. They should be the key gardeners.
Lars Peter Nissen:Should be but I think often they actually lacked that hands-on operational experience, you speak up to really understand and own that a crisis is a severe loss of control. It really is. You're in the deep end and you don't know what to do. And when you're at the top of a big hierarchy, your daily life is the opposite often. Yeah, of course there are crisis and whatever but your own integrity or your own positioning is not challenged in that way. You don't experience, necessarily, that level of loss of control. I don't think you do. I think you're still... you may be losing the football game, but you're still on the pitch. There is a pitch, there are rules, right? It is that it's not like you're just in absolute chaos. And so I'm not sure they always get it. I think they overestimate the level of control we have. And that's where a lot of these problems you mentioned actually stem from. They're surprised that it could go so bad. They they lack agility because of... you know, they're used to working with the machine and suddenly that is not working anymore. And so I get what you're saying in terms of wanting access to the top level of the top tier, but I also think that maybe you would find more fertile ground for your thinking and your projects sort of in the middle, at the operational level in a sense, the people who still have fresh operational experience.
Christian Uhr:Yeah, I agree. If I'm about to just try to identify where the disaster management, the crisis management knowledge is today, in organisations, I would say that knowledge is on a quite low level in an organisation. And that's a problem. Because that doesn't really help the long term strategies. It needs to be at this low level as well. But do we actually need to build this attitude towards knowledge on a high system level, among the top nodes, so they can help our long term strategies. So we don't have this circle... moving in circles again. So I think the only one, the key solution, is to have another mindset when it comes to knowledge. And they need to be more open. And they need to spend time exercising, taking lectures, and so on, if they are supposed to be managers during a crisis, otherwise, they can stay managers just during a normal everyday management.
Lars Peter Nissen:So I think we've covered quite well, the diagnosis of the problems, the way in which we fail and the way we think about crisis, and it seems to get stuck all the time. When you look at your research today, what are you most excited about? Where did... Where's the... Where's there, for you, most energy in terms of moving forward?
Christian Uhr:Well, I think you... Well, it's... that's about research, but yesterday, we had a lecture in Lund in a class with international students studying the course that I run at the moment, Introduction to Disaster Response Management. And I'm so satisfied when I hear these students. Really clever people. It's such a great honour to to actually facilitate their learning processes, and so on. So that that makes me happy. For real. When it comes to research, I think that I still experience curiosity, that the people are curious researchers are curious, and I think I see a trend that researchers, they are moving a bit towards the idea of going into more design research, not only descriptive research. And working more with practice or practitioners, professionals, I think I can say that my experience is that we see more of this now than 10-15 years ago. So I think we're all moving in the right direction.
Lars Peter Nissen:So Christian, thank you so much for an excellent conversation. Here, towards the end of it, I realised that we forgot to introduce the most interesting fact about you, which is not that you are a researcher, but that you are a mixed martial arts fighter. And so as we were talking, I was thinking of the famous quote, the 'Everybody's got a plan until they get hit in the head' by... I think it was Mike Tyson who said that. And in a sense, that's what happens to institutions. We all have a plan and then Mike Tyson comes and punches you in the head and everything falls apart.
Christian Uhr:It's a good quote. I just must correct you because I'm not a mixed martial artist. Not... Well, I'm not a Mixed Martial Artist anymore. It was long time ago. But I like to give you a quote back. I think it's so important for the academia or the academic world to be humble in this. And sometimes I believe that the researchers, they think, Well, I'm thinking, don't confuse me with facts. That's not a quote that I really like. So we, from the academic side, we need to stop and listen to the professionals. If we like to design stuff, if we like to improve stuff, we need to stop and listen.
Lars Peter Nissen:Thank you, Christian. Thank you for your research and your passion around this issue. I look forward to our collaboration in the future.
Christian Uhr:Thank you. It's an honour to be here.