Voices from the Field: Wildland Fire Managers and High-Reliability Organizing Mindfulness

Abstract

Wildland fire management agencies manage wildland fires for resource benefit while protecting firefighter and public safety. Firefighting fatalities and property damaged by wildfires prompt reviews aimed at preventing similar accidents. The principles of high-reliability organizing (HRO) have been used to analyze such unexpected, high-consequence events. However, fire managers who agree to the value of an HRO framework often have difficulty applying and teaching it. Using data gathered from experienced fire managers, we identify salient examples that illustrate each HRO mindfulness behavior. We then focus on specific language choices encountered in these examples and suggest how these choices might add to the applicability for both HRO theorizing and practice.

Keywords:

• communications
• high reliability organizing
• resilience
• wildland fire management

Acknowledgments

We thank Paula Nasiatka, Dorothy Leonard, Anne Black, Marty Alexander, Paul Keller, Karl Weick, Kathleen Sutcliffe, the 74 people we interviewed, and six anonymous reviewers.

Notes

Resiliency has been articulated as a personal quality (Pulley, 1997; Richardson, 2002), an organizational quality (Vogus and Sutcliffe, 2007; Chewning, Lai, and Doerfel, 2012; Ouedraogo and Boyer, 2012), a quality of communities (Bevc, Nicholls, and Picou, 2010), or a combination of personal and organizational qualities and as a process of discursive creation (Buzzanell, Shenoy, Remke, and Lucas, 2009), which makes isolating resilient communication in discourse often a difficult task. Although we agree with the Buzzanell et al. notion that resilience is a combination of personal and organizational qualities and a discursive creation, our data include retrospective accounts, which limits our ability to discuss resilience as it is produced in real time.

Although we argue that the use of figurative language reflects and invites mindful thinking, we also recognize the potential for figurative language to create misunderstandings that might go unchecked. This characteristic of language is described by Peters (1999) when he argues that language is both bridge and chasm.

Heifetz and Linsky (2002) say the hardest part of being a leader is “to experience distress without numbing yourself.” They call this state of mind “sacred heart.” “Sacred heart” is the “courage to maintain your innocence and wonder, your doubt and curiosity, and your compassion and love even through your darkest, most difficult moments” (227). We believe that this type of courage marks a commitment to resiliency.

Often, the term “near miss” can be confusing because we reason through it to mean a “near hit” instead—as in, “those two airplanes were so close, they nearly hit.” But it actually refers to the idea that airplanes miss each other in the air all the time, but sometimes they only miss each other slightly, still a miss, but a near miss.