 In June of 2005, a group of firefighters met in Alta, Utah to participate in the Pulaski Conference. Their purpose was to draft a body of principles that would guide our fire suppression activities into what is now known as fire operations doctrine. To help us understand what doctrine is and why we need it is Larry Sutton. Larry is a risk management specialist for the U.S. Forest Service. At this point you should have completed the first part of the doctrine exercise in your student workbook. Peanut, meet me at the truck. Bring your tools. Pass the word. You won't set the truck. Bring your tools. Jim won't set the truck. Bring your tools. This is your opportunity to show what we can do. To show initiative and pay attention to the job to be done. I know you'll do your best. All right, just load the tools on the truck and be on our way. I think fundamentally doctrine is a belief system. For us it's a belief system that's written down. It's not like anything else we already have. It's not policy. It's not procedures. It's its own thing. And that's the best way to think about it as something that is different from what we already have. Lots of other types of organizations have doctrine. There's religious doctrine, military doctrine and so on. So if you're looking around for an example of a doctrine, shock and awe is a great example of a specific kind of military doctrine that has to do with the use of overwhelming force. For us it's a belief system about how you should approach wildland fire management. A doctrine is not as procedurally oriented as most of our best practices like the standard orders, LCES and downhill line construction guidelines and all those sorts of things are much more at the tactical level than doctrine, which is really more of a strategic level foundational thing that describes how we think about our business, how we approach it. You have to go back and look at why did people want to spend the effort to create fire suppression doctrine in the first place and a lot of that goes back to 2003 in the Southern California fire siege that occurred that year. We had people operating in these really hazardous environments working with all kinds of cooperators. It was a serious firefight and it became evident there to a lot of people kind of all at the same time that this big set of rules that we had was kind of tying people's hands and not allowing enough decision making at the point of friction. In other words firefighters need the ability to act independently and take their own initiative and seize that initiative when there's an opportunity and if we have rules that are getting in the way of that that's kind of what doctrine needs to be there for is to address the fact that we don't have enough decision making in the hands of firefighters. That was the intent behind it from the beginning. The traditional agency response to a tragedy is to create more rules and that's how we've ended up with such a big rule book but everybody recognizes that you could never have a rule for every situation and even if you could firefighters would never be able to remember all that stuff. So what we need is to use the best tool we have at our disposal which is the brain of the firefighter in these really complex situations that are so fluid and dynamic that only their judgment and decision making at the scene of action is what's going to make the biggest difference and that's really the intent behind this whole effort towards establishing these foundational principles in doctrine in the first place is to provide that decision space to firefighters because they're the ones that are going to use it the best. We're going to get away because crew and sector bosses don't do enough on their own. We seem to be too dependent on the boys above. Now in our sector Jim, your judgment at that moment is more important than anybody's because you're there. The doctrine is there when the leaders who articulated it aren't there. It's always going to be there to provide some kind of foundation for you to base your actions on and that really is, I think, helps with that unity of effort. Most of us probably a lot of times in our careers have said to ourselves or to others why are we here? Why are we even trying to do what we're trying to do here? I think doctrine kind of helps answer some of those questions or at least it should and it also gives you a framework for asking those questions of others. In a way you could look at doctrine as a way for firefighters to hold management accountable. We often seem to talk about accountability as ways, methods of holding firefighters accountable for things they do or don't do but perhaps doctrine is a way to have accountability for all. Here's a typical layout of a chain of command on a large campaign fire. At the top is the fire boss. Now here's where we fit into this organization. Here you are. Fire moves quickly. It doesn't stand still. So you have to move against it. You see something that needs doing? You do it. Never assume or leave it to the next guy. You'll be on your own a great deal and you are expected to show initiative and thinking. When you first start thinking about these principles, well it really should free us in a lot of ways and it does. But it also with freedom comes responsibility in that what your parents always told you when you're a kid, it's really true in this case because now you have that initiative and judgment that's placed on your shoulders. And so you can't just always defer to the rule book and say, well we did it this way or that way based on this book. Now you have to make decisions and then be able to justify them according to whatever your rationale was at the time. All of the safe firefighting practices that we've been taught over the years are still incredibly important. I mean there's nothing about doctrine that's going to let you off the hook of needing to post a look out in the right situation or maybe more than one. But the point is that you have that discretion. You make those decisions. And so you have to bring your A game every day to the fire line. That's really what it's about. I think maybe in the past we've lulled ourselves into a false sense of security by giving people things like the 10 standard orders and saying, well you know if you just follow these you'll be okay and your people will be alright. Well that may not necessarily be true. You might follow those and they might not be okay and you might not under the right circumstances. So use your brain. Use the judgment that's there. Don't be preoccupied with figuring out which checklist you're supposed to be following at a given time. But use everything you've been taught to achieve successful outcomes. Hey, spot fire over there. Dick, we're going to get out there. Hurry up, move it out. Don't be so slow. Doctrine never was meant to be just another checklist. I mean if that's all it was going to be we were doomed before we even started. That was the whole point of having it in the first place was to start paring down on the number of rules and things that constrain people's decision making abilities. I think it is fair to say that these principles are an acknowledgement in a lot of ways of the fact that there is ambiguity in our operating environment that we often don't have enough time to gather all the information we'd like to have to make a decision but one has to be made anyway. That we're constantly under all different kinds of pressures. We have objectives that compete with each other. Put out the fire. Don't get anybody hurt and don't spend any money. Try to reconcile all those together in a situation where you have a lot of hazards. You have fatigue. You have all different kinds of stress operating. If you're at the scene where something is happening and you're the leader all your training and experience and everything that you bring to bear is most useful right there at that scene and there may not be a lot of value that any of us that aren't there can add to that. Use it. That's what we're trying to empower. The mindless following of rules is not anything that makes us stronger or better. We have to have some rules and I think doctrine helps us think through which rules we really need to keep and how to kind of interact with those but maybe it's a better world to have fewer rules that everybody knows and follows than more that they couldn't possibly follow because they can't know them all and then having the foundational principles to really give you that underpinnings that foundation for why do we do this stuff? How should we do it? How should we think about the business that we're in? I mean I hope most of us spend a lot of time thinking about the business that we're in and this is meant to be an aid to that. Well, I got myself a team after all. Yes sir, a real solid team with no cracks in it. Now we're ready for any job. Now that you've read the doctrine summary and watched the video go back to your student workbook and complete the third and final column in the chart.