IGNITE: Attention!

 

Attention is the most essential leadership skill. Great leaders focus it inwardly, outwardly, and on the world. ♦ Daniel Goleman ♦

Photo: Marc Sanchez/BLM
www.fireleadership.gov

Increasing What is Known

Fire leaders seek and accept feedback to maintain accurate situation awareness about ourselves. We are willing to examine and probe blind spots, seeking feedback from others. Because blind spots can lead to problems, leaders accept and act on feedback as part of the responsibility to mitigate error. 

Situation Awareness Cycle

Situation Awareness is depicted as a cycle because the situation and people’s perceptions are constantly changing. This internal cycle continues as long as people are awake. 

Change is Coming

("Swiss Cheese" by thenoodleator is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

We live in a period of such uncertainty. Worldwide pandemic. Wildfires raging across all western states. Double hurricanes forming. Meteoroid headed to earth. Political and social unrest. Worldwide hunger and water shortages.

IGNITE: Know Before You Go

“The jungle is never dangerous if you know the trails.” - Unknown

[Photo: Justin Vernon]

#fireleadership #situationawareness

IGNITE: Seeing What Others Don't See

“Most people are good at evaluating the obvious. The exceptional leaders will look beneath the surface and see what others don't see.” ♦ The Daily Coach ♦

[Photo credit: Union IHC]

#fireleadership

2019 WOR Day 3: Change Blindness

This Week of Remembrance is dedicated to all those who have fallen in the line of duty and is intended to serve as an opportunity to renew our commitment to the health, wellness, and safety of wildland firefighters.

Remember yesterday’s discussion of TJ’s rappel gear? When you looked at the harnesses side by side did you think to yourself “how could they miss that?” Well you wouldn’t be alone if you did but let’s put you in the hot seat and see how you do.

IGNITE - What do you see?

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. - Henry David Thoreau

[Photo credit: La Grande IHC]

IGNITE: Stay Calm

Relax. Look around. Make a call. - Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership

[Photo: Kyle Miller/Wyoming IHC]

Are Your Senses Tricking You?

Making Sound and Timely Decisions

To make sound and timely decisions, fire leaders assess the situation, seek out relevant information, weigh options, make judgments, and initiate action as required to create a positive outcome within inevitable time constraints.

You Are a Work in Progress

Technology has a huge affect on the way we learn, earn, live, and play. Few can deny that technology is a vital part of our lives. Some might even go as far as to say that technology has destroyed our lives. These thoughts are said by every generation. Regardless of your opinion, technological advancements happen and will continue to do so. The real questions are whether or not you are aware of the changes that affect your way of learning, earning, living, and playing and how you deal with those changes.

Day 4: Situational Awareness and Mindfulness

Day 4: Situational Awareness and Mindfulness 

Week of Remembrance June 30-July 6 

Applying Situational Awareness (SA) – an on-going process of perceiving what is going on around you, comprehending the meaning of what we are noticing, and projecting and predicting this comprehension forward in time – can often be challenging. Research has indicated that three-fourths of SA errors can be traced to something important happening in our environment, and we missed it (Jones & Endsley, 1996). In a high risk world like wildland fire, missing important cues or events can lead to catastrophic outcomes. The practice of mindfulness can help.

IGNITE: Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is an inward application of situation awareness. Fire leaders have an inner drive to analyze and know ourselves. – Leading in the Wildland Fire Service, page 59

How Good is Your SA?

Making Sound and Timely Decisions 

To make sound and timely decisions, fire leaders assess the situation, seek out relevant information, weigh options, make judgments, and initiate action as required to create a positive outcome within inevitable time constraints. 

The cornerstone of good decision making is good situation awareness. Leaders can increase their decision space by attaining and maintaining good situation awareness. Decision space is simply the amount of time that a decision maker has for considering options before reaching a required decision point. 

Leaders can optimize their decision space by using time efficiently. Seeking advance information in new situations or utilizing standard operating procedures for routine tasks are examples of techniques that make good use of available time. 

In the wildland fire environment, decisions have serious consequences and often can have life-or-death implications for others. With so much on the line, we have a responsibility to understand the decision-making process—the components, the flow, the effect of time— and to develop the skills and confidence that enables us to make the best decision possible with the information and time available. 

(Leading in the Wildland Fire Service, pp. 30-31)

Wildland Fire Leadership Challenge: Digging a Little Deeper

• Observation: As you watch the video below. Stop the video before the scene changes are revealed. Replay the video to the same point notifying your audience to watch for set changes. Stop before the reveal and have your audience identify things that changed. How many of the items did the participants identify? Show the scene change reveal and compare to the audience's answers.

