Decision inertia in emergencies: Reasons to be cheerful ten years on

Abstract

A decade on from the publication of Decision inertia: Deciding between least worst outcomes in emergency responses to disasters , this commentary reflects on the paper's contribution to understanding decision‐making in high‐stakes environments and its subsequent theoretical, methodological and practical impact. The original paper identified decision inertia as a cognitively active form of indecision, where decision makers in critical incidents get trapped in redundant deliberation rather than committing to a least‐worst course of action. Since its publication, research has advanced understanding of the cognitive, behavioural, affective, social and contextual factors that contribute to decision inertia, while methodological developments have provided increasingly more sophisticated and ecologically valid approaches for studying complex operational settings beyond the practitioner community. However, important questions remain regarding how decision inertia should be measured and how its antecedents and mechanisms can be integrated into a comprehensive multi‐dimensional theoretical model. Moreover, despite advances in the science and recognition in policy, translation into operational practice has been comparatively limited. We argue that greater collaboration and co‐production between researchers and practitioners would ensure that advances in understanding decision inertia lead to meaningful, evidence‐based changes on the ground. Ten years on, there are reasons to be cheerful, but the challenge for the next decade is to translate what we now know into better decision‐making on the ground.