Identifying Option Awareness Requirements for Public Health Crisis Decision Making

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a series of task analyses with decision makers responsible for managing public health crises. The goal was to uncover cognitive requirements for achieving option awareness, in addition to situation awareness, in complex and emergent decision-making scenarios. Five expert decision makers in multiple roles related to public health were interviewed to elicit knowledge requirements relating to emerging public health crises. Analysis revealed patterns of responses showing that in addition to the known necessity of high situation awareness in handling complex events, additional forms of awareness about the relative desirability of options affect the decision making of experts. The results have implications for the design of systems supporting decision making under high complexity and uncertainty, as well as for training to accelerate the growth of novices into expert decision makers.