MAIS Research Proposal

How Public Emergency Management Systems Document and Learn from Complex Crises

Jeff McCarthy

Athabasca University

MAIS 602: Interdisciplinary Research

Research Proposal

Instructor: Dr. Lisa Micheelsen

Date: 04.19.2026

Abstract

Public emergency management systems are expected to learn from complex crises, yet how that learning is documented and institutionalized remains underexamined.  If adaptive leadership approaches are increasingly used during prolonged and complex crises, formal crisis documentation often underrepresents or omits these practices.  This research explores how emergency management systems and governments document, represent, preserve, and interpret crisis experiences, with a particular focus on prolonged events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.  While after-action reports and similar documents are often presented as objective records, in practice, they are narrative constructions shaped by power, omission, perspective, time, distance and institutional priorities.  This research asks: How do public emergency management systems document and learn from complex crises, and what does this reveal about institutional memory and adaptive leadership practice?  The research is grounded in the assumption that critical elements of crisis response, particularly adaptive leadership and frontline experiences, may be underrepresented or omitted from formal documentation.

Using a qualitative approach informed by philosophical hermeneutics and Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), this study will examine both official documents and the lived experiences of crisis leaders through semi-structured interviews.  By interpreting these sources as narratives rather than neutral records, the research seeks to identify gaps between lived experience and institutional representation.  The findings will show that institutional learning is shaped as much by omission and narrative construction as by experience itself, with implications for how public systems design future crisis learning.

Research Proposal

Introduction

Public emergency response systems rely on formal documentation to capture, interpret, and learn from complex crises.  After-action reports, audits, and internal reviews are intended to serve as institutional memory, providing a foundation for future preparedness, response, and risk mitigation.  These documents are often treated as objective accounts of what occurred, offering lessons learned and recommendations for improvement, especially regarding collaboration, joint readiness, and communication.  However, this assumption warrants closer examination.  Documentation does not simply record events.  It constructs a version of them, shaped by perspective, timing, power, institutional priorities, and omission.  Institutional memory is not discovered in documentation like a needle in a haystack.  It is produced through the act of documenting itself.

This challenge becomes sharper during prolonged crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.  Unlike shorter, less impactful emergency events, prolonged crises evolve over time, require sustained coordination across multiple networks, and demand continuous adaptation amid uncertainty (the fog of war).  Leadership in these contexts is not neatly confined to formal authority structures, all-hazards emergency management plans, and organizational charts.  It emerges across networks, compartments and levels, often in response to rapidly changing conditions, incomplete information, competing pressures and instances where leadership must emerge out of necessity.  Decisions are made in real time, often without precedent or clear guidance, which may increase confusion and distrust.

Within this complexity, adaptive leadership becomes critical.  Adaptive leadership involves actively seeking out and responding to uncertainty, navigating competing values, motives and interests, and mobilizing people to confront difficult realities (Heifetz et al., 2009).  During the COVID-19 pandemic, leadership frequently emerged beyond formal authority structures, requiring rapid learning, multi-level cross-sector coordination, and continuous readjustment.  Scholars examining pandemic leadership emphasize the importance of sensemaking, distributed leadership, and adaptive capacity in managing complex events (Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2018; Hartley et al., 2021).  Yet, these adaptive practices are rarely front and centre within crisis documentation.  In many cases, they are informal, personal, relational, and context-dependent.  As a result, they may be simplified, repositioned, or omitted altogether in official reports that prioritize coherence, accountability, checklists and institutional positioning.

This raises a fundamental question about how these systems learn.  If the documentation that serves as institutional memory does not fully capture the lived crisis experience, particularly the adaptive leadership that occurs across frontline and mid-system levels, then the learning derived from that documentation may be incomplete.

This research is situated within the context of emergency management during the COVID-19 pandemic in New Brunswick.  To date, no formal pandemic after-action report has been produced in the province.  This absence cannot be simply regarded as a gap in documentation.  It represents an opportunity to examine how learning is constructed in the absence of a formalized narrative, and how institutional memory can exist when left to the remaining forms of documentation, communication, and retrospective interpretation.  Therefore, the research asks: How do public emergency management systems document and learn from complex crises, and what does this reveal about institutional memory and adaptive leadership practice?   In doing so, the research shifts focus from simply evaluating crisis response outcomes on their merit to examining how those outcomes are interpreted, documented, and utilized within emergency management and broader systems.

