Fostering Creativity in Order to Develop Mental Model Templates for Planning in National Emergencies

National Emergencies set the need for quick responses and actions from all institutions that are responsible for national security and/or citizens’ health. Course of action development as part of mitigation planning in such situations, is a complex and difficult procedure because of the uncertainty of the future events, the risk associated with decisions for human actions and the time pressure because of the emergency. This means that planning for addressing national emergencies is not a common and simple task. Moreover, because emergencies appear seldom, most of the stakeholders have lack of experience. Thus, they need more time to assimilate the incoming information into their mission planning process and finally to propose the appropriate courses of actions. An antidote to the above difficulties can be the appropriate training in combination with the enhancement of the creativity of the stakeholders. In order to address that, we propose a novel methodology of creating mind map templates, based on creativity techniques, for specific operations that can be applied to national emergencies. Our methodology, called “MEMOS”, was developed according to the relative theoretical frameworks and then tested with a case study, including hypothetical security scenarios in national emergency situations. The proposed templates can be used as inspiration tools or idea tanks in order to guide and speed up the process of course of action development in mitigation planning for similar future security operations.