An overview of assessment approaches for C2 agility in the crisis and emergency response domain

This report focuses on assessment approaches for C2 of organisations or collectives of organisations in crisis and emergency response operations in terms of their abilities to cope with disturbances, unexpected situations and other types of changes in circumstances. The study was performed by utilizing the concept of C2 agility that has been devised in the military domain. A challenge in this context is to transform such a concept (C2 agility) from one domain (military operations) to another (crisis and emergency response) and as well as to define particular capabilities, factors, and properties for the domain of crisis and emergency response operations, in order to identify measurable training and evaluation objectives. Our overview identified a number of frameworks from the military domain that capture aspects of C2 agility, but none of them were explicitly developed for assessments of C2 agility, and none of them have been used in the crisis or emergency response domain. The overview also presents some methods, like social network analysis and communication analysis that can be utilized to analyse aspects of C2 agility in the crisis and emergency response domain. Further, we describe pros and cons with a number of data collection methods that can be used for gathering data regarding C2 agility in the crisis and emergency response domain. As no existing frameworks or methods can be applied directly for assessing C2 agility in the crisis and emergency response domain, we suggest that a new instrument is developed to support analysis of C2 agility in crisis and emergency response organisations. Such an instrument should take a functional view of C2, be able to capture the dynamics of C2 as well as the crisis or emergency events, and be applicable to development of training or exercise scenarios.