This research also aims to produce practical outputs where possible.  First, it may inform the development of an adaptive leadership framework customized for prolonged, complex crisis environments, with particular attention to the leader-of-leaders application and system-level integration.  This adaptive leadership framework would inform leadership theory.  Second, it may contribute to the conceptual design of an AI-assisted, narrative-based after-action reporting model that captures real-time experiences, decision-making context, and competing interpretations during crises.  Together, these outputs aim to address limitations in current documentation practices by supporting more inclusive, context-laden, and adaptive forms of institutional learning.

Methodology

A qualitative, interpretive approach grounded in philosophical hermeneutics and supported by Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis and document analysis guides this study methodologically.  It takes an interpretive approach, viewing crisis documentation as a socially constructed narrative shaped by power, omission, and institutional context.

Traditional crisis response evaluation approaches tend to focus on measuring performance against predetermined indicators or identifying gaps between expectations and outcomes.  While valuable, these approaches assume that a complex reality can be objectively captured and that traditional documentation practices accurately reflect it.  This study challenges that assumption.  It begins from the position that meaning is constructed (narrativized), not simply recorded, and that understanding how systems learn requires examining how narratives are produced, structured, preserved, and interpreted (Gadamer, 2004; Riessman, 2008).

Philosophical hermeneutics provides the main interpretive framework for this inquiry.  Drawing on the teachings of Hans Georg Gadamer, this approach emphasizes the role of interpretation in understanding human experience and social occurrences.  Gadamer challenges the idea that understanding can be achieved through objective detachment, viewing it instead as shaped by history, language, experience, and our meaningful interaction with what we seek to understand.  Meaning is not recovered as being predetermined or a fixed notion, but emerges through this ongoing process of engagement and interpretation, a reflexive back and forth.

Central to this approach is the concept of the hermeneutic circle, the relationship between the parts and the whole.  Individual elements of a document or an experience can only be understood in relation to the broader narrative of which they are a part, while the broader narrative itself is continually shaped by the effects of its individual components.  This reliance and synergy are relevant in the context of crisis documentation, where countless decisions, interpretations, and events are assembled into coherent accounts that attempt to present as all-encompassing and validating.

From a hermeneutic perspective, these accounts are not neutral snapshots of reality, but interpretive constructions shaped by the historical, institutional, and political contexts in which they are produced.  The process of documentation inherently involves selection and omission, each of which contributes to the construction of meaning.  What is included, how it is positioned, and what is left unsaid all influence how events are understood and remembered, impacting later learning.

Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons” informs this analysis even further.  Understanding occurs through the interaction between the interpreter’s perspective and the historical context of the text or experience being interpreted.  This includes the researcher’s own professional background in emergency management, as well as the institutional contexts in which crisis documentation is produced.  Rather than attempting to eliminate this influence, it is acknowledged as an integral part of the interpretive process, one that requires considerable ongoing reflexivity.

This framework allows for an analysis that goes beyond surface-level accounts of crisis response to examine how meaning is constructed within institutional narratives.  It allows the research to explore how reflection and coherence are produced, how contradictions are managed or minimized, and how certain experiences, particularly those related to adaptive leadership and frontline decision-making, may be obscured or excluded.  In doing so, philosophical hermeneutics provides a foundation for understanding crisis documentation not as a record of what happened, but as an integral interpretive act that shapes institutional memory and learning. 

Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis strengthens this approach by focusing on lived experience.  IPA examines how individuals make sense of complex experiences.  In prolonged crises, this enables exploration of how leaders interpret their roles and decisions in uncertain environments.  It also allows examination of experiences not fully captured in formal documentation.  For example, attempts at adaptive leadership practices, so prevalent during the pandemic response, undermine themselves when they fail to attend to the lived experiences they are meant to engage with and learn from.

Narrative and discourse-oriented approaches further support this methodology.  Scholars such as Riessman and Fairclough posit that language is not merely descriptive but formative (constitutive), shaping how events are understood and how lessons are learned.  In a crisis response context, documentation should therefore not only serve to record the facts of the event but also legitimize a particular version of events.  It is not difficult to assume that a complex, prolonged crisis may have multiple versions or perspectives on what happened and how the response unfolded.  Attention to language, narrative building, framing, context and omission becomes essential in understanding how institutional memory is constructed and versions are chosen.  It determines precisely what systems value, what they say we should pay attention to and what is worth learning from.  Absence and silence are not treated as gaps to be corrected.  They are treated as meaningful tenets in the construction of institutional narratives and an extension of that system’s perspective on leadership and learning.

