POLICY
SUCCESS, AND SACRIFICING-DECISIONS IN THE FIELD BREAKING THE RULES FOR A POSITIVE OUTCOME
Keynote speaker Dr. Sidney Dekker explored sacrificing decisions during the virtual
16th Wildland Fire Safety Summit | 6th Human Dimensions of Wildland Fire Conference in May. Dekker is professor and director of the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith
University in Brisbane, Australia. He introduced participants to sacrificing decisions and how, in hindsight, we might avoid second-guessing firefighters’ sacrificing decisions in the field. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
I want to share with you some stories and experiences. All of these ideas about human performance have direct and immediate consequences to the ways we respond to human performance – is it going well, is it not going well? – and how we deal with each other as colleagues and fellow human beings in the pursuit of success. The reason we want to talk about this is that we’re finding the progress on making human performance in safety even better has slowed over the past 20 years. There are go-to recipes that we have: 1) we make more rules, and 2) we try to stop things from going wrong. One of the consequences of this, obviously, is that if you make more rules, if you try to stop things from going wrong, you gradually begin to clutter your system and shrink the bandwidth of human performance at the front line, squeezing it between what is allowable, and
squeezing the native resilience from the front-line people. Back in 2012, a colleague made this essential point: we try to understand safety by looking at non-safety. We focus on the tail end of distribution of normal work (Figure 1), and sometimes, things go wildly good on the tail end of distribution of normal work, [for example,] the Hudson River landing. It turns out, actually, that you can learn very little from these heroic recoveries because the circumstances that led to them are so incredibly unique that it’s difficult to tease out lessons from them. We were talking to an obstetrician, and she said when it comes to performance and safety, it is as if you are trying to understand how to have a happy and healthy marriage for the rest of your days by studying a few cases of divorce and domestic violence. You study those and then you assume you know everything there is to know about how to have a happy, healthy marriage for the rest of your life. Nonsense; that’s an absolute absurd, bizarre presumption. For the last 10 years, the safety community has said the way to look at this is to stop this obsession with squeezing the last little red bit (Figure 1) out of our human performance distribution. Figure 1: The way to make the red part (unwanted outcomes) on the left smaller is not by making it impossible for things to go wrong (as we’ve done almost everything in that regard already). We make the red part smaller by making the white part bigger: focusing on why things go right and enhancing the capacities that make it so. Graphic by Kelvin Genn.
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wildfire
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OCTOBER - DECEMBER 2021
