Developments in open innovation platforms, mobile phones and portable computers have enhanced communication, collaboration and location of people, places and resources, while facilitating societal transformation and self-organising capability on an unprecedented scale. Communities have been able to “self organise” like never before and have become major participants in, and facilitators of disaster recovery operations in the Haiti Earthquake (2010), Christchurch Earthquake (2010/11), Japanese Tsunami (2011) and the Queensland, NSW and Victorian Floods of (2011/12). Case studies of these incidents provide numerous examples where self-organizing groups of citizens supported and supplemented government efforts. While genuinely attempting to render assistance in the recovery process, these self-organising groups and the systems they have created, have sometimes been misguided, inappropriate and dangerous due to their lack of integration with coordinated government, NGO and community views of recovery activities and systems.

We examine how to best harness the principles of self-organising systems to augment traditional “command and control” pictures of disaster recovery in order to more effectively develop an integrated approach to: situational awareness, resource utilization and recovery outcome optimization. This is a very important, costly and complex problem for government and one that is currently significantly under-researched. In order for this problem to be effectively tackled in the current context of social transformation, the best of command and control approaches and structures must be considered and blended with the potential that is arising from emerging self-organising systems.

This study outlines the results of a 1-day Resilient Disaster Systems Symposium that was held with an experienced academic, agency and NGO audience where key issues in disaster recovery and suggested areas of focus were generated. These key issues were then examined utilising the theory of evolving organisations and systems archetypes, so as to better understand guiding principles for developing effective and resilient systems solutions.