The Fire Management Deep Smarts Project: interviews with key people involved with the Yellowstone fires of 1988 and with experts in returning natural fire to wilderness and National Park Service lands

This data publication contains transcripts from 74 videotaped or audiotaped interviews of highly experienced wildland fire managers that were conducted between 2006 and 2009. These experts have extensive expertise in prescribed fire, fire behavior prediction and wildland fire use. They represented mainly USDA Forest Service and National Park Service fire agencies, and most positional levels within these fire organizations and most geographical sections of the United States. Included is an one interview with an international fire behavior prediction expert from Canada. After providing brief biographical information, interviewees were asked to describe a challenge they had worked through in their fire management careers. Follow-up questions attempted to solicit the particular skill sets, cognitive and managerial, the subjects used to solve or to work-through the challenge they chose to talk about. This set of skills was considered to be part of their "deep smarts".
The purpose of this Fire Management Deep Smarts Project was to capture the experience of seasoned employees who are acknowledged by their peers to have high expertise in planning and implementing fire programs. There are many possible uses for these interview transcripts. For example, in one instance, we tried to determine if these wildland fire managers naturally possessed one or more of the five properties of high reliability organizing mindfulness (HRO-mindfulness) as defined by Weick and Sutcliffe (2001; 2007; 2008). This analysis of the interviews showed that these wildland fire managers did operate very effectively sometimes utilizing an HRO-mindfulness framework. As a result this study constructed a preliminary outline of what a widely accepted model of HRO-mindfulness looks like for wildland fire managers as it moves more completely from "theory to action". The results from this project can be used to coach and train wildland fire managers and other individuals working in high risk occupations in HRO-mindfulness, helping them to operate more safely and effectively. These interviews were also used to develop "deep smarts" video podcasts hosted at the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center website, Tucson, Arizona (http://www.wildfirelessons.net/). The deep smarts effort was promulgated using Dr. Dorothy Leonard's (Harvard Business School) model of deep smarts (2005), a method of identifying tacit knowledge in highly experienced fire manager's heads. There are also other ways to make use of this interview material, such a writing histories of the wildland fire use program in both the Forest Service and National Park Service, and in developing training programs to coach and mentor apprentice fire managers. Leonard, D. & Swap, W. 2005. Deep smarts: How to cultivate and transfer enduring business wisdom. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Weick, Karl E. & Sutcliffe, Kathleen M. 2001. Managing the unexpected: Assuring high performance in an age of complexity. Jossey-Bass, John Wiley & Sons. Weick, K. E. & Sutcliffe, K. 2007. Managing the unexpected: Resilient performance in an age of uncertainty. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Weick, K.E. & Sutcliffe, K.M. 2008. Organizing for higher reliability: Lessons learned from wildland firefighters. Fire Management Today, Vol. 68, No. 2, Spring 2008.
Original metadata date was 10/23/2012. Minor metadata updates on 03/26/2014. Minor metadata updates on 12/09/2016.