Abstract
Experiential learning is essential for many high-performing teams, yet there are also challenges to its incorporation into team training. Using an interpretivist lens, this study explores how members of wildfire crews are encouraged to appropriate the experiences of their teammates to improve team process. First, we offer a tripartite argument for how experiential learning is inhibited. Then, based on our findings, we argue that a key practice of critical teamwork is the ability of team members to “borrow” experiences or learn from the experiences of others. We examine how firefighters interpret the concept of experience; the delineation between experiences and personal experiences was often blurred, as some firefighters spoke about experience as something that could be gained through activities that are not specifically firefighting. We delineate five training interactions through which firefighters are encouraged to appropriate the experiences of their colleagues. We then discuss how this extends the principles of the Nested Phase Model for critical teams and suggest areas for future research. These findings have implications for all types of critical teams—including military units and medical teams—as well as high-reliability organizations.
Keywords
On July 30, 2013, 19 hotshot firefighters died when the Yarnell Hill Fire overtook them as they were deploying their fire shelters. The Serious Accident Investigation Report, produced by a team delegated by the Arizona State Forestry Division (2013), details how the crew left the safety zone they had been in most of the day and tried to take the most direct route to another safety zone. It had been their hope to reengage with fire suppression efforts; however, as they made their way through a box canyon, the winds shifted and sent the fire raging over them, resulting in the deadliest wildland firefighting event in 80 years.
The Serious Accident Investigation Report noted that we will never know the rationale behind the decisions made that day. This presents an interesting dilemma for the wildland firefighting community: What is the value of a tragic event like Yarnell Hill to the firefighters who had to go out on fire lines the next day? How do firefighters learn from the tragic experiences of their colleagues without having personally experienced the event themselves? Given that a prerequisite for success in an industry like wildland firefighting is “preoccupation with learning from failure” (Roberts, 1990; Weick, 1990; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007), these questions about experiential learning served as the impetus for our research project at large.
Learning from experience is an important and often difficult process, especially when it must occur in complex and rapidly changing environments (Carroll, Rudolph, & Hatakenaka, 2003). This is no more apparent than in the work of teams such as fire crews, medical teams, and military units—so-called critical teams, those that must perform highly skilled, interdependent work in life-or-death situations (Ishak & Ballard, 2012). Experiential learning is important for critical teams in large part because it helps to develop the team coordination and individual expertise needed to be successful in unpredictable, physically demanding environments (Kamphuis, Gaillard, & Vogelaar, 2011; Minei & Bisel, 2013). On the contrary, experiential learning is especially difficult for critical teams because they work in hazardous environments in which a trial-and-error approach can lead to major loss of finances, resources, and human lives (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007). In addition, experiential learning can be time-consuming, which is a major challenge for teams that must use their time efficiently. Therefore, this study contributes to our understanding of learning in critical teams by first using extant literature to make the argument previewed above—opportunities for experiential learning are challenged by various factors. We then explore how organizations respond to those challenges by using interview data to answer the question: How can critical teams ensure their members receive the benefits of experiential learning while also overcoming the challenges and dangers associated with the process?
Experiential Learning in Critical Teams
Experiential learning is especially important for critical teams. Critical teams make up a subset of action teams, which are teams comprised of highly skilled members who must interdependently complete their work within the constraints of time-sensitive performance events (Sundstrom, 1999), such as a wildfire. These teams are often embedded in high-hazard organizations (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007) and work in situations that have potentially fatal outcomes, such as fire crews, military units, and emergency medical teams (Ishak & Ballard, 2012). While this study uses teams as its unit of analysis (Poole, 1998), we also draw on research regarding high-reliability organizations (HROs) to inform our research. HROs have been defined as systems that successfully operate in environments that could produce catastrophic errors (Perrow, 1984; Roberts, 1990; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007), such as air traffic control systems (Kontogiannis & Malakis, 2013; La Porte, 1994; O’Neil & Krane, 2012), nuclear plants (Bierly, Gallagher, & Spender, 2008; Bourrier, 1996; Marcus, 1995), and aircraft carriers (Rochlin, La Porte, & Roberts, 1987). They are defined in part by their preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, and sensitivity to operations (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001). HROs, and their embedded critical teams, prioritize organizational learning, including experiential learning, for error prevention (Garvin, 2000; Senge, 1990; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007).
