Dr Nicola Power

I am interested in understanding how people make decisions in complex work environments (e.g., emergency services, NHS). Specifically I have researched why indecision is prevalent in these organisational contexts, and utilised a Naturalistic Decision Making approach to unpack expert insight into why indecision arises and strategies for overcoming it. I have found that during crises indecision does not occur via the avoidance or deferral of choices, but instead due to an intense and cognitively active process of decision inertia. Decision inertia occurs when the decision maker is highly motivated to act (e.g., due to their organisational responsibility), but instead of committing to a choice they engage in a process of redundant deliberation over their choices. Redundant deliberation occurs as the decision maker is caught in a loop of negative anticipatory thinking about the consequences for making a bad choice (e.g., things go wrong) and the consequences for failing to choose (e.g., incident escalates out of control). Identifying ways to break this loop and commit to action is key to overcoming decision inertia. I have recommended that regular immersive decision-making training that seeks to expose decision makers to "wicked problems" that are at risk of inertia is one way to to reduce its prevalence.

I am interested in understanding teamwork in extreme environments and the type of training that is required to develop extreme teams. I have conducted research with the Emergency Services on interoperability and ways to improve joint working between the Police, Fire and Ambulance Services. I have argued that existing strategies to improve interoperability have largely focussed on how to align procedures between emergency groups, but have paid less attention to the psychology of interoperability (e.g., the role of concepts such as trust and identities). I am currently PI on a 12-month ESRC funded project to address this issue, where we are looking to develop our understanding of interoperability and to feed this into strategies for developing psychological interoperability training. ESRC grant on the psychology of interoperability