 Although the principles of wildland firefighting has remained relatively constant throughout our fire history, innovations from the ground up continue to change and hopefully improve the way we go about doing our business. The primary firefighting tool was designed by a ground pounder named Ed Pulaski. It's the combination of many small innovations and modifications that lead us to where we are today. To understand why ground up innovations are an important part of any successful organization, we talked to Mark Smith from Mission-Centered Solution. Well I think when you look at how innovation works in an organization, you do have a group of people in any organization that is dedicated to kind of research, development, the new things. But they create theory and they create tools and models around that theory. But it's up to the person flying the plane or the person swinging the tool to apply that innovation and that breeds new innovation. And as long as there's a mechanism for that to percolate back up and continue to go up and down and up and down, then you have continuous improvement. If you cut off the people from the bottom, then you have no reality to guide your research and development. No matter how much experience somebody has in the research and development lab and the qualifications they have, they can't be everywhere. So you're cutting off thousands and thousands of ears and eyes if you stifle that growth from the bottom. And then you'll affect commitment, the buy-in that people have, because if somebody can contribute a tool, they're bought in. They're bought in to the mission. If you cut that off, then all you've got is a bunch of robots out there doing exactly what they're told and no more than what they're told. So if their assignment is dig line from drop point one to drop point two, that's what you're going to get. That's all you're going to get. Which may be effective to incident XYZ, but it's not effective to an agency. It's effective that day on that piece of ground, but it doesn't contribute anything to what's going to happen tomorrow. This last winter, the first innovation summit for wildland firefighting was hosted in Bakersfield, California by Anthony Escobar. Anthony brought together a diverse group of firefighters to simply share ideas on how to improve fire line operations. Ideas were presented, discussed, and advice was given on how they can continue to develop their idea further. In this module, we're going to showcase one innovation that was developed by Brad Mayhew, a crew member on the Los Padres Hot Shots. Brad's idea relates to the human factors on the fire line, which is the study of human behavior and decisional error. After the South Canyon fire in 1994, Ted Putnam, a researcher for the Missoula Technology and Development Center, organized the first human factors workshop, which basically started the examination of the human dimensions involved in wildland firefighting. Putnam noted that wildland firefighters were experiencing collapses in decision-making and organizational structure when conditions on the fire line became life-threatening, and we needed to be much more proficient at decision-making under stressful conditions. Since 1994, a lot of material has been made available to firefighters to improve their decision-making skill under stress. The Wildland Fire Book on Books, found on the leadership website, has dedicated an entire section of suggested reading material just to human factors. Being a student of fire, Brad has been diligently reading this material and has created a tool that helps him organize his knowledge about situational awareness and decision-making. Brad designed a human factors tool for wildland firefighters, and he calls it the two and seven tool. He believes that this tool will give firefighters the skills to notice, identify, and mitigate breakdowns in decision-making and situational awareness. The tool outlines two fundamental decision errors leading to burn-over tragedies and seven key barriers to situational awareness and decision-making. It can also be used to analyze errors systematically and learn from them. Let's listen to Brad explain his tool further. Okay, what got me interested in human factors was what was reading these fatality case studies that we do, and what I saw was that you could see what the fire did, and that made sense. We had tools for figuring that out, and you could see what the tactical errors were. We got tools for figuring that out, and what I started seeing more and more, especially through the new training, this human factors training, is that human factors are a huge part of the decision-making process. In other words, it ain't just that they used the wrong tactics or the wrong fire behavior. There's a reason that that made sense at the time to do that. That's what I was interested in, is what was going on, why did that make sense, and what really scared me was the more and more I looked at it, tried to think about it, and tried to really understand what happened here, the more and more what I saw was it could happen to me. The key thing for me is that these were human factors. That was really when the light went on, was when I'm studying this stuff and thinking about it and trying to understand why they did what they did. What I began to realize is that they're human beings. They're doing what human beings do. I'm a human being. I could be doing the exact same kinds of mistakes. Part of this project has