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This review examines the role of intuition as a cognitive tool to better manage complex crises. The paper draws on a case study in the aviation industry, the Hudson river incident, to advance the potency and value of intuitive expertise in crisis situations.

Crisis managers operating in safety critical domains are often faced with difficult and exceptional conditions that may challenge their expertise and cause them to rely more heavily on their experiential knowledge. This review therefore provides insights into intuitive thinking and demonstrates its importance in crisis decision-making.

Evidence suggests that intuition arguably offers a better cognitive option to decision-makers in high staked and time-pressured crisis situations. The Hudson River case study further highlights why organizations should aim to train their personnel to become better intuitive thinkers.

This review challenges conventional classical decision theory, outlining its limitations in typical fast paced crises environments. The paper instead positions intuition as a scientific construct that holds important value for crisis managers in extreme conditions.

Experienced firefighters often make important decisions in fast-paced fire ground environments characterised by uncertainty and evolving conditions, mostly under considerable time-pressure. The nature of these environments inadvertently presents firefighters with novel situations that occasionally challenge their expertise, subsequently necessitating a reliance on intuitive as opposed to rational decisions. The purpose of this study is to elicit the tacitly held knowledge and intuitive thought processes that were used by 31 experts while managing a range of complex, non-routine fire incidents.

The study used a formal knowledge elicitation technique known as the critical decision method (CDM). CDM is a qualitative strategy that applies a set of cognitive probes to explore the cognitive processes that aid the performance of a complex task. This method was preferred to other cognitive task analysis methods as it specifically favours the use of retrospective incident accounts and incidents that were both challenging and memorable. Using the full CDM protocol, 31 experienced firefighters were interviewed across various fire stations in the UK and Nigeria (UK = 15, Nigeria = 16). The interview transcripts were coded, categorised and analysed using the emergent themes analysis approach.

The results from the study identified 134 decision points across the 31 incident accounts. A total of 42 salient cues sought by experts at each decision point were revealed and organised into a critical cue inventory. The identified cues were subsequently categorised into five distinct types based on the type of information each cue relayed to an incident commander. The study further developed a decision-making model – information filtering and intuitive decision-making model – that describes how experienced firefighters made difficult fire ground decisions amidst multiple informational sources. The model ultimately showed experts’ preferences for intuitive decisions as the default-thinking mode, with deliberation only required on few instances as conditions warranted. The study also compiled and indexed the cognitive strategies elicited from the expert firefighters into a competence assessment framework.

In light of existing debate about the accessibility of expert knowledge, the current study not only provides empirical evidence detailing the practical application of the CDM as a formal knowledge elicitation method but also delineates a range of cognitive outputs from the elicitation process that ultimately holds relevance for knowledge transfer from expert to novices. The study identified a range of training needs and discussed the practical implications of transferring expert knowledge into learning tasks that could subsequently aid the cognitive development of novices. In particular, the study proposed adopting the four-component instructional design model in organising the CDM outputs for training purposes.

While it is generally taken that experts, because of their extensive domain knowledge and well-developed schema, often perform considerably (and sometimes exceptionally) well when solving complex problems, finding a credible and objective method to model what experts know and do continues to pose a challenge, particularly when such revelation is crucially required for training purposes. This study is therefore timely since its tacit and intuitive knowledge outputs can now be applied to enhance the development of training curricula for novices. The learning tasks developed from the CDM outputs are hoped to facilitate organisational learning not only within the firefighting domain but also across other high reliability organisations. It is extremely important that expert knowledge is preserved in these domains especially in countries such as the UK, where the rate of real fires has been on decline, which in turn suggests that the quality of experiential knowledge required to manage complex non-routine fire cases may also be on decline. The current study also presents and discusses insights based on the cultural differences observed between the UK and the Nigerian fire services.

Being a novel public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic presented world leaders with difficult options and some serious dilemmas that must somehow be negotiated. Whilst these leaders had limited knowledge about the coronavirus and how the pandemic would potentially evolve, they were still expected to make high-staked judgements amidst a range of uncertainties. The purpose of this paper is to explore the response strategies used by various world leaders from the perspective of crisis leadership within the public health domain.