Experience plays a critical role in the learning process (Kolb, 2014) and is especially essential for HROs and critical teams because they are required to make on-the-fly decisions in stressful, time-limited, and unpredictable environments, with little room for error. In a given situation, a critical team member is expected to draw on his or her experience, as well as knowledge and intuition, to produce novel decisions and actions; this is the process of improvisation (Crossan & Sorrenti, 1997; Mendonça, Beroggi, & Wallace, 2001; Weick, 1998). Improvising is not considered something to be avoided, a last resort, or an action that critical teams do because they lack preparation; it is not “making something out of nothing” (Berliner, 1994, p. 492) and it “does not materialize out of thin air” (Weick, 1993, p. 546). On the contrary, improvisation is a method of composition—a way that plans and actions are put together effectively in successful teams (Nettl, 1974). Improvisation is structured upon all available resources, including the experiences of team members. In addition, improvisation keeps teams and organizations from losing necessary flexibility in the face of changing conditions (Kreps, 1991), which can lead to ineffective performance and disaster. Because experience is such an important input for improvising, critical teams and their parent organizations look to provide as many experience-building opportunities as possible to their members.
Therefore, experiential learning is an attractive outcome of training for HROs and critical teams. Organizations and teams engage in training to “create sustainable changes in behavior and cognition” so that their members can be competent and more effective in their work (Salas, Tannenbaum, Kraiger, & Smith-Jentsch, 2012, p. 77). Training opportunities that allow individuals to experience and respond to conditions they would encounter in the field are seen as most effective (Salas et al., 2012). Nevertheless, training comes in numerous forms and modalities, or method of communication, identified as learning by doing, hearing, or seeing (Martin, Kolomitro, & Lam, 2014). Alternatively, this is described by Lujan and DiCarlo (2006) in terms of the senses employed while learning: kinesthetic, auditory, or visual. Training exercises have also been categorized according to the training environment, that is, if training occurs in the natural environment, a simulated environment, or if the environment is contrived and does not resemble actual working conditions (Martin et al., 2014). In light of learning modalities and environments, experiential learning would seem to rely on training exercises that focus on learning as doing, using one’s kinesthetic senses (e.g., simulations, games, role-playing), and are in a natural or simulated environment.
Viewed through these frameworks, we put forth a tripartite argument regarding training for bona fide critical teams: Experiential learning is labor-intensive, hazardous, and limited by the realities of team process, which therefore inhibits traditional experience-based training.
Experiential Learning Is Labor-Intensive
It is impractical to expect that each member can gain experience—or even familiarity—with every possible scenario (Kendra & Wachtendorf, 2003). There is an array of variables when fighting a fire, conducting a military operation, or performing emergency surgery, and it is unrealistic to expect that each member of a team will always be able to say: “I have experienced this exact situation before.” So while experience is a critical component of how life-or-death decisions are made, critical team members generally cannot amass as much firsthand experience as desired.
Experiential Learning Is Hazardous
Because the work of critical teams generally takes place in life-or-death situations, it could be considered unsafe to place inexperienced members in positions of responsibility (Kamphuis et al., 2011)—the exact positions in which they need to be in to get experience. Certainly, decisions can be made as a team, and experienced members can provide support to those who are less experienced, but some actions and decisions do not allow collaboration or support. Therefore, inexperienced members may not be afforded many opportunities to take on genuine challenges that would raise their levels of experience. Paradoxically, a member must be experienced to have opportunities to become experienced.
Experiential Learning Is Limited by Realities of Team Process
Critical teams may only spend a very small percentage of their time using their expertise and skill in activities that lead directly to their team goals. For example, during a 24-hr shift, a fire crew may only need to expend an hour or two fighting fires or providing first responder and medical assistance. The rest of the time would then be focused on other activities. Therefore, in addition to being labor-intensive and hazardous, experiential learning is limited by time and opportunity.
