By Allison G. S. Knox
Contributor, AMU Edge
The famous psychologist Karl Weick once posited that cosmology episodes are so dramatic they shift how people think about similar events in the future. He argued that these events are really so monumental that people don’t have a frame of reference to deal with them.
So, after the event, individuals would think about how they handled it and would base that on how they would deal with future such events. Weick’s argument is particularly important in understanding human psychology, organizational theory, and policy formation.
Where emergency management is concerned, cosmology episodes can be viewed as major disasters during which things go off the rail. Hurricane Katrina can be considered a cosmology episode because it shifted the way we administer emergency management services in the United States. The coronavirus will also shift how we understand public health crises where emergency management is concerned, particularly when future pandemics are the source of the emergency.
Hurricane Katrina & Emergency Management Administration
Many Americans remember when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005 and the devastation it caused in New Orleans. Americans watched in horror as reports came across the news that thousands of people were without any place to stay. People had drowned in their attics; others were unable to receive medical attention, and the Superdome as a shelter ended up becoming a serious public health concern of its own. Katrina became a cosmology event.
A tremendous amount of research followed this crisis with experts working to understand specifically what went wrong with the Hurricane Katrina response. Some concluded that the roles and responsibilities from the local level up through the federal government were at fault. Scholars like Donald Moynihan argued that the internal structure of the Department of Homeland Security created situations where roles and responsibilities were ultimately difficult to understand. As a result, it was not clear who should be managing the situation and fingers were pointed in myriad directions.
Shortly after Katrina, the federal government revised its emergency management policies, clarifying the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders. Since then, we have not had a major meteorological disaster quite like Hurricane Katrina. But then again, we have the coronavirus pandemic.
Coronavirus and Emergency Management Administration
Prior to March of 2020, pandemics of this magnitude were sort of a myth to the American public. Of course, we understood that pandemics could happen, but because they happen so rarely – the last being the so-called Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 – a major pandemic was not really of great concern.
However, the lockdowns that have taken place worldwide have forced Americans and others to understand that we are experiencing one of Weick’s cosmology events because we have not have a frame of reference for what happens with pandemics since 1918.
Schools have had to move to online instruction and businesses have shuttered their offices and employees work remotely. Policy holes exist in almost every area of American society because the virus has created all sorts of difficulties.
The U.S. government has worked at the local, state and federal levels to try to manage the coronavirus. Some of the obvious measures have been keeping businesses afloat and trying to reduce new incidents of the virus with the advent of three effective vaccines.
Coronavirus as a Cosmology Event
In essence, because Americans have not really experienced a pandemic like the novel coronavirus, it will become a cosmology event; that is, an event so significant that it will shape how we think about how to manage pandemics and other public health emergencies in the future. As such, we should use the pandemic as a means of understanding how we can strengthen resources at all levels of government.
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