Decision Making in a Crisis

In times of rapid change, we often are in a quandary about making decisions. This is because the information we have had in the past, through our experiences and studies, doesn’t necessarily apply in these new situations.

I’ve always been about information-informed decision making. The current health crisis reminded me of a much smaller and less harmful situation I was involved with back in 2002 at Dartmouth College. An outbreak of conjunctivitis was spreading rapidly through the campus and we just did not have the information we needed to deal with the crisis. The Center for Disease Control came to campus to try to help when we quickly realized we needed more information.

In 2002 it was still not commonplace to conduct web surveys. In fact, the CDC had never seen it done before. I, however, had been experimenting with this mode of surveying since the mid 1990s. We quickly created a survey to help us understand what faculty and student behavior was like in the crisis and how they were feeling about it. Armed with the rapid results from a web survey we were able to identify issues that we could impact to improve the situation. I wrote an article about this that was published in the Journal of American College Health.

I recently also worked with a college that evacuated in the face of a hurricane, examining through surveys what the student experiences were like, what they feared, and how they continued to learn as the were forced off campus.

In the days and weeks ahead we will need more information to move nimbly through this unprecedented change in our lives. Based on my experiences gathering helpful information for decision making in education in both crisis and in everyday situations, I am actively creating tools and processes that will help organizations make the best decisions possible.

Stay tuned.