GNGTS 2014 - Atti del 33° Convegno Nazionale

management institutions were invited. Each of these was designed to bring people within these communities together to discuss the requirements that they believed were needed for the living document to be an effective tool. As well as this, the workshops provided information to the project partners about how these people tend to learn from previous events, as well as what the main problems are when trying to solve issues in a crisis. In the first workshop on forest fires (Weeze, Germany, April 15-16, 2013) a scenario based approach was used (Maal and Grunnan 2013a). The scenario based approach led to interesting discussions. However, it was difficult to structure the findings as the problems were complex and had different challenges in the various phases. Thus, based on this experience another approach was chosen for the following workshops. A problem structuring approach appeared as the most fruitful tool to tackle the multifaceted problems and to categorize them. We used a combination of methods described by Eriksson (2003). In the second workshop on earthquakes (Weeze, Germany, June 25-26, 2013) and the third workshop on floods (Vienna, Austria, 8-9 October 2013) a “ post-it ” method was used to structure the discussions (Grunnan and Maal, 2014). A “post-it exercise” was conducted in two steps where the experts in the ELITE CoP were invited to share their experiences. The participants were divided into three groups of ten experts, each with a facilitator from the ELITE project and one person taking notes. Through the post-it exercise the experts would first write down lessons learned (also referred to as “problems” in the exercise) that they had experienced in their work on different post-its. Challenges like “inter-agency communication problems”, “lack of knowledge in the population”, “no debriefings” and “few evaluations” were mentioned by the experts. Next, the experts presented their post-its and stuck them onto the whiteboard. This would often cause discussions as the experts would often provide an example where they experienced this problem, other experts would also share similar experiences. This created an interactive context and became a good environment for learning. Post-it notes with similar lessons learned were grouped under larger problem areas and it was also noted in which of the phases of a crisis this problem was most prominent (pre-crisis, during the crisis, post-crisis, Fig. 2a). The facilitator played an important role in clustering the post-its. Examples of lessons learned were grouped in problem areas like “communication”, “logistics”, “training experience” and “knowledge”. It was a participative process and all the group members got to share their views, triggering interesting discussions as the experts came from different countries and backgrounds. Results from each group were presented in plenary session. The second step of the process consisted of a session where the same groups had to identify possible solutions to the problems. Through the workshop exercises and the following discussions, it was possible to disseminate and collect procedures and best practices, thus establish a framework for identifying and reporting lessons learned in crisis management. The problems were plotted into a word-table, all the problems Fig. 2 – a) Pictures from post-it exercise in ELITE earthquake workshop in Weeze 2013 (Maal et al. , 2013); b) lessons learned categories from the earthquake workshop (Maal et al., 2013) a) b) GNGTS 2014 S essione 2.3 397