A Temporal Perspective on Experiential Learning
The first two limitations of experiential learning are consistent with Bandura’s (1977) argument that “learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous,” if it proceeded only on one’s own actions (p. 5). The third part of the argument—that experiential learning is limited by the realities of team process—is highlighted when team process is viewed through a temporal perspective by using the Nested Phase Model (Ishak & Ballard, 2012). This model argues that the work of all action teams, including critical teams, progresses cyclically through four phases, which are displayed in Figure 1.
Sample process of the Nested Phase Model.
Production
The most important phase is the production phase, in which teams combine elements of taskwork and team process to achieve their goals. This phase is the team’s reason for being, such as when a military unit is actively engaged in battle, a basketball team is playing a game, or a fire crew is working on a fire line. Therefore, this is the only phase that involves direct, real-world experiential learning. It is also the only phase in which teams use their skills and expertise to directly achieve team goals.
Consistent with our view of experiential learning, the production phase for critical teams is labor-intensive, hazardous, and limited by the realities of team process. Other phases are often fungible in terms of when they can occur, meaning a minute of work now can be substituted for a minute later (Bluedorn, 2002; McGrath & Rotchford, 1983). However, production is marked by epochality and finality, meaning that the phase is composed of nonmovable events with marked starts and finishes, without the ability to be redone at a later time (Ishak & Ballard, 2012; Whitehead, 1978). Still, the success of teams is often evaluated solely on what occurs during production; a team rarely gets credit for simulating well, for example, but not performing well when it counts. Therefore, the other three phases (simulation, adaptation, and preparation) exist to increase the chance of success in production. The limitations of the production phase are why teams choose to progress through the other three phases in this model.
Simulation
In the simulation phase, teams mimic the expected activities of the production phase—a pre-enactment of expected events. A simulation is a technique used to partially or fully replicate aspects of the real world in an interactive manner (Gaba, 2004). It is a necessary action for critical teams because their jobs often involve life-or-death decisions for which there no chance to redo work (Kolbe et al., 2013; Sandahl et al., 2013; Weiss et al., 2014). The most effective simulations are based on a scenario (Stocker, Burmester, & Allen, 2014), often pulled from a single previous event, or a combination of events, and are followed by a debriefing (Kolbe et al., 2013).
However, simulations can be as hazardous as a real event. For example, while the total number of on-duty firefighter deaths has declined over the last few decades, the number of training deaths has not (Fahy, 2012). In fact, there were 108 firefighter training fatalities across the nation from 2001 to 2010, many of which occurred during apparatus and equipment drills, live fire training, and water rescue training.
Adaptation
The adaptation phase occurs when teams stop or slow down the work of the production phase to communicate with each other, like a time-out. Adaptation has been conceptualized in a number of ways in the literature on team process (Baard, Rench, & Kozlowski, 2013); in the Nested Phase Model, it is conceptualized as a domain-specific performance change which happens in response to a new or complex situation, and whose quality can be improved through training inductions.
Preparation
In the preparation phase, teams and their members complete preliminary measures designed to make them ready for future production phases, such as fitness activities, discussions about goals, and review of previous production phases. Each activity in the preparation phase is designed to support readiness and effectiveness in the production phase (Ishak & Ballard, 2012). For most critical teams, the preparation phase makes up the majority of team process.
Experience in the Nested Phase Model
Using the Nested Phase Model as a framework illuminates the limitations on experiential learning for critical teams, as only one phase—production—allows for what Bandura (1994) would term enactive mastery experience, which are actual, authentic success and failure activities. The adaptation and preparation phases offer no opportunities for the construction of enactive mastery experiences. Simulations do not have true life-or-death outcomes—and the associated mental weight—that may accompany real events in fields such as firefighting and emergency medicine.
However, simulations are a mainstay of critical team processes. Most professionals in these fields would argue that simulations are incredibly valuable to team success. While we know that enactive mastery experience is highly valued, we argue that the presence of simulations in the process of critical teams implies that critical teams and HROs value other types of experience in addition to enactive mastery experience. Specifically, we assert that critical teams encourage their members to share experiences with each other in nonproduction phases to overcome the challenges of experiential learning posited above.
