Combining Crisis Management and Evidence-Based Management: The Queensland Floods as a Teachable Moment

Natural disasters, such as floods, provide teachable moments for students to learn about crisis management. The authors argue that evidence-based management offers a pedagogical tool for leveraging these teachable moments to deepen student learning about the management challenges of crisis situations. An emerging area in management education, evidence-based management involves using best available scientific evidence as the basis for management decision making and practice. Using data from 782 student assignments in an undergraduate introductory management course, the authors show how combining crisis management and evidence-based management in an assignment task in the aftermath of the 2010-2011 Queensland floods in Australia deepened student learning of general and crisis management concepts and increased students’ engagement in learning an evidence-based management approach.