The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center is located at :
National Advanced Fire and Resource Institute (NAFRI)
3265 East Universal Way, Tucson, Arizona 85706
Office Phones: Center Manager (520) 799-8760, Assistant
Center Manager (520) 799-8761, SCA Intern (520) 799-8762
Editorial Assistant (520) 799-8763 Fax (520) 799-8785
Lessons Learned Center Staff (left to right)
B. MacDowell, P. Nasiatka, K. Manganini, D. Christenson
Our Mission The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center actively promotes a learning culture to enhance and sustain safe and effective work practices in the wildland fire community. The Center provides opportunities and resources to foster collaboration among all fire professionals, facilitates their networks, provides access to state-of-the-art learning tools, and links learning to training.
Our Vision for 2012
The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) is well established and highly respected throughout the wildland fire community as an innovative and progressive organizational learning resource center. The Center helps the community to deeply establish a safe learning environment, enabling it to receive honest input and distribute trusted information, created and contributed by the community. The LLC provides leading edge strategies, processes, and tools to assist the entire community to perform more safely and effectively using lessons both past and present. It provides both the central point for a continuous organizational learning and improvement cycle in wildland fire, as well as a center of high performance and integrity.
1. Collect and analyze observations
more information2. Retain knowledge of lessons learned and effective practices
more information
3. Transfer knowledge and information
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4. Incorporate lessons learned into the wildland fire training curriculum
Our 2007 Accomplishments
This report to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) Chair highlights several of the Lessons Learned Center's key accomplishments for the wildland fire community.
Key Definitions
Lesson - An innovative approach or work practice that is captured and shared to promote repeat application. A lesson may also be an adverse work practice or experience that is captured or shared to avoid recurrence. A lesson is not a "Lesson Learned" until we modify our behavior to reflect our new knowledge and insights.
Effective Practice - A process, technique, or innovative use of resources, technology, or equipment that has a proven record of success in providing significant improvement to an organization. It does not become a "Best Practice" until it is compared against all available effective practices with the same objectives.
Community of Practice - An informal group of people with similar work-related activities and interests, who deepen their knowledge and expertise area by interacting on an ongoing basis.
Background
Recognizing the value of experience, organizations ranging from the military to banking have placed "lessons learned" at the heart of their safety and performance improvement programs. The lessons learned concept focuses on the collection and analysis of operational experiences and making use of the resulting lessons in training and operations.
Analyzing events for lessons learned provides a basic tenet of many of the world's most progressive safety management programs, including those that focus on systematically addressing the root cause of most industrial accidents, that being the human element, or human factors.
The Business Practices Re-Engineering of the former National Advanced Resource Technology Center (now the National Advanced Fire and Resource Institute) and the Tri-Data Wildland Firefighter Safety Awareness Study identified a need for the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center. The Lessons Learned Center was established in May 2002.
Examples of proven models are The Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Department of Energy and United States Coast Guard. Lessons Learned evolved from these and other models.
The Lessons Learned Center staff performed a benchmarking trip to the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) to examine the Army’s collection and analysis process. The Army is highly skilled in how they acquire, analyze and disseminate lessons and practices. The Lessons Learned Center has adopted some of the components of the Army’s process to better serve the professional wildland firefighter. Other benchmarking efforts have been with Raytheon Missiles System, Inc. in Tucson, AZ and the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) is Melbourne, Australia.
Sponsors, Cooperators and Partners
The Lessons Learned Center is an interagency program supported by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) consisting of the federal and state fire agencies.
NWCG CharterThe Center Manager is a National Park Service employee, the Assistant Center Manager is a US Forest Service employee. The editorial assistant is a U.S. Forest Service employee and the Student Conservation Association (SCA) one year intern is funded by the National Park Service.
The Center works in cooperation with the National Interagency Fuels Coordination Group (NIFCG), Federal Fire and Aviation Safety Team (FFAST), the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) and its working teams, and the National Association of State Foresters (NASF).
Since 2002, Lessons Learned Center Staff has been active in doing briefings, presentations, and providing the LLC exhibit for various meetings, conferences and workshops throughout the country. In 2007, LLC staff made presentations at international wildland fire conferences in Spain, France and Australia. As of January 2007, almost thirty thousand contacts have been made. To view detailed numbers and information on LLC outreach contacts click here:
Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center Outreach Contacts.
"The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) was recognized at the 4th annual National Fire Plan awards ceremony in March 2006 for significant contributions in the category of Firefighter Preparedness, Training and Safety. In the four years since its start, the Center has made great strides in helping the interagency wildland fire community become a learning organization."