PROBLEM STATEMENT
The recent audit of Forest Service fire management by the Office of Inspector General adds an additional voice to the chorus calling on the federal fire community to 'get more fire on the ground' (OIG 2006). This latest report joins the 1995 National Fire Plan and the 2001 Implementation Plan in identifying the critical role of intentional fire in reducing hazardous fuels conditions, reducing risk to property and natural resources, and reducing costs (which have exceeded $1 billion for the Forest Service alone in three of the past six years; just over 40% of the entire agency's budget). Yet, meeting these goals poses significant organizational challenges, particularly regarding the community's capacity to manage more and larger fire safely and effectively.
Safety has been a particular focus in the fire management community since 1994 when, prompted by internal and external forces predominantly but not exclusively in the suppression arena (continuing loss of life in the line of duty, and recommendations of the Wildland Fire Safety Awareness Study Phases I-III by TriData Corporation), the federal fire community initiated activities designed to increase safety:
- providing formal fire leadership training programs,
- creating a Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center,
- developing and conducting staff rides of significant wildland fire events,
- sponsoring Organizational Learning/After Action Review workshops with Harvard professor, Dr. David Garvin,
- sponsoring several 'Managing the Unexpected' workshops with Dr.s Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, University of Michigan, Ross Business School.
Since safety is one outcome of organizational learning and one measure of organizational effectiveness, ideally, these activities result not only in greater capacity to meet suppression needs safely, but also greater capacity to meet growing demand for management of desirable fire -prescribed fire (Rx) or Wildland Fire Use (WFU).
Many of the key concepts under-girding these new organizational effectiveness activities are captured in the language and theory of 'high reliability' (c.f., Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001; Weick and Roberts, 1993), which in turn is based on organizations functioning as 'learning organizations' (c.f., Garvin, 2000). However, to date, there has been no assessment of the depth, breadth or effectiveness of the diffusion or of the use of 'high reliability' concepts in the federal fire community. The only related work is being conducted by the Harvard Business School, which, in partnership with the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center, recently conducted an on-line survey to obtain a baseline assessment of 'critical features of the learning organization' - learning environment and culture; learning processes, and leadership for learning (LLC white paper 2006). This on-line survey continues to be available for wildland fire professionals to use as an immediate feedback mechanism to assess the level of learning within their own organization; after taking the survey, their results are compared to the baseline.
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