The Wildland Fire lessons learned are posted weekly by email to over 7000 readers. They are the way the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) does rapid lesson sharing. They are also a place for users to submit their own stories about fire-related accidents, close calls, successes, or a way of doing things more efficiently or safely.
Click on the images to read short lessons and learn why they are so impactful. You might be able to use the one about cell phones yourself!
Research on the transfer of knowledge (Szulanski and Lee 2020) describe common barriers to transfer, which the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center has found a way to overcome. Here are some of those barriers (in bold) and my take on how the LLC has addressed them (in italics):
Common Barriers
- The effort required of the source to share lessons – a firefighter can click on the button at the end of each lesson and fill out a quick electronic form to share their story with the Lessons Learned
Center who then does the formatting, write up, and adds the pictures of the lessons for publication and distribution.
- Lack of motivation of the source to provide enough detail for the recipient to implement the lesson – firefighters are willing to provide enough detail to keep their colleagues out of life-threatening situations and the recognition from having their name and often their picture as well is an added incentive.
- Causal ambiguity – the lack of understanding about how a suggested lesson will change the outcome – the lesson writers make the benefit clear, often through the images, as well as restating the benefit again at the end as a recommendation or caution
- Lack of absorptive capacity of the recipient to understand the what the source is talking about- the use of common firefighter jargon (e.g. “faller,” “sawyer,” “geysering”) in the lessons aids in the understanding of other firefighters. Colleagues are doing the same work and have many of the same experiences as the source.
Likewise, Szulanksi and Lee suggest what encourages the production and improves the receptivity of lessons learned.
Encourage Lessons Learned
- Gatekeepers that can absorb knowledge from a source and interpret it for the recipient – the Lessons Learned Center writers, who are firefighters themselves, know what to ask the
firefighters to get all the necessary details for their stories.
- A shared superordinate social identity between the source and the recipient - firefighters have a shared identity born out of their commitment to the mission and the genuine threat of danger with which they live on a daily basis.
- The credibility of the source – that the lessons come from other firefighters, not from an unnamed source or HR lends credibility.
- Observability – the vivid pictures in the Lessons help the receiver both see and remember the lessons.
- Provenness of knowledge – real firefighters telling their stories about their own accidents and recovery, is verification that the lessons work.
The Wildland Lessons Learned Center was created after the 1994 South Canyon Fire that killed 14 wildland firefighters. This tragedy triggered the interagency TriData Firefighter Safety Awareness Study that recommended a permanent “lessons learned” program be established for wildland firefighters. Karl Weick, one of my heroes, from my faculty days at the University of Texas, worked with Wildland Fire to figure out how it could learn as an organization. That is what Lessons Learned should be – a way for organizations to learn.
In 2002 the interagency Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) was created to focus on improving safe work performance and organizational learning for all Wildland firefighters. The website declares, “The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center is the single most important step forward for wildland fire agencies in becoming “learning organizations.” The LLC facilitates the documentation of lessons in a variety of formats to make them accessible. In addition to the weekly emails, the LLC produces a compellation of incidents that have occurred over the past year, for example, trees falling on firefighters, chainsaws accidents, or heavily loaded vehicles that have rolled. Check out one the annual reports - you will be amazed at what firefighters deal with daily.
The LLC also provides a 1) quarterly magazine called Two More Chains; 2) a popular website for wildland firefighters, 3) a YouTube channel as well as 4) training, meetings, conferences, workshops, seminars, and wildfire academies throughout the United States.
The website notes, “The LLC is particularly important at this time when a large cohort of senior wildland fire managers are retiring within the next 4-5 years. The LLC offers an opportunity for those highly experienced firefighters to provide the next generation with well-learned lessons in fire behavior, safe practices, wildfire management, prescribed fire, and all other aspects of wildland fire management.”
That is taking Lessons Learned seriously. It takes a lot of effort and focus for an organization to become a learning organization!