Transferring experience in critical teams
One way in which critical teams overcome the challenges of experiential learning is by creating opportunities for members to transfer experience via observations of, or conversations about, another person’s behaviors (Hoover, Giambatista, & Belkin, 2012; Kim & Miner, 2007). Because experience is viewed as a form of knowledge (Huang, Hsieh, & He, 2014; Nonaka, 1994; Nonaka & von Krogh, 2009), most research on the transfer of experience is embedded in a larger body of work on knowledge sharing. This research has been conceptualized in a number of ways, including knowledge transfer (Argote & Ingram, 2000; Bandura, 1977; Leonard, Swap, & Barton, 2014), organizational learning (Argote, 2013; Argote & Miron-Spektor, 2011; Huber, 1991), team learning (van der Haar, Segers, Jehn, & Van den Bossche, 2014), mental modeling (Smith-Jentsch, Cannon-Bowers, Tannenbaum, & Salas, 2008; Uitdewilligen, Waller, & Pitariu, 2013), transactive memory (Garner, 2006), and the transfer of experience (Ingram & Simons, 2002), among others.
While each of these conceptualizations has unique aspects, we highlight their similarities. Knowledge sharing is generally viewed as a process that can result in a change in the range of potential behaviors that can be enacted by members, teams, organizations, and industries (Huber, 1991; Thornton & Thompson, 2001). It can occur explicitly, such as when one fire crew teaches another about a successful tactic at a training session or in a review process (Black et al., 2011), or it can occur through implicit, more informal means, such as observation and unstructured conversation (Argote & Ingram, 2000; Hoover et al., 2012; Kim & Miner, 2007). In addition, the knowledge itself can be explicit and easy to transfer, such as numbers, guidelines, and other forms of declarative and procedural knowledge, or it can be of a more abstract, tacit type that potentially requires improvisation and practice, such as skills and routines (Argote, 2013; Carroll et al., 2003). Sometimes, explicit and tacit knowledge are intertwined. For example, the 10 Standard Fire Orders used by the U.S. Forest Service (for reference, see Ziegler, 2007) are explicit, codified forms of information and can be understood—at least superficially—in a classroom setting, but the strategies of how to interpret the orders while under pressure require tacit familiarity with the process to be reconstructed to fit the user and scenario. The latter type of transfer includes in-depth sharing of experiences (Huang et al., 2014; Nonaka & von Krogh, 2009).
Therefore, we are especially interested in how critical teams and HROs overcome the challenges of their work by sharing and appropriating the experiences of their colleagues. Specifically, how do critical team members view the concept of experience in their work? Given the limitations on how firsthand experiences can be amassed, how do they value other forms of experience besides enactive mastery experience? In what ways are they allowed to or encouraged to appropriate the experiences of others? These are the questions that drove this research project.
Method
Participants
We conducted interviews with 24 wildland firefighters serving on U.S. Forest Service hotshot crews to explore how firefighters learn from the experiences of others. Our participants’ tenure with the Forest Service ranged from 2 to 30 years, with an average of 10 years of service. Two participants were female, and this is consistent with the number of women in wildland firefighting nationally (Langlois, 2014). Half of our participants served in a leadership position on their crew (e.g., assistant superintendent, superintendent, crew boss, etc.).
Procedures
Following procedures approved by the Institutional Review Boards at our institutions, we recruited participants by emailing the superintendents of all hotshot crews using the U.S. Forest Service’s hotshot contact list (http://www.fs.fed.us/fire/people/hotshots/IHC_list.html). In the email, we explained the project, invited participants for interviews, and requested that the superintendent forward the email to the rest of the crew. Those interested in participating emailed us, and phone interviews (and one face-to-face interview because of participant/researcher proximity) were then scheduled.
We adopted an interpretive research paradigm for this project as our goal was to understand the phenomenon of learning from others (Golafshani, 2003). The foundations of this paradigm lie in constructivism, which, according to Crotty (1998), is “the view that all knowledge, and therefore all meaningful reality as such, is contingent upon human practices, being constructed in and out of interaction between human beings and their world, and developed and transmitted within an essentially social context” (p. 42). In this study, we were interested in our participants’ experiences. We relied on their accounts to form our understanding of how members of critical teams view, explain, and enact using experience, both their own and others’ when making decisions. In this vein, the findings of this study represent the experiences and the lived realities of our participants.
