Managing disorganization in a disaster case

Abstract

This thesis has five main goals. The first goal is to attempt to replicate the system dynamics model “The essence of transformation in a selforganizing team“ by Tu et al, with the modelling tool Vensim. “The essence of transformation in a selforganizing team“ deals with managing disorganizing using imperical data from the Palau Case. The other four goals include a review of Tu et al.’s model, implementing proposals for improvement, expressing the implications for the model for better crisis management, and if real data can be found describe a different case of emergency management. We approached this problem by reviewing and testing Tu et al.’s iThink model, and replicated it into a Vensim model. The equations were tested and applied the correct unit and polarity. The model was also simplified by removing unnecessary equations and the model was applied to a new crisis case (Hatlestad case). Our results show that our simplified model can be used in disaster planning, with only minor changes to the variables other disaster cases where the situation goes from chaos to control can be modelled.