been, well, let's try to pull apart what is going on in your head. The first thing that we started looking at was the tension, how you notice, what you notice. The key point with the tension is that we don't notice much. The key point with the tension is that our wiring is such, our brains are wired to basically filter out almost everything that's going on in the world around us so that we just pick out a few key points of information and then we go from there. With those key points of information, what you do is you pick a slide. The idea there is that we've got these pictures in our brain. When you make a decision, you base it on this picture in your brain of, this is what I think is going on here, I'm going to go direct on this because this is what the fire is like. Basically, we base our actions on fire behavior, our perception of fire behavior. There's a lot of interesting stuff about how you form a perception and what happens once you do form a perception. One of the things that happens once you form a perception is that the perception that you've got tells you what to pay attention to. In other words, once you've got a certain slide and you're locked in and you say, your brain says, okay, I've figured out what's going on here, then your brain says, so here's what I have to pay attention to. If your slide's a little off, if your perception's a little off, your brain's going to be paying attention to the things that may not be key importance. You might be disregarding things that don't matter or shouldn't matter because your perception says this is not important right now, but if your perception's off, that can be a problem. One example that somebody shared with me was a guy was talking about looking at some structures one time and they really wanted to say those structures and they believed that they were defensible. This is doable. We're going to do it. They're like the secondakuCon, they're committed forces and it turned out they couldn't say the structures and what the guy said afterwards, he's looking at it, he said, you know, looking back on it, we couldn't have saved them. It wasn't국 effect lined up. And we were talking about this and it turns out that his interpretation of what happened was what we really, really wanted to save, that was really important and so what I wanted, I wanted to save structures ended up influencing my perception of the situation. I want to save those structures so I end up thinking, I can, I can do this. So what happened was I started looking at this human factor stuff and I, you know, at this point, I'm, you know, I got a motivation, namely the people that are getting hurt are just like me, it could happen to me, so I want to know, I want to understand what's happening. And what I found was, heck, there's a ton of information out there. I went down to the local university library, there's a ton of information there on the fourth floor of the university library, but it isn't written to be used in the back of a crew buggy, or to be used on the fire line. And so what I got interested in trying to do was figure out some way of taking all this information and looking at it and turning it around and trying to figure out, you know, is there some way, how do you get all this into something that I can use, that I can use as a simple system, because simple systems get used, right? If it's simple, it's a systematic thing, it's going to get used, L-C-E-S, it's simple, it's a system, it gets used. How do I get all of this stuff into a simple system that I can use so that I can understand this stuff so that I can communicate about it, so that I can analyze my situation, so that I can analyze other people's mistakes and learn from them, and the two-in-seven tool developed from there. Okay, what the two-in-seven tool is, is it's two errors, the two fundamental errors that I kept seeing again and again, and it seemed to lie at the heart, consistently lie at the heart of tragedy fire line decisions, these two errors. And then the next question is, well, how did you end up making those errors? You know, why, what was it that got in the way of situational awareness and decision-making that led to those errors? And there you have seven barriers, which are the seven dynamics or seven phenomena that I found seem to be influencing our decision-making. And the two decision errors we ended up with were one is underestimating fire behavior and using inadequate safety measures, which means for us on the fire line inadequate L-C-E-S. And the second error is failing to notice changing conditions and adjust tactics accordingly. In both cases, what you're doing is based on a perception, and your perception doesn't match up real well with what's going on in the world. There's basically two ways of getting there. Either you look at what's going on, and you underestimate your hazard. That's one way of getting there. Or the other way of getting there is you look at what's going on, you get a picture of it, and then things change, and your mental, your perception stays the same. Example from a fire line is this, for error number one, underestimating fire behavior. One thing that I saw more than I thought I would is that people, people, tragedies would happen as people were on what they thought was an escape route on their way to what they thought was a safety zone. And I'm trying to figure out what's going on here. Well, what's happening here is you can have your safety measures in place, right? You can