Improvisation and resourcefulness are core capacities in emergent disaster response because disasters create novel problems that cannot be fully handled by routine plans alone [@kendrawachtendorf2006; @quarantelli1995]. The school does not treat improvisation as a minor exception to planning. It treats it as one of the ways communities and organizations remain capable of acting when the situation outpaces their scripts.
Improvisation as capacity
James Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf argue that improvisation occupies a conflicted place in emergency management because it can look like a failure to plan, even though disaster response constantly depends on it [@kendrawachtendorf2006]. Their argument aligns closely with the problem-solving model: planning and improvisation are not opposites, but distinct capacities oriented toward different aspects of action.
Resourcefulness and emergence
Kathleen Tierney treats resourcefulness as an organizational and social phenomenon rooted in the capacity to manage emergence, convergence, and collective action [@tierney2003]. This matters because resourcefulness is not just individual cleverness. It is a social capacity built from communication, redundancy, self-organization, and the ability to recombine available resources under pressure [@tierney2003].
Creativity under changing conditions
Kendra and Wachtendorf’s World Trade Center paper extends this point by showing that creativity can sustain emergent methods and organizational networks during rapidly changing response conditions [@kendrawachtendorf2002]. That finding is useful for this school because it clarifies why hubs, clinics, volunteer houses, and improvised fleets or transport systems recur across otherwise different disasters.
Significance
Improvisation and resourcefulness matter because they connect method to practice. They explain how people turn uncertainty into action and how new organizational forms arise before anyone can formalize them. Without those capacities, emergent disaster response would remain a good ideal with weak operational force.
Sources
- University of Delaware: Kendra and Wachtendorf, Improvisation, Creativity, and the Art of Emergency Management
- University of Delaware: Tierney, Conceptualizing and Measuring Organizational and Community Resilience
- University of Delaware: Quarantelli, Disasters Are Different
- University of Delaware: Kendra and Wachtendorf, Creativity in Emergency Response After The World Trade Center Attack