Background
As fire managers retire or move on to other positions, the knowledge and experience they have gained through planning and implementing complex fire management programs often goes with them. The difficult, on-the-ground lessons that they have learned from the rough and tumble of fires escaping or fire behavior going awry, have not been systematically captured and structured in such a manner that they can be easily passed on to the people who succeed them. Essentially, fire management organizations have lost some of the knowledge that is locked in their experienced employees’ brains.
Losing the knowledge and experience (the “deep smarts”) of our experienced employees is a dangerous position for fire management agencies to be in, for it places them in a position of learning primarily through trial and error.
There is a better way to fill this knowledge gap - a better way for our fire employees to learn from experienced fire-use practitioners, prescribed fire specialists and fire behavior analysts.
The Fire Management Learning From Experts Project was initiated to capture the experience of our seasoned employees who are acknowledged by their peers to have high expertise in planning and implementing fire programs. Project personnel video-tape interviewed more than 70 people with extensive expertise in prescribed fire, fire behavior prediction, wildland fire use and the Yellowstone fires of 1988. These experts, some retired and some still working, represented all fire agencies, most positional levels within fire organizations and most geographical sections of the United States and Canada.
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How to Use These Videos
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Safety meetings: Download a video and show it at a weekly tailgate or unit safety meeting.
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Course instruction: Use these podcasts as parts of standard fire training courses in fire behavior, prescribed fire and wildland fire use.
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Small group exercises: With your squad, crew, module, or office, show a podcast on a relevant theme and then discuss what the interview means to various members of the group. Look for areas where people agree and disagree.
There are many other ways to use these podcasts and we invite you to come up with your own novel approaches. Whatever method used, it is important to use them to start good conversations. As HRO experts Weick and Sutcliffe say, an organization operating at the highest stages of mindful reliability talks “incessantly.”
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Choose a collection to begin viewing:
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Download Media Player
A podcast is a series of digital media files that is made available for download via web distribution. They can be accessed using any computer capable of playing media files. If you are unable to play these audio files on your computer, you may download any of the following media players for free.
Windows Media
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