• Discuss how this phenomenon can affect your safety on the fireline and ways of mitigating gaps in situation awareness.

Close Calls and Trusting Your Intuition with Dan Pickard

Close Call, Trusting Intuition from The Smokey Generation on Vimeo.

Have you lost your situation awareness and experienced mission creep? Is your worst-case scenario playing out in front of you? Dan Pickard, Entiat Interagency Hotshot Crew, shares personal stories from the fireline. There is a fine line between success and failure in our business. How can you increase your margin, accept risk, and fulfill the mission? Most importantly, should you even be fighting the fire?

Operational Tempo
(Leading in the Wildland Fire Service, p. 31)

Operational tempo is the speed and intensity of our actions relative to the speed and intensity of unfolding events in the operational environment. Within this context, fire leaders plan, prepare, and execute operations proactively, rather than continuously being forced to react to the environment.

Successfully maintaining operational tempo is not solely about speeding up to match or exceed the pace of the environment. It is also about knowing when operations should slow down and why.
Fire leaders balance activities such as planning, preparation, and action. Too much time spent planning increases the potential for missing opportunities. Too little time spent planning increases the potential for error. A judicious assessment encompasses the capabilities and endurance of resources.

When employing people, leaders weigh expected gain against potential risks. Using too few resources keeps teams from building the momentum needed to gain the advantage. Using too many resources can lead to confusion. Tasking resources beyond their capabilities leaves the team exhausted and unable to respond to an unexpected change in the environment.

We are most vulnerable to accidents and errors when the operational tempo is changing, especially when it changes quickly. Maintaining good situation awareness in spite of change in operational tempo represents a considerable challenge.


The key to managing operational tempo successfully is monitoring the changing environment and capabilities of the team, and then applying good judgment to determine whether to push forward or pull back while making necessary planning and resource adjustments.

An Introduction to the Concept of Margin 

Unlocking the Hidden World

Perception plays a vital role in a fire leader's decision-making process. How well perception matches reality is called Situation Awareness. How much do we really see? How closely do we dissect a situation before making a decision? Are we open to what is or could be? How much do we NOT know or see about the world around us?

Louie Schwarzberg takes TED Talk viewers to where technology, art, and science intersect in order to see a hidden world. What we don't see can have a profound impact upon what could be.



Leadership is about innovation. As a fire leader, being able to see beyond what is apparent and having the courage to go beyond comfort zones opens our organizations to possibilities we never thought possible.

Wildland Fire Leadership Challenge

Discuss the following questions with your team:

• What are you doing within your organization to innovate? 
• How do you ensure that perceptions meet reality?
• Do you challenge the status quo?
• What mechanism do you have to expose the hidden elements within your decision-making process?

How is Your SA?

Take "5 at 2"

What is Take 5 @ 2? Where did it come from? What does it mean?

Recently, the folks that build the Wildland Fire Safety Annual Refresher (WFSTAR) modules (Annual Fire Refresher) took a deeper look into statistics of historical burnover fires. Some surprising trends came out of this analysis. One trend was the timeframe of fire blowups and burnovers. Of twenty (20) fatal burnover fires, fifteen (15) of them occured within the timeframe of 1400-1630. This should not surprise experienced firefighters much, as this timeframe is during the hottest, driest part of the day...when fires can blow up quicker and faster. Although not a surprise, 1400 could be an appropriate time to take a tactical pause, remember that this is the beginning of the most dangerous part of the day for fighting fires, and reflect upon those that have lost their lives due to burnovers.

Be sure to check out the WFSTAR video below. The Instructor Guide and Student Workbook as well as other informative lessons are available on the WFSTAR website.

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The Last Chase

(Photo credit: DCL via Discovery Channel)

The Last Chase

by Rick Connell

In the November 2013 issue of National Geographic, Robert Draper shares an article about Tim Samaras a “storm chaser” who specializes in gathering data and photos of tornadoes, and was a member of the Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers show.

The article describes Samaras as being “known for evangelizing about safety and for bringing an abundance of caution to his vocation.” (p. 37)  It continues to illustrate that he wouldn’t deploy sensors in front of tornadoes that were rain wrapped or if an escape route could be compromised, and had a history of stopping the chase for safety. Yet, with years of experience, knowledge and a dedication to safety on May 31st of this year he choices cost him, his son and a third chaser their lives.

