Treesearch

Between 2000 and 2010 the US Forest Service and the Department of the Interior experienced 82 wildland fire fatalities. Our most recent organizational focus has been to eliminate fatalities. The chief of the USFS, in a letter to all employees, asked us to "suspend disbelief" with regard to the concept of a "zero fatality organization". This plea came while some field personnel argued that there was no way to eliminate fatalities without eliminating risk.

While several studies have examined the relevance of the HRO paradigm for fire management, no known empirical studies exist. In late 2007, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Michigan, we embarked on an exploration of the nature and extent of HRO practices in the US fire community. One of the primary questions was: How do HRO practices vary across the federal fire community? We sought to understand how commonly the theorized principles of HRO were practiced, and the degree to which these were associated with other aspects of organizational culture and crew social...

This dissertation project used a two-study mixed methods approach, examining the communicative accomplishment of safety from two perspectives: high reliability organizing (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld 1999), and safety climate (Zohar 1980). In Study One, 27 firefighters from two functionally similar wildland firefighting crews were interviewed about their crew-level interactions for implementing safety rules and tasks. Findings revealed that the two crews differed in their communicative interactions related to three specific routines: planning, use of safety rules, and authority. The crews...

In 2011, we held five 2-day workshops at various locations around the US as part of a Joint Fire Science Program project to understand 'learning from escaped prescribed fire reviews'. Each workshop drew an interagency audience with representation from all facets of fire management, from ground personnel to local line officers, regional, and national positions. Over the course of these 10 days of discussion, we developed a rich dataset and conceptual models to describe the existing and potential learning cycle in wildland fire.

Since emerging in the late 1980s, the paradigm of High Reliability Organizing (HRO) has sought to describe how and why certain organizations consistently function safely under hazardous conditions. Researchers have explored a variety of industrial situations, from the early observations of nuclear aircraft carrier operations to nursing units and even high-tech IPOs. The bulk of this research has been descriptive rather than comparative or predictive. Still, or perhaps because of this, there has been a robust and enriching academic discussion through which the paradigm has been refined and...

For some time now, the wildland fire community has been interested in 'organizational learning' as a way to improve safety and overall performance. For instance, in the US, federal agencies have established the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center, sponsored several national conferences, and are currently considering how incident reviews might be used to further organizational learning. To assist in this effort, we embarked on a Joint Fire Science Program-sponsored research project to understand what organizational learning - even simply 'learning' - looks like currently, and to explore...

Interviews were conducted with public information and line officers about wildland fire communications with the public. The goal of these interviews was to determine the best practices and most useful content and format for an annotated bibliography about external wildland fire communications, i.e., does the current literature reviewed address the issues of greatest interest ground of stakeholders and expand the "solution space" for community-based fire mitigation efforts.

When unexpected outcomes occur in wildland fire, reports from incident reviews carry a symbolic value beyond the factual information they contain. Popular perception of incident reviews is that the organization has identified the root cause with an eye toward system change, and that the final report chronicles "the" final, definitive, and authoritative version of events. However, participant comments from a series of dialogue sessions on Learning from Escaped Prescribed Reviews reveal that authors, subjects, and readers of reports engage in a much more complex process of audience analysis...

Fifty years of scientific literature on human behavior, communication and organizations offers numerous insights into the communication and use of science in the context of public land management. Using diverse but complementary social science theories and methods, I studied individual and organizational influences on the use of science by federal fire managers and decision-makers. Results supported the Technology Acceptance Model by showing individual beliefs about research usefulness to be better predictors of use than beliefs about ease of use. Overall, individual beliefs and attitudes...

Studies of science communication and use in the fire management community suggest manager's access research via informal information networks and that these networks vary by both agency and position. We used a phone survey followed by traditional statistical analyses to understand the informal social networks of fire professionals in two western regions of the United States (Northern Rockies and Southwest). In these regions, we sampled federal and tribal decision-makers, fire management officers, fire ecologists and fuels specialists to determine 1) who they go to for scientific information...