Secondary data was collected from research papers, policy reports and credible media outlets to examine the construct of crisis leadership within the context of the global pandemic.

The paper identified three cognitive antecedents to the COVID-19 crisis leadership failures, which helped to explain why certain policy decisions were successful and why others were less so. On this basis, a clear dichotomy was drawn between highly rated leaders and their less successful counterparts in relation to the management and governance of the coronavirus pandemic.

The uniqueness of this paper lies in its psycho-political approach, which offered insights into the cognitive undertones that underpin the three leadership failures that emerged from the distinct approaches used by world leaders to prepare for, respond to and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. The practical recommendations proposed in this paper are hoped to aid better decision-making for leaders faced with the task of managing future public health crises.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on the naturalistic decision making and cognitive science literature to examine how experienced crisis managers utilize the intuitive and analytical strategies when managing complex incidents. A cognitive model that describes the interplay between strategies is presented and discussed, and the specific role that intuition plays in analytical decision making is addressed.

Designed as a conceptual paper, the extant literature is reviewed to advance discussions on the theme of intuitive and analytical decision making in the naturalistic environment. A new model of expert intuition – the information filtering and intuitive decision model – is presented and evaluated against existing cognitive models from the wider literature.

The paper suggests that experts’ ability to make intuitive decisions is strongly hinged on their information processing skills that allow irrelevant cues to be sifted out while the relevant cues are retained. The paper further revealed that experts generally employ the intuitive mode as their default strategy, drawing on the analytical mode only as conditions warrant.

Prior research has shown that experts often make important task decisions using intuitive or analytical strategies or by combining both, but the sequence these should typically follow is still unresolved. Findings from the intuition model reveal that although intuition often precedes analytical thinking in almost all cases, both strategies exist to offer significant values to decision makers if the basis of their application is well understood.

Experienced fire ground commanders are known to make decisions in time-pressured and dynamic environments. The purpose of this paper is to report some of the tacit knowledge and skills expert firefighters use in performing complex fire ground tasks.

This study utilized a structured knowledge elicitation tool, known as the critical decision method (CDM), to elicit expert knowledge. Totally, 17 experienced firefighters were interviewed in-depth using a semi-structured CDM interview protocol. The CDM protocol was analysed using the emergent themes analysis approach.

Findings from the CDM protocol reveal both the salient cues sought, which the authors termed critical cue inventory (CCI), and the goals pursued by the fire ground commanders at each decision point. The CCI is categorized into five classes based on the type of information each cue generates to the incident commanders.

Since the CDM is a useful tool for identifying training needs, this study discussed the practical implications for transferring experts’ knowledge to novice firefighters.

Although many authors recognize that experts perform exceptionally well in their domains of practice, the difficulty still lies in getting a structured method for unmasking experts’ tacit knowledge. This paper is therefore relevant as it presents useful findings following a naturalistic knowledge elicitation study that was conducted across different fire stations in the UK and Nigeria.

This study aims to offer a bibliometric analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on global virtual teams (GVTs).

Using a systematic literature review approach, it identifies all articles in the Web of Science from 1999 to 2021 that include the term GVTs (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 175 articles. The VOSviewer software was applied to analyze the bibliometric data.

The analysis revealed three dialogizing research clusters in the GVTs literature: a pioneering management information systems and organizational cluster, a general management cluster and a growing international management and behavioural studies cluster. Furthermore, it highlights the most cited articles, authors, journals and nations, and the network of strong and weak links regarding co-authorships and co-citations. Additionally, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, journals and disciplinary approaches from 1999 to 2021. Finally, the analysis illustrates the position and centrality in the network of the most relevant actors.

The findings can guide management practitioners, educators and researchers to the most meaningful clusters of publications on GVTs, and help navigate and make sense of the vast body of the available literature. The importance of GVTs has been growing in the past two decades, and Covid-19 has accelerated the trend.

This study provides an updated and comprehensive systematic literature review on GVTs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first systematic literature review and bibliometry on GVTs. It concludes by suggesting future research paths.