The article recreates the last 20 minutes of the “known” facts including the recognition by Samaras that they were in a bad place. There was no way for Tim to know/forecast the tornado growing from ½ mile to 2.6 miles wide in a very short time. The parallels to fire incidents such as 1937 Blackwater, 1994 South Canyon, 2012 White Draw, and 2013 Yarnell is obvious.

As ICs and managers what is our role in maintaining situational awareness about weather. The majority of incidents (99%, dare I say) do not have an Incident Meteorologist focused on weather impacts to fire behavior. When the National Weather Service (NWS) issues a weather warning what is their criteria? How far or close is the threat before its impacts are expected? Do we have time to respond?

After the Yarnell fire, it became clear to me that we lack specifically developed actions related to weather impacts to our events. Is it enough to “keep informed on fire weather and conditions” and then “base all actions of current and expected fire behavior.” How well are we accomplishing these tenants of fire?

As an Operations Section Chief on the Western Montana Incident Management Team, I initiated a weather response plan for the incident with sections for operations, incident command post (ICP) and aviation. The plan lays out a warning response, say thunderstorms within 25 miles of the incident, that expects line resources to re-evaluate escape routes and safety zones, camp to “batten down the hatches,” and aviation to evaluate missions and movement of aircraft. 

At the implementation stage, say thunderstorm within 10 miles, line resources move to safety zones, aircraft return to base, etc. We implemented this plan on the Rough Creek fire where we added an “all clear” response. We also came to realize on this incident, where the majority of resources were at a spike camp where morning briefing was held, that the majority of folks in camp were not getting messages. It has been an assumption that sections/units provide a briefing. So we’ve asked those leaders to review the pertinent portions of the incident action plan (IAP) during morning meetings with their sections to increase the awareness of issues related to safety, weather or other topics that pertain to their safety. We’ve shared this plan with IMETs and local NWS forecasters for input.

We will never know why Granite Mountain moved to the ranch or Tim Samaras continued into the path of the tornado but maybe we can use these events to instill an enhanced respect that weather is the game changer that can happen quickly and decisively.

So the question for us as leaders is "what is your severe weather plan?"

Wildland Fire Leadership Challenge

Read Draper's article "The Last Chance" and watch Tim Samara's story for yourself on the National Geographic website.

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Rick Connell is the Forest Fire, Fuels, Aviation & Air Program Manager for the Flathead National Forest. The expressions within this blog are those of the author.

Turning Information into Knowledge

(Photo credit: Langwitches.org)

"To make sound and timely decisions, fire leaders assess the situation, seek out relevant information, weigh options, make judgments, and initiate action as required to create a positive outcome within inevitable time constraints." (Leading in the Wildland Fire Service, p. 30)

It seems humans have always had more information than they could process. The type of information and volume may have changed, but the reality is we have always had to analyze information to make sound and timely decisions. The things that have changed are the technology and methods we use to obtain and filter information. Our inability to filter information may lead to a loss of situation awareness and an inaccurate view of the current reality.


Information and Situation Awareness

In Leading in the Wildland Fire Service, we define Situation Awareness (SA) as "how well perception matches reality. Everyone starts with an initial perception of any given situation and then continuously updates it with new information. People gather information through both observation, which includes input from the senses, and communication, which includes face-to-face conversation, written comunication, and radio or telephone exchanges.

Simply paying attention is an important part of maintaining good situation awareness, but even more important is determining what to pay attention to. All perceptions are subject to filtering and focusing: people constantly filter information and shift focus. People also produce a lot of internal inputs such as thoughts about what to do next, stress, memories of similar experiences, fear. Those with more experience in an environment often can more easily filter out distractions and unimportant details and focus on the most salient information. [pp. 31-32]


Overcoming Information Overload through Collective Curation 

Fire leaders want as much information as they can get in order to make a sound and timely decision. The inability to filter information decrease the amount of time fire leaders have to make those decisions. Effective fire leaders learn to filter information and surround themselves with individuals tasked with filtering information. Individuals who make decisions in a "bubble" or "vacuum," may subject themselves, their people, and the communities they serve to unnecessary risk and serious consequences.

Check out this short video on collective curation...




Wildland Fire Leadership Challenge

We challenge fire leaders to

• Be open to the views and perspectives of others. 
• Develop collective curation teams to filter what can seem like information overload. 
• Assess your filtering systems to ensure that a broken filter does not exist. 
• Turn information into knowledge.

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Digging a Little Deeper

Carl Shirky gives us his perspective of the information overload/filter failure debate and a glimpse into a possible paradigm shift regarding education and information.