Document Analysis

A range of official documents will be examined, including after-action reports, Auditor General reports, internal reviews, briefing materials, and public communications.  These documents will be analyzed as parts of an overarching narrative rather than simply as neutral records.  Following Bowen’s teachings, particular attention will be given to both content and context.

The analysis will focus on how events are framed, how decisions are justified, how power represents itself and how success and failure are defined.  Particular attention will be paid to omissions, including the absence of dissenting perspectives, the oversimplification of complex decision-making, and the limited representation of frontline experience.

 Semi-structured Interviews

Semi-structured interviews (8-12) will be conducted with pandemic leadership participants, including emergency management officials, public health leaders (Chief Medical Officer of Health), and senior public servants (Deputy and Assistant Deputy Ministers), to capture a breadth of perspectives, experiences, and analyses.  Interviews will explore lived experiences of confusion, decision-making, adaptation, power shifts and system-level coordination, as well as perceptions of how those experiences are represented in formal documentation.  Questions will be open-ended, allowing participants to reflect in their own terms.  

Interview data will be analyzed to identify key themes, patterns in how participants make sense of their experiences, and areas of ambiguity.  Document analysis will focus on how events are presented, including structure, language, and what may be left out.  Data will then be analyzed (codified) to determine where documented accounts align with or differ from lived experience, with attention to gaps, over-simplification or differing interpretations.

The researcher’s positionality is an important consideration in this study.  As a participant-observer with direct experience in emergency management during the COVID-19 pandemic, including service as Executive Director of the New Brunswick Health Emergency Operations Centre, the researcher brings both insight and perspective to the research.  This close proximity to the subject matter provides a depth of contextual understanding that may not be accessible through a review of documentation alone.  At the same time, the potential for bias is present, particularly in the interpretation of events, decisions, and institutional processes.  Consistent with a hermeneutic approach, this influence is not treated as a limitation to be dealt with, but as an integral part of the interpretive process.  Ongoing reflexivity will be required to examine how prior experience, assumptions, and professional relationships influence interviews, analysis, and interpretation.  

 Ethical Considerations

This research will require approval from the Athabasca University Research Ethics Board. Participation will be voluntary, with informed consent obtained from all participants.  Confidentiality will be carefully managed, recognizing the small, interconnected nature of the NB public service. 

Participants will be offered anonymity, though complete anonymity cannot effectively be guaranteed.  Interview questions will focus solely on experience rather than on evaluating individuals, branches of the emergency management apparatus, or government departments.  Public documents pose minimal risk but will be treated as constructed narratives and will also require reflexivity.

Given the researcher’s professional background, reflexivity will remain an essential ongoing practice to ensure credible interpretation.

Reflection

The development of this research question reflects a shift from a broad focus on leadership to a deeper, more meaningful inquiry into how systems construct and interpret crisis experiences.  Initially framed as “Who leads the leaders,” the question was too broad without clear methodological guideposts.

Engagement with course materials and classmates’ reflections emphasized interpretation and reflexivity, and introduced me to the concept of the constructed nature of knowledge.  The turning point was recognizing documentation and ‘silent archives’ as objects of study.  Rather than assuming reports accurately captured events, the research began to question how those reports were constructed and what they may omit, leading to missed opportunities to learn from valuable instances of adaptive leadership. 

The very nature of interpretive methodologies aligned with this shift, supporting a move beyond descriptive inquiry toward analysis of meaning-making within complex systems.  The absence of a formal pandemic after-action report in New Brunswick further solidified this direction, not merely as a gap to be filled, but as a perfect example of how institutional memory is constructed or left unfulfilled.  Rather than being a stifling limitation, this glaring absence provides insight into how systems choose to document, interpret, or avoid capturing complex crisis experience altogether.  This evolution reflects a shift from seeking certainty (mistakes in leadership) to engaging with complexity, exactly what an after-action report, an emergency management leader and a public service leader of leaders should do.  The research now endeavours to understand how systems construct meaning from crisis experiences and how that purposeful construction, in turn, shapes what is learned, remembered, archived, and later applied in adaptive leadership practice.

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