Episode #48: Connecting research, communication, and human behaviour to disasters

Barbara has spent more than 40 years working across journalism, public relations, research and teaching, with a strong focus on how people seek information, respond to risk and engage during disasters.

She is the founder of Cicada Research and Communication and was a founding director of Emergency Media and Public Affairs (EMPA) — helping shape the emergency communication profession across Australia and New Zealand.

Barbara’s work explores one of the biggest challenges in disaster resilience: how we better connect research, communication and human behaviour to real-world preparedness and recovery.

She’s also a volunteer firefighter and community educator, bringing both academic insight and lived frontline experience to the conversation.

So I’d heard a lot about Barb. She’s one of those names that you kind of hear a lot about in the sector. And then a few years ago, I joined the EMPA Board, which was a great experience to really play a role in listening to what’s happening in that side of the disaster space. So I got to meet Barb, spend a lot of time with her and really see, I guess, and embrace the passion of what she set up and created as a founder of EMPA.

1. You’ve spent decades working across journalism, communication and disaster research – what first drew you into the disaster resilience space?

Barbara Ryan

I was working as the corporate communication manager for Toowomba City Council. And it was the year before the Canberra Bushfires, just a few months before then. And unusually for Queensland, we had a really big fire up here. It went for about three weeks in my little neighbourhood. And on the last day it was going to come up the hill, and the LDMG were all sitting around at 6 a.m. They were telling us that we were going to lose houses today. And I thought, you know, you have that feeling in the bit of your stomach that, this has all gone well so far because we lost a few sheds and that was about it. And a lot of acres burned.

But it wasn’t really real until that point. But we were so lucky we had rain that day.

Under the Local Disaster Management Act, the Queensland Disaster Management Act at the time, the local councils were responsible for all the communication around bushfires. And so our team was seconded onto the LDMG. And so me and three others sort of handled this what turned out to be international media interest.

But I was also wondering how well we were connecting with the community. we were trying to put out fifteen minute bulletins on radio and all the local radio stations were amazing, TV stations were great, everyone was really helpful. but I wasn’t quite sure if we were saying the right things and doing it through the right channels. And this was in the days before social media, two thousand and two. So we sort of hadn’t that was all we had and you know, and we’d come into it with no experience, but just a really solid background in comms, all of us were communicators. So we knew that we needed to be delivering the information that people wanted and we had to guess. So I went across to the university and I needed a study area for my PhD. So I looked at how people get information when they’re in a disaster.

2. You often focus on how people look for information during disasters. What do most emergency systems still misunderstand about human behaviour?

Barbara Ryan

I think there are a few aspects to answer that question. So I think agencies are very wedded to their process, mitigation, preparation, response and recovery. And in reality, it’s a bloody hot mess. It’s just everyone is in different stages, even within each of those phases.

So there’ll be people in our community who saw this coming, they’re all ready, they’ve got their evacuation plan done, and then there are other people who are only just realising, holy hell, this is going to be big for me. So it’s a real challenge for agents to be communicating what people need at the right times. and think also, especially operational people.

They’re so used to working in a high stress environment that their brains work really well. They don’t realise that the brains of the rest of us can really let us down in times of acute stress and that our decision making goes completely out the window. And unfortunately, they label that panic. What is actually happening is that people are taking in as much information and they’re making decisions based on that information.

So we need to give them the information that they need right at that time so that panic doesn’t eventuate. They can still make okay decisions, even though their brains completely let them down and all they’re seeing is this tunnel vision. They can’t make decisions. They’re running around the house looking for undies rather than their grandmother’s portrait, you know, those types of things. And probably the biggest thing that I think the emergency management system lets us down in is the way they consider community engagement as an add-on that it’s really great to do it at grassroots but you know it’s more important to have it at a top level. So whereas really you know yourself in recovery and the resilience space, the only way community engagement works well is when you’re face to face with people. And I think resources don’t quite get pushed that way. I believe that everything else, you know, comms, the top level community engagement team, their support. They should be support for the people who are working on the ground.

3. We talk a lot about warnings and technology… but how important are trust, relationships and local connection in whether people actually act?

 
Barbara Ryan

Trust is such a big thing. And it really came home to me how lucky we are in Australia because we on the whole, emergency agencies have a fairly high rating in terms of trust. But I was talking to a fellow for my book the other day, Fabio Silva from Portugal, who’s a firefighter, he’s really interested in community engagement and the trust and that type of thing. And it’s completely different in Portugal because the Portuguese government has done the wrong thing, sometimes intentionally in the past. and they haven’t had that stable political system that we’ve had for so many hundred years or so. and Fabio was saying that their biggest challenge is being trusted by the community and undertaking activities that will help them win that trust. So that when they have a disaster, then people will actually take the suggestions that they’re putting forward and make their job on the fire ground much easier because everyone’s doing what they’re being asked to do.

Whereas in Australia I think we do have a much higher level of trust that runs through our systems. But we do, you know it’s a graphic illustration of how localised trust is much greater than the centralised trust from head office. So, that’s why local community Facebook pages just go, they just explode when something happens. and we point people to our head office page in in those times, but they’re not giving the granular information that people want. And the local Facebook pages do. And it’s really interesting, the research shows that local Facebook pages are also self-correcting. So if someone posts something that’s not right, everyone piles on and says, you know, they don’t always do it, in a haranguing way, but they’ll say, no, actually I heard that this is and you can go to that website and have a look to see that that’s actually not quite right. So we need to trust the community more. And this kind of brings me back to shared responsibility. And you’ve done a podcast about it, I think, and I can’t wait to hear it. But there’s not trust by agencies in the community. We’re not trusting the community with the smarts to look after themselves and make the right decisions. And I think we’re going to lose trust because of that. If we talk about shared responsibility, There is a shared responsibility on the part of agencies to trust communities to do the right thing.

