Simulated Trust: Creating Situational Awareness in a Multi-actor Security Exercise

Abstract

“A safe and secure city is made together!” This is a commonly heard co-creation tag line in numerous events where security specialists and stakeholders convene. But how is this togetherness specifically enacted in command center or situation rooms of stadiums and other venues filled with soccer fans or festival goers? This chapter discusses joint security-generation and the construction of shared situational awareness that supports it. It is built on the complex adaptive systems theory and draws its inspiration particularly from Bart Nooteboom’s ideas of trust, communication, and cooperation. Moreover, positioned at the crossroads of governance and sociotechnical systems studies, it is philosophically rooted on pragmatism. This also renders the paper critical by its approach. In the heat of an emergency situation—and even more so, pressurized in a situation room—we need to ensure that the methods and tools that we use for creating this commonality support rather than harm the restoration and maintenance of public safety and security in any given context. The epithets “joint,” “shared,” or “commonality” imply that it is necessary for the stakeholders to be able to trust each other. In a row of two exercises, we studied the use of a compact and highly mobile tool for situational awareness in simulated urban event security situations. Survey data collected from the exercise participants highlight the elements that security stakeholders appreciate in the available tools and how the individual and collective understanding of what is at stake becomes constructed. Institutional ethnography/longitudinal participatory observation during the entire simulation cycle from early co-creation sessions with the participating agencies to the actual simulation sessions and their debriefing added depth to the interpretation of both qualitative and quantitative data. The results shed light on the situational factors that contribute to if not potentially determine the successes and failures of joint multi-actor security exercises.