 The demands we are placing on our Fireland leaders and decision makers are incredibly high. To quote the leadership website homepage, the most essential element of successful wildland firefighting is competent and confident leadership. On this website, and I certainly hope you have all visited this site by now, you'll find the wildland firefighters core values and principles. Under each principle, you'll find references or tools that will allow you self-directed opportunities to improve your performance level as a leader. Some of the tools you'll find include Tactical Decision Games or TDG Libraries, where you can take a pre-built TDG and run the exercise with your local resources. You'll find the Sand Table Exercise Workbook, the professional reading program, and a self-development plan. Recently added is a tool called Leadership in Cinema, which allows you to identify leadership styles in movie clips and other media and apply them to your own work environment. Films not only entertain us, but they can also teach us a lot about leadership styles. Pam McDonald from the Leadership Committee has made available to you already a selection of movies that have been reviewed and lesson plans have been created. To hear more about leadership and the Leadership Development Program, we recently talked to Tom Boatner, the Group Manager for BLM Fire Operations. This idea that regardless of what level you are in the fire program, whether you're an engine crew member or a unit FMO, or you're a national fire program manager, all of us need to understand that we can continue to learn valuable things that will improve our performance, whether we've been doing this for a week or 30 years. So this whole idea that we should be continual students and continually looking for ways to improve our performance, I think is a huge fundamental part of what good leadership is. We're putting incredible stress on our fire line leaders these days with the complexity of the incidents they're dealing with, the amount of policy and procedure we're asking them to stay on top of. We're putting a huge burden on our leaders to perform at a pretty high level. And we're looking for people who have the willingness and the strength to give that their best shot. And we're trying to give them some training and some tools that will help them be better at it. We tend to be pretty strong at the technical stuff, fire line tactics, fire weather, fire behavior and fuels issues. What we're still struggling to get better at is the human element that becomes an issue on the fire line. How do people communicate when they're under stress? How do people make decisions when they're under stress? What happens to our performance when we're fatigued because we're 60, 70, 80 days into a long demanding fire season? I think first and foremost an AAR is meant to be a learning process to discuss how a group of firefighters performed in a particular situation, what happened, both positive and negative, what can we learn from what happened today to make us better tomorrow. It's not meant to be a formal assertion of facts or any organizational means of deciding if something bad has happened on a large scale. It's meant to be a local learning process, confidential so people can speak real openly and learn about what happened and what they did. Investigations I think are performed by, in general, an outside group to look at an incident or a part of an incident where generally something didn't go right, ascertain the facts and see what the organization needs to do to deal with what happened. And that's a different thing from a small fire unit using an AAR as a learning tool to improve their performance. If the only time young leaders get to practice making critical, potentially life affecting decisions is when they're on the fire line and things are stressful and at their worst, then we're not going to get very much practice at it, which means we probably won't do it as well as we can. But if we find a way to practice making those kind of decisions and assessments and communicating them in an environment where there is very little risk, but we're trying to imitate the high-risk environment that we occasionally work in, then we are going to get better because we're maximizing the practice. And I think tactical decision games and sand table exercises are an inexpensive, low-risk way to give young leaders many, many repetitions at making difficult decisions and then being assessed on how they did so they can improve their performance. It's like a football team practicing for 20, 30, 40 hours to play a one-hour game. Hopefully they'll make the mistakes and do some learning in the practice that will make their performance better in that brief period when the chips are all on the table. Fireline leadership is important to us because whether we like it or not, we are considered a high-reliability organization. Errors on the fireline can and do have life-and-death consequences and it has always been our goal to perform at the highest level possible. For this reason, we tend to focus a lot of our attention on accidents and near misses in the hopes of learning from some of these events. Let's listen to Dr. Patrick with him as he gives us some insight into some of the practices of high-reliability organizations. Well, what makes the study of high-reliability organizations unique is just this focus on errors. You have to have high reliability because any error can result in death, personal injury, or high levels of property loss. And so therefore, that should be unacceptable. There should be zero tolerance. You can make automobiles and they think a 3% error rate is great, but we have to function down at the level where we would prefer there were no errors at all. The focus of high-reliability organizations on near misses comes about in that they examine every error that they have in great detail. Therefore, we have reviews. We have to look at some things that some people might consider to be trivial, but when you start looking at this at an organization or a wide level, you realize that it's not trivial. High-reliability organizations, we know that the dissemination of information is critical, and so to get that information out, there's several channels available to people. Of course, you can go right through your chain of command and through your supervisor. You can also take more direct routes and go through mass emails to other Forest Service, a BLM, Park Service personnel, kind of things like that if that's available to you. There's also safe nets are available for anyone which allow anonymous types of information to go out. I think many times in our organizations there are not enough positive reinforcements, and this is very important. AAR shouldn't get the feeling that people fear them that they're going to find something wrong and pick someone apart. It should really be an open learning kind of experience, and so you can really focus on the positive experiences in there too. And actual rewards for people are great. Just a, hey, job well done is always real useful. In the past I've seen letters to people commending them for a job well done. There's always the rare pay bonus that comes along, and just anything to encourage people that when they do a job correctly that they're going to get rewarded for it and recognized. Now let's get into our groups and complete the exercise in your student workbook.