4. You’ve worked across both academia and frontline practice. Why is translating research into practical, usable action still such a challenge in emergency management?

 
Barbara Ryan

I think there are a couple of reasons. One in academia and one in agencies. As you said, we’ve just gone onto the hamster wheel and we don’t get a downtime season anymore. So the people in agencies who might use research, and I’m not just talking about community engagement or communication research here, it could be fire behaviour or whatever, they don’t have time to wade through published version, which is an incomprehensible academic article, to try and apply the findings to what they’re doing. I think that’s one thing. And of course at the other end, academics who aren’t sort of they’re scientists. So they’re not communicators and they just need a bit more help communicating. And I think universities and it even goes back further, it goes to government level, the pressure on universities to generate research in certain avenues like published articles and that and so on, instead of connecting with practice, makes it really hard for that knowledge to be pushed out. And I love emergency management so much because I’m unlike any other communication or engagement sphere, I’m dealing directly with the people who use my research. And I’m actually to stand up in front of the people who use my research and talk about my research and tell them what are the three key things they need to know and what are the three key things they need to do from that. But universities aren’t equipping scientists to make that translation and I think that’s because of the pressures on them to be publishing in all of these hidden away avenues of communication of research.

5. Disasters are becoming more frequent and more complex. Do you think Australia is genuinely shifting toward resilience and preparedness or are we still mostly reactive?

 
Barbara Ryan

I think if s things had stayed normal, and in normal I’m thinking when I started my PhD, it took me a long time. I lived in Queensland and we had drought and that was it. You know, for ten years there was drought, there was no cyclone, there was no bushfire, that was it. And then twenty eleven happened and suddenly we have been smashed ever since. And I think if things had stayed so we had the odd cyclone every four years that, you know, was going to really threaten communities, we would be doing the most fantastic job, but we just can’t keep up.

But would we be at that stage if we hadn’t had the pressure put on us to improve? I have to keep reminding myself that, I think that because I’m within the system as well as outside the system looking in, I might be a bit captured by the agency I work in. But I have to keep reminding myself, no, we are doing a really good job. We’ve got Really good systems. We’ve got amazing communication between agencies with the different conferences that people go to. And the senior managers take sort of interagency cooperation really seriously. there are a few little areas that need improvement, and I think probably community engagement is one of those. But on the whole, I think we’re doing an amazing job, but we just can’t keep up with what’s happening. We don’t have enough people and resources and for a country of twenty seven million, we have a lot to pay for and every disaster costs us billions now. How do we keep up with that?

6. You’ve spoken about community engagement and social change approaches to disaster preparedness. What does meaningful community engagement actually look like?

 
Barbara Ryan

To me, it’s really a process of motivating and connecting people. And we all know that social connections are pretty critical to a community going through an event and then coming out the other side much better than other communities. I’ve actually worked on this with colleagues from QT and University of Technology Sydney, and we developed a model of community engagement for emergency management. So the five challenges in that model, and you know, it’s a fairly linear process, but people slip back and forth in that process. The five challenges are the first one is to understand your community and that there are communities within that community. The second one is to help them understand their risk. And I think at a local level, like I have a tiny community. We don’t have a pub. We have a hall. There’s no school. So how do we connect? So I look at who I’ve got in my community. We have 25 artists in a community of 250 houses. So, you know, that’s obviously a group that I’m going to talk to. and the second challenge is getting those groups to understand their risk especially in a community like ours, which is 30 minutes from a really big centre, a lot of commuters, people have moved in from interstate. There’s a lot of work there to help them understand their risk. And then once you’ve done that, you go to the third challenge, which is really harnessing their interest and keeping them interested and motivating them to keep getting better at preparing and understanding how they or their own role in their community and how important they are to their neighbours.

So on. And the challenge is really supporting the leaders that come out of that process. They’re the ones who are going to be really further developing any connections that come out of this process. And then the fifth challenge is facing the event itself and supporting communities through that. And you sort of then end up back at probably stage two, three or four in recovery, it just depends on people’s own situations and how involved they are and where they’re at in terms of their social circles.

So to me all of those challenge points have different methods of community engagement. So I would never go into a community who is just learning about their risk and do a risk mapping workshop because I know that a risk mapping workshop really needs a community that’s already got a few connections developed to get people there. even though, you know, it would be really great for the ignorant people to come along to that workshop, but getting them there is really hard. And you know, public information meeting, that’s people who go to one every year, they’re probably up in the supporting leaders phase of emergency management community engagement. And so, they don’t really need that information. They want more complicated stuff.

It frustrates the hell out of me that, you know, there’s a few different resilience models and one of them has 84 different pieces that contribute to overall resilience. The National Resilience Strategy from 2011 has three of those. And yet emergency management has responsibility for the entire resilience picture.

How does that work? Most of the resilience is in social connections, health, facilities, all the social capital stuff you’ve done with Daniel. And yet it’s emergency management that has to pick up the can and do all the heavy lifting. And that annoys me so much. I think considering that picture, we’re doing a pretty good job.

The other thing I think is that Community engagement is not really understood well at operational level in agencies. The recovery people are all over it, but the preparation and response side of things, people still think it’s just doing public information sessions And don’t understand that there can be a whole planning piece about this, and we can get the local chamber of commerce onto the LDMG, and we can have planning sessions and then suddenly the load is spread incredibly because people from within the community are involved in the process. And I try to spread the word. And there are evangelists in every organisation who really get it. But we’ve still got a lot of work to do on helping the operational people who’ve come up fighting fires and driving floodboats and that type of thing, really understanding how community engagement could help make their job easier.