The Dichotomies of Crisis: Different Yet Valid Realities of the Lindt Café Siege

ABSTRACT Over a decade after the Lindt Café Siege saw a lone gunman take hostage 18 people over a 16‐h period resulting in two deaths, the decisions and actions from police and emergency services continue to be scrutinised. When such volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous events occur, they give rise to dichotomies in the perception of (i) crisis; (ii) complexity; and (iii) systems which only serve as a positive feedback loop. This paper proceeds by exploring each of these dichotomies as they apply to the various levels of response and identifies how they can impact decision‐making in the most high‐consequence, low‐frequency public events. Furthermore, this paper provides a visual representation of the various levels of response, the interplay of the systems and the complexity encountered by those at the tactical, operational, strategic and executive levels responding to the Lindt Café Siege. Mapping the systems involved in responding to the Lindt Café Siege visually illustrated the complexity of the response in the differing levels of decision making as one moved further away from the incident, and most importantly the dichotomies found to have potentially impacted on decision making. Whilst we found that the systems operated as expected, the deficiencies in decision‐making as noted by the Inquest were due to some extent by several contributing factors. These factors were found to arise from systems relativity, institutional dimensional reduction, complexity dichotomy and consequence relativity. The results of this analysis have informed a series of recommendations for command development and response planning within similar contexts, including how a systems thinking approach can enhance decision making in complex and ambiguous situations.