have something that's supposed to be LCES in place. But if you're underestimating a fire behavior, if you're LCES, if you're safety measures, don't match the fire behavior, it's not going to do you much good. And so to me, this is a key error then. Error number two, this is another way that we can get into trouble when our perceptions don't match reality. And what can happen is you start doing something. You've got the perception. You've got a picture of what's going on, and conditions change. And for one reason or another, these changing conditions don't register. You don't notice them, or you don't recognize them as changing conditions. And you keep doing what you're doing. The situation's a different animal. So what you end up doing is you're not noticing changing conditions and adjusting your tactics accordingly. That's not happening. And that was another common theme in the fatality reports. So having looked at these two errors, then the next question is, well, how did you end up doing that? Why did that happen? And here's where the seven barriers come in. These are the seven barriers to good situational awareness and sound decision-making. These are the seven things that get in the way, basically. Or they can get in the way. And I should mention, they're all very, very human. I mean, these are things that we, they should be familiar to all of us. We're doing all of them all the time. The trick isn't that they're bad. The trick is just, look, they can get in the way sometimes. So the first barrier is an experience. And the key point here is that our perceptions are based on what we've seen before. And they're also based sort of on the mindset that we're in kind of right now. And that has a lot to do with experience. So when you're like me, when you're still pretty new to the game, you don't have a ton of experience. You don't have a whole lot of slides to draw from, to base your decisions on. So that's an experience. It's the first barrier to notice it. You can't notice the right things if you don't know what the right things are to look for. The second barrier is getting too comfortable or complacency. The key point here is that when you start, the key point here is that you can be comfortable. That's cool. But when you're too comfortable for the situation, that's where you can get yourself in a trouble. It's something we all know what this is like. But the idea is, as you get comfortable, you just don't pay attention as closely. You tend to get more into habit mode. Tend to get more comfortable taking risks because it's worked out before and probably worked out this time. Now, the third barrier is distraction from primary duty. The key point here is that human beings, our brain, has a limit to how much it can do at one time. And Ted Putnam's written about this. Basically, the bottom line is you can pretty much focus real well on about one thing at a time. But the trick is you can switch focus real quick. So it feels like you're looking at all kinds of stuff going on. But it's pretty much one thing at a time. You can juggle real quick about five things at a time. So your brain can juggle. You can keep track of about five things at a time. You can focus on one thing at a time. But you're going back and forth. You can track about five things. OK, where we get into trouble or can get into trouble is if you're trying to juggle too many things, you can't. It feels like you can. We feel like we see everything, like you see what's going on out there, but we don't. We don't perceive quite as effectively as we think we perceive. So the idea is one in five. And the point here is you can only track about one thing at a time. And you can juggle about five things. Any more than that, you're pushing it. You're brain-an-wired for that. So barrier number four is priorities out of order. Now, the key point here is that we've got a lot of things we care about. We have a lot of priorities, a lot of things that motivate us. And safety is one of those things. So when we're on the fire line, we care about safety. But we're human beings. We care about all kinds of other stuff. You want to accomplish the mission. You want to maybe save that house. You want to get done quick. There's all kinds of other motivations and priorities that get involved in the decision-making process. Competitiveness, ego, not letting people down. And the idea is not that there's anything wrong with that stuff. That's part of what it is. That's being human. The idea is that sometimes your priorities get out of order, and this other secondary stuff can get to where we're making decisions maybe based on that a little bit more than safety. The idea is one of those things gets above safety in your decision-making process. So the fifth barrier or potential barrier is social influences. The key point here, this is part of what it is to be human. One old Greek philosopher wrote that human beings are tribal creatures. We are tribal social creatures. And part of what that means is that we're wired to stick together and we're wired to work together. Usually, that works out well for us. I think human beings have been able to survive because we're tribal creatures. But it can also get in the way, because sometimes the perception that the people around you have isn't the right perception. Sometimes their priorities are out of order, and they're influencing your priorities and your perception. One specific kind of way that social influences can go wrong is