Crous, C.J., (2012).Tasking & Coordination: Effective Decision Making or Blind men Feeling an Elephant. Journal of the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers (AIPIO) Volume, 20 Number 1, pp 3-16. TASKING & COORDINATION: EFFECTIVE DECISION MAKING OR BLIND MEN FEELING AN ELEPHANT? Introduction Many factors influence police decision-making. One of the most important of those is that police face an insatiable demand for their services 1 . The combination of high demand and the increasing complexity of the criminal environment command a closer look at the way that decisions are made in the contemporary police agency. A well managed and highly directed police agency should be able to reduce crime and disorder. However this is challenging as police organisations have been described as slow moving ineffective bureaucracies with limited focus and lack of direction 2 . The Indian story of blind men trying to accurately identify an elephant provides an excellent analogy in explaining the difficulties facing police decision making in highly complex, uncertain environments. This legend begins with six blind men being asked by their king to determine what an elephant looks like by touching different parts of the elephant‟s body. The man who felt a leg described the elephant as a pillar. Another described the tail of the elephant as a rope. The trunk of the elephant is described by another as a tree branch. The man who felt the ear of the elephant described it as a hand fan, while the belly of the elephant is described by another as a wall. Finally, the man feeling the tusk of the elephant describes it as a solid pipe. The king tells the six blind men that each of them is providing a correct description, depending on their individual focus, but that the whole is more than its parts. Decision making in policing can be compared with the blind men feeling the elephant- each trying to make sense of what they have in front of them. Each part of the environment can (and often is) described differently, depending on one‟s perspective: traffic, neighbourhood policing, criminal investigations, patrol, or any of a myriad other police roles. Perception on criminality might also be influenced by demographic trends, social trends and economic factors. The major challenge for the contemporary police manager is therefore not merely to feel the tusk, or the ear, but rather to understand the full breadth of the spectrum of operational outputs criminal environment, and not get bogged down in a singular mindset, for example, by merely focusing on response time or the number of recorded or resolved crimes in a specific period. Only with a broad perspective can the right decisions be taken to keep communities safe.