Managing natural catastrophies - Viable Systems to prevent human tragedy - the Hawai'ian example

This book will assess the O'ahu disaster management system's current ability to manage a high-impact low-probability (HILP) event, a Category 4 or 5 hurricane striking the Hawai'ian island of O'ahu. It will investigate through one of the core diagnostic tool of management cybernetics, the Viable System Model (VSM), deficiencies of the existing disaster management system used across the United States and offers suggestions to improve its effectiveness. Further, this book represents a general assessment of the application of management cybernetics to disaster management systems worldwide.

Dr. Anja Reissberg was born in Munich and studied Economic Geography at the Ludwig-Maximilians University. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA where she deepened her focus on the interface of natural disasters, the economy and society, specifically human-induced social, economic, environmental and cultural vulnerabilities researching in particular the functioning of the Hawai'ian hurricane hazard management system. For coping with the extreme complexity, interconnectivity and dynamics of such challenges for the first time she applied the most innovative and powerful cybernetic tool of the (so called) Viable System Model which led her to entirely new and highly relevant insights into the inner workings and deep structures of the organizations involved and, most importantly, reasons for inefficiencies and mismanagement. Immersing herself in the islands for seven years, she worked with local, state, federal, non-governmental and privat-sector organizations, departments and agencies to overcome interdisciplinary and bureaucratic boundaries thereby coming to highly relevant recommendations for the functioning of the wholistic total emergency system which would save countless lives in the case of any major disaster. Her dissertation on these complex systemic challenges in Management Cybernetics brought her to Malik Management in 2010 as a Systems Expert with a focus on the functioning of loosly-coupled dynamic networks of organizations.