something called groupthink. And this is identified by a guy named Irving Janis. And one of the things that he found, and this should, this sounds, you know, I'm reading this guy telling me about Pearl Harbor and mistakes in the Vietnam War. And I'm thinking, this is off the fire line. I mean, this is stuff that we know. So what he talks about, one of the things that happens is that the group, he calls it a group mind. The group mind starts thinking a certain way. And the group members, when you're in a groupthink situation, the group members stop thinking for themselves, you know, they're not independently thinking anymore. They're thinking along with the group mind. Another thing he talks about is when that starts happening, you're going to be afraid to speak up. You're going to be afraid to contradict the group's perception. If you do contradict the group's perception, a lot of times someone will tell you, hey, shut up, man. So that's groupthink, just a brief overview of it. That's one of the key ways that social influences can get in the way. OK, so number six is a stress reaction. Now, this, again, look, this is part of how we're wired as human beings. Our human wiring gets a, our human wiring prepares us to be able to rally our forces physically, I mean, our internal forces, our body, our brain, our emotion, to react drastically and immediately to a threat or a challenge, to either run like hell, to fight a bear, to go out and get something, some opportunity out there. I mean, this is old school survival stuff from way back in the early days of humanity. It's the stress reaction. Fight-or-flight mechanism. When something triggers this reaction, what you get, you get a whole bunch of hormones dumped into your bloodstream. Those hormones change how your brain works, they change how the cells in your body works. I mean, you go through something of a physical transformation when you're under the influence of stress. So what happens? How do you get transformed? OK, you get this rush of adrenaline and noradrenaline, cortisol, these other stress hormones. Here's what happens. Your body's getting ready to focus, to focus on the one thing that matters for my survival right now and handle it, right? Your body and brain are getting focused. One thing that happens, you can focus too much. So when you're in this stress reaction, your body, look, if you're running from a lion, it doesn't matter what color that tree is or how many zebras are over there. It doesn't matter. All that matters is this one thing right now. So you focus. But the trick is, when you get focused like that, you can get too focused to the point where you're blocking out other stuff that's important. Another thing that happens is you start making decisions more and more. The emotional part of your brain sort of takes over. Another thing that another consistent trend is that communication breaks down. Number seven is physical impairment. And a key thing here, bottom line, is that our brains are physical objects. It's a part of our body. And when your physical body is impaired in some way, it's going to affect how clearly you can think. You're not going to notice things as effectively. You're not going to process that information as effectively. And the decision-making process just isn't going to be as efficient as when those factors are not present. OK, so what do you do with the tool? Well, I can tell you the three things that I do with the tool. One of the leadership principles is know yourself and seek improvement. So this tool is a way of one of the things I use it for is I look at mistakes that I make. And I take this tool and I kind of hold up my mistake right next to that tool. And I can look at a mistake I made. And with this tool, it helps me understand why I made that mistake, how I ended up there. And I think that's important to me. That statement, know yourself, that seems like one of the most powerful ways to mitigate these factors. By understanding this is how we tend to work. So if I understand it, then I can figure out how to mitigate or at least get started on mitigating it. And I think the big payoff is if we can work on that now while we're young, while the stakes are low, well, we're making decisions. But it's not affecting other people. That's what I'm shooting for. So looking at my own mistakes, that's the first. And the second thing is looking at when we do case studies. As I said, the intent, the original idea behind this tool was it was giving us just some way to look at case studies and organize the human factors discussion, so you could look at what the fire did, what the tactics were. And here's how they got there. Here's why they made that decision. So I've been using it for that. And the third way that I use it is I look around. I look at the people around me, especially on the sand table. The sand table, I think, is one of the most powerful tools that we have, because you can see every single one of these points on the sand table. You can see yourself doing this stuff. You see your buddies doing this stuff. And you can see exactly how these things work. And to me, getting to or at least trying to get to know how we work as human beings makes that makes a lot of sense. It makes as much sense as getting to know how fire works, as much sense as getting to know how our tactics work, is getting to know how firefighters work, trying to understand, trying to get to know yourself and get to know your fellow firefighters.