Balancing voices in the integrated warning team: a blue sky day approach to cross-sector severe weather preparedness

For public safety professionals, fostering cross-sector collaboration means finding ways for people with different domains of expertise to engage in meaningful interaction. Cross-sector collaboration requires people to come together as a collective, while simultaneously elevating local knowledge and leveraging technical knowledge. This study examines a National Weather Service integrated warning team (IWT) workshop focused on tornado readiness and other weather risks in rural Appalachia. The workshop brought together participants with two types of expertise, one focused on warning and prediction (i.e. meteorologists) and one focused on disaster response (i.e. public safety professionals, community leaders, and nonprofit leaders), in order to build relationships between organizations before severe weather hits. Ethnographic methods were leveraged for the assessment of this workshop, and multiple authors’ perspectives were used for crystallization of findings. Our findings highlighted communication practices that constituted a balancing act between collective knowing, or the communicative construction of expertise, and collective not-knowing, or shared vulnerability to weather-related risks. Participants developed a sense of sharedness in purpose and goal, while also making space for individual expertise. These findings are discussed as extensions of high-resilience organizing, as well as practical recommendations for future IWT initiatives.