Interviews were conducted during late fall 2013 and early spring 2014—less than a year after the Yarnell Hill Fire. The semistructured interview protocol included questions about the resources individuals use when making decisions and how they learn those decision-making protocols. For example, we asked, “What is the decision-making process like for you and/or your team?” and “Do you ever rely on what you have heard about others’ experiences when making decisions? Can you give me an example of a time you did this?” Additional questions, which are not the focus of this particular analysis, explored participants’ responses to the Yarnell Hill Fire and how the tragedy affected the ways participants approached their jobs (see Williams & Ishak, 2017). Interviews ranged from 18 to 51 min, with an average length of 32 min. Audio recordings of the interviews were transcribed verbatim and resulted in 904 double-spaced pages of data.
Analysis
Analysis of the data focused on how individuals learn from the experiences of others. When we constructed our interview protocol, our focus was decision making and how an event like Yarnell Hill may influence decision making. However, as we began to conduct our interviews and hear how our participants were talking about their experiences, it became clear that learning was a precursor to decision making.
We then took a grounded theory approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) as we explored how our participants reported learning, specifically from others. Modeling other qualitative studies (e.g., Galanes, 2003; Sonenshein, DeCelles, & Dutton, 2014), we each read through transcripts, identifying themes and assigning codes to the data. At the end of the first round of coding, there were more than 70 codes (e.g., substitute for experience, desire to learn from mistakes; a complete list of these codes can be obtained from the first author). It was at this point in our analysis that we decided to focus on the codes that highlighted experience and learning for this article (see Figure 2 for examples of codes).
Sample codes from data set.
For the present study, we were left with 36 codes. As we collapsed and redefined these codes, we engaged in frequent discussions about the data (Charmaz, 2006). Seeking to identify the most meaningful pieces of text, we sorted through units by code, noting which codes seemed particularly interesting and salient to our research question (Klein, Ziegert, Knight, & Yan, 2006). We continuously went back to the literature on learning, teams, and HROs as we worked to move “informant’s self-meanings and other constructs into more generalizable categories” (Sonenshein et al., 2014, pp. 12-13). Throughout this process, we approached our data in an interpretivist manner (Guba, 1990). While we looked for generalizable themes throughout the data set, we acknowledge that social “realities exist in the form of multiple mental constructions, socially and experientially based, local and specific, dependent for their form and content on the persons who hold them” (Guba, 1990, p. 27). That is, our purpose is to represent how our participants experience learning by borrowing experiences in critical teams, not to generalize knowledge about all teams across all spaces. Through an iterative process of coding, discussing, memoing, and recoding, we arrived at the findings below. Figure 2 presents a sample of how we moved from codes to umbrella themes to our broader findings.
Findings
Our findings suggest there are multiple ways members of critical teams add to their bank of experiences by borrowing from the experience of others. In this section, we first explore how participants made sense of the role of experience and being able to borrow experiences from others. We then offer a typology of how experiences are shared and borrowed with others in wildland firefighting teams.
Experience as Critical—and Sometimes Borrowed
When asked about decision making, our participants confirmed a basic, underlying principle of critical teamwork: Experience is integral to decision making. When asked what goes into a decision, many participants immediately brought up experience as an important resource, either by itself or as a part of a larger system. For example, one participant said, “Most of my decisions are made upon fire experiences,” and went on to cite additional factors such as conversations with more experienced colleagues as well as checklists and fire conditions. Those who did not bring up experience on their own were then specifically asked about it, and without exception, each participant agreed that experience is a key component of decision making. This is consistent with previous work on decision making in critical teams (Gorman, Cooke, & Amazeen, 2010; Mendonça & Wallace, 2007; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001).
