The Go Point: When It's Time to Decide--Knowing What to Do and When to Do It

Book by Useem Michael

1

In the Heat of the Moment

At 4 p.m. on August 5, 1949, Wagner Dodge and his crew of sixteen parachuted into the remote Montana wilderness at Mann Gulch to combat what seemed to be a routine forest fire. By 5:56 p.m., all but three of the firefighters were dead, fatally burned—then the worst disaster in the history of the U.S. Forest Service and one caught memorably by Norman Maclean in Young Men and Fire.

Forty-five years later, on July 6, 1994, Donald Mackey was helping to oversee a team of forty-nine firefighters spread out on Storm King Mountain in Colorado. Some of the group had parachuted onto the mountain that day; others had come by helicopter, still others by foot. Again, it looked like a routine fire, and again, the fire proved that it is always a mistake to treat any backcountry blaze as routine. By four o’clock in the afternoon of July 6, the Mann Gulch disaster seemed about to repeat itself.

In both cases, bad luck and a fatal confluence of environmental factors contributed to the flaming ambush of the firefighters, but individual decisions were critical in each instance. At Mann Gulch as at Storm King, those most directly responsible on site faced a sequence of decision points during their fateful hours in the fire zone, and their decisions at those moments helped take their teams to the brink of disaster and beyond.

Wildland fires are a special circumstance, and wildland firefighters— the men and women who parachute, helicopter, or trek in to fight them— a special breed. But while the conditions are unique, the experience of those who fight fires in the outdoors has much to teach us all about decision making indoors, especially when there is little room for error or delay. The go points their crew leaders reach and the consequences that follow are unusually clear-cut and consequential for the goals of the enterprise. And like so many critical business decisions, fire decisions brutally punish those who do not keep both the big picture and small detail well in mind.

The blaze that raged over Colorado’s Storm King Mountain on July 5 and 6, 1994, in what has come to be known as the South Canyon fire, has been the subject of extensive official study and secondary analysis, including one by Norman Maclean’s son, John, who chronicled the fire’s course and the efforts to combat it in Fire on the Mountain. Thus, we have an exceptionally well-documented record of the decisions taken by those responsible for the firefighters on the mountain.

In analyzing the record, I do not seek to criticize anyone involved or to affix blame for the disaster that occurred on any one individual. Whether they survived the blaze or not, the wildland firefighters who assembled on Storm King Mountain were heroes: they placed themselves in harm’s way to protect others, and some paid the ultimate price. But firefighters also feel it is their duty to unflinchingly examine past tragedies to determine what decisions went wrong so they can prevent similar calamities in the future. In that spirit and from their bravery come enduring lessons in the art and science of decision making whatever the zone.

The Basics: Safety, Speed, and Suppression

In attacking wilderness fires, firefighters traditionally form into crews ranging from three to twenty members. The crews are rapidly deployed, combining with other crews to combat larger fires and then just as quickly breaking up and redeploying to other incidents. As might be expected of their organizational chart, crew leaders operate both collaboratively and independently, but during multiple-crew blazes, as was the case in the South Canyon fire, one individual of necessity should assume clear and authoritative responsibility. As we shall shortly see, that did not happen on Storm King Mountain.

“On any incident, large or small,” states one of the basic fire service manuals, “the Incident Commander has ultimate responsibility for the effective and safe execution” of all aspects of the attack. The commander’s duties place a premium on ensuring that decisions optimally contribute to the three primary goals of firefighting: safety, speed, and suppression.

Always, the premier criterion for decision making by fire crew leaders and incident commanders is the safety of their team. Even though physical peril looms large whenever crews are called in, fatal injuries are no more tolerable in firefighting than is fraudulent accounting in business or bogus stories in journalism. Yet since risk is always present, wildland fire leaders must be able to appraise it and take appropriate steps toward mitigation.