However, our findings suggested something new about how people in organizations understand experience: What firefighters referred to as experience was not always self-generated. The delineation between experiences and personal experiences was often blurred, as some firefighters spoke about experience as something that could be gained through activities that are not specifically firefighting. One example of such an activity is reviewing a fatality fire. When speaking about the aftermath of the Yarnell Hill Fire, Christa, a 4-year hotshot, said, “I think a lot of people (in the firefighting community) gained a lot of beneficial experience from that accident that happened.” Although this implies an untraditional definition of experience, the concept of assimilating the experiences of others with one’s own was common in our findings. Christa continued, “If you can rely on their memory slides and gain from their memory slides, then you gain some experience yourself” (emphasis added). In our research, the experiences of others were often viewed as part of the sum total of experience to a firefighter. To many firefighters, experience can and should be gained through interactions with others, not only personal involvement with an event.
We term this phenomenon borrowing experience. Here, we mean that a borrowed experience is one that is appropriated, not one that is taken and returned. It is based on Herzog’s (1941) use of the term to describe how daytime radio listeners would appropriate fictional stories as their own experiences. Within wildfire crews, the stories are real and no one is claiming someone else’s story as their own, but the underlying concept of borrowing experience rings true: The stories of others can be incorporated into the bank that one uses when drawing on experience. This process is well known and well respected in the firefighting community, even with the understanding that one’s own experiences are still considered the gold standard. As Josh, a sawyer with 6 years of experience, said, “I think it is harder to remember those situations that aren’t your own personal experience, but the people that really excel at the job do take experience from other people that they’ve learned.” This quote exposes two important characteristics of how firefighters view experience. First, personal experiences are still paramount, in part because one is more likely to remember an experience that he or she was personally immersed in. Second, borrowing experience is something that firefighters should aspire to do in their work. Taken together, borrowing experience is viewed as an imperfect but necessary component of wildland firefighting. We argue that this is a response to the challenges of amassing personal experience, namely, that experiential learning is hazardous, time-limited, and limited by the realities of team process.
Adding Slides to the Tray
The validity of borrowing experience is further underscored by the presence of a universal metaphor of wildland firefighting: the slide tray. Numerous participants brought up this metaphor to describe how they catalog information in preparation for future decision-making processes. Putting a slide in their tray meant that they had committed the details of a scenario to their memory (many called them “mental slides”) and could call upon that knowledge when making decisions in the future. Luke, a superintendent with 13 years of experience, described the slides as “mental pictures of certain situations,” which are then used in subsequent events to help determine tactics and strategies. These slides are the foundation of decision making in wildland firefighting. Larry, a squad boss with 8 years of experience, said, “Most of my decisions are made upon fire experiences. We call it building slides like a slide show.”
In the wildland firefighting world, building a slide tray is critical to one’s development and success. Charlie, a superintendent with 18 years of experience, said, “The more slides you have, the more training and experience you can pull from.” He said junior firefighters are encouraged to learn from experience so that they can have as many slides as possible, and that they should try to read about each new wildland event so they could “carry that slide into their life and career.” Other supervisors concurred that good firefighters will pull slides from their own experiences as well as the experiences of others, including failures.
Indeed, a common theme in our data was that firefighters learning from tragedy. One assistant superintendent said he tells his crew to read “every fatality report that comes across their desk.” This sentiment was echoed by other squad leaders. Our participants noted that they learn about failures in their field with the goal of understanding what they would do if faced with a similar situation—not with the goal of assigning blame for the failure (Williams & Ishak, 2017); in this way, the explicit purpose of reviewing incidents is slide creation.
We argue the use of the slide tray metaphor is evidence that wildland firefighters view the experiences of others as compatible in type with their own experiences. Our participants rarely differentiated between slides created from their own experiences or others. Even then, differentiations were spectral, not categorical. For example, some participants noted that personal experiences are often more memorable than the experiences of others. However, both types end up as slides in the tray, to be drawn on at a later time. We see the equivalency in nonmetaphorical language as well. One superintendent recalled his mantra: “Learn from other people’s mistakes. Learn from your own mistakes but also learn from other people’s mistakes.” These types of statements, when taken in conjunction with the idea that if you “gain from their memory slides, then you gain some experience yourself,” show that firefighters view both personal experience and the experience of others as compatible.
Conversely, some scholars argue for inequivalence of experiences—that when one person shares an experience with another, it cannot be internalized as an experience by the latter. Many studies argue that an experience transforms into knowledge when transferred from one person to another. For example, Leonard et al. (2014) define knowledge as “information that is relevant, actionable and at least partially based on experience” (p. 18). Furthermore, Argote and Ingram (2000) argue that when a person learns through the experiences of others—what Bandura (1977) calls vicarious experience—they are engaging in the process of knowledge transfer.
However, other studies do not differentiate between how personal and other experiences are processed. Kolb (2014) says that all experience becomes knowledge, even personal experience, which is consistent with Dewey’s (1938, 1958) seminal work on experience as an input for decision making. More specifically, Argote and Miron-Spektor (2011) put forth that knowledge—not experience—is created from one’s direct experiences, and knowledge is developed from the experiences of others. These studies argue that the ways in which personal and other experiences are processed are not categorically different, whether or not they are viewed as forms of knowledge. Based on our findings, we extend this argument to say that the manner in which firefighters internalize appropriated experiences is categorically similar to the way they internalize personal experiences.
Borrowing Interactions
The experiences of others are highly valued in decision making for critical teams. Therefore, it follows that the unique process of wildfire crews, as explicated in the Nested Phase Model, would be shaped in part by the desire to encourage members to share experiences. Indeed, we found that HROs and critical teams implement numerous training exercises in the preparation and simulation phases that encourage appropriating the experiences of others.
These findings are consistent with previous research on borrowing experience. While enactive mastery experience (Bandura, 1994) is still viewed as the gold standard of experiential learning, vicarious experience is also encouraged by HROs and other organizations. For example, in their study of communal settlements in Israel, Ingram and Simons (2002) found that groups of organizations facilitated the transfer of experience among members through three specific mechanisms: by increasing opportunities for transfer, increasing motivation for transfer, and increasing capability of the organizations to successfully apply the experiences of others. Specifically, organizations created opportunities for transfer of experience by bringing members of an organization together for both task and social purposes.
This takes place with wildfire crews as well. Below, we highlight five training exercises identified by our participants as facilitating the transfer of experience. These exercises are designed explicitly by the U.S. Forest Service for training purposes, and we argue that they also have the latent purpose of supplementing enactive mastery experience.
Case studies
A case study is a detailed examination of a previous event and its context, and is usually followed by a discussion of takeaways from the learning experience. They are commonplace in fields such as firefighting, medicine, and crime prevention. Firefighters generally come into contact with case studies from their first day of training, and supervisors mentioned that they use them every year to sharpen the skills of the crew. In the wildland community, case studies tend to be about the fatality fires and near misses. According to Curt, a forestry technician, studies about fatality fires generally become a “very significant part” of U.S. Forest Service education and become well known by name, such as Mann Gulch and South Canyon.
Specifically, case studies have three educational purposes. First, they are used to educate members about different scenarios so that they will have a larger resource of experience to draw upon in the field. Curt said that after reading a multitude of case studies, including those about tragedies and close calls, he feels more prepared for a wider variety of scenarios: “You don’t find yourself in the situation very much where you haven’t done it yourself, heard about it, or know somebody that tell us they did it and talked about it with you.” Second, case studies are used to question preconceived ideas that may arise through early-career overconfidence as well as complacency that comes with success. As Jack, a 21-year superintendent, explained, case studies “supplement experience . . . and not necessarily validate what you’ve done in the past but challenge what you’ve done in the past.” In this sense, a case study functions as a devil’s advocate in a team setting. Third, case studies are seen as opportunities to understand how fickle conditions can be and, subsequently, how fortunate many firefighters are. As mentioned, case studies are often about fatalities in a profession in which life-threatening danger is often yards away. Case studies are used to remind firefighters that they must remain vigilant in the face of such dangerous conditions:
I can think of times—I’ve done that a million times. I’ve done that same thing and thinkin’, “Jesus. That could have so easily happened to me.” [laugh] And so those are the things that stick with me. Because they haven’t happened to me but they happened to my colleagues right there and they almost died. (Jack, superintendent)
Case studies are implemented to teach members about different scenarios, question preconceived notions, and remind members of the lack of room for error of their work.
Facilitated learning analyses (FLAs)
FLAs are a unique aspect of the U.S. Forest Service. Sometimes described as interactive case studies, FLAs are reports of nonfatality fires created by members of the Forest Service