The second criterion for crew leaders and incident commanders is speed. Firefighting is a world of decision urgency. Hesitation and equivocation can do more than delay a solution: they can radically compound the problem. In product markets, the short term can be months; in stock markets, days; in fire zones, hours or even less. A 10-acre fire—small potatoes in the wildfire playbook—if not quickly suppressed can explode in minutes into a 1,000-acre conflagration. “Make sound and timely decisions,” the official firefighters’ manual exhorts, with good cause.

The final criterion for decision making in a fire zone is a set of technical considerations to actually suppress the fire: How many firefighters are required? Where should a fire line be constructed? What aerial reconnaissance is needed? On such technical calls can hang the fate of both the zone’s natural resources and the men and women who seek to preserve them.

Winding around all these matters and never separate from them are the shifting conditions of the wilderness fires. It is not in the nature of blazes to sit still, and each new shift in the fire can create new and dangerous microclimates—powerful winds, intense heat—that further complicate suppression. An incident commander or crew leader who makes the right choices, handles them quickly, and anticipates correctly where the fire might suddenly go and where his crew should subsequently be achieves the primary purpose of the business: “fight fire aggressively but provide for safety first.” Make the wrong choices, make them too late, and all hell can break loose.

When “Can Do” Is Not Enough: Preparing for Decision Making

Wildland firefighters often assume leadership roles with little warning, in venues that are always new. Military leaders, of course, are called to do the same: freshly commissioned officers commanding soldiers in combat, for example, or seasoned officers taking troops onto an unknown battlefield. But unlike graduates of the military academies or war colleges, where leadership decisions have a central place in the curriculum, newly appointed wildfire incident commanders traditionally have taken charge with little or no formal preparation in leadership decisions. Indeed, prior to the South Canyon fire, the responsible federal agencies offered virtually no coursework in how to make decisions when lives depend on them.

Poor preparation predictably leads to poor choices. Consider one large adversary of good decisions: overconfidence, a moment when a responsible decision maker believes that a decision outcome is more likely than the factual situation would predict. Business studies have found that excessive audacity is most prevalent when managers face decisions on products and markets with which they are least familiar. In one such study, two researchers examined confidence among product managers of small computer software and hardware firms when they introduced radically new products to the market. The more pioneering the new products—and thus the less familiar the market—the more the product managers were likely to view the prospects for success through rose-colored glasses.

Firefighters constantly forced to make snap decisions in unfamiliar terrain face the same challenges. The less they have been prepared for a responsible decision-making role, the more a natural can-do attitude takes over. Without a pool of experience to back them up— experience in firefighting and in decision making—incident commanders sometimes latch onto a flawed firefighting strategy, certain that “we can make it work.” In the rapidly changing world of a racing fire, a can-do attitude is both essential and potentially dangerous.

In the Heat of the Moment: Acute Stress and Decision Making

Wildland fires can reach 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, race forward at speeds up to 25 miles per hour—a gold-medal speed in the Olympics’ 100-meter event—and leap overhead without warning. At their most dangerous, such fires are said to “blow up,” an inflection point when they acquire a manic momentum of their own. Like avalanches and tornadoes, a blowup is one of nature’s most terrifying spectacles, one reason tension is ever present in a fire zone. For crew leaders and incident commanders, those who carry personal responsibility for the lives of others, the resulting tension can become acute. The more severe the stress, the less optimal decisions are likely to be just at a time when they are becoming most consequential.

Research confirms that individuals under time pressure or performing simultaneous multiple tasks are more prone to indulge in poor decision making for a host of reasons including a reluctance to search for relevant information. Studies also demonstrate that the adverse effects of underpreparation on decision making become most pronounced in the most severe conditions. In short, the two enemies of optimal decisions—poor preparation and great stress—are particularly pernicious when combined.

In studying urban firefighter captains and lieutenants, Fred Fielder found that while seasoned officers actually improved their performance under the stress of a fire, less prepared ones went in the opposite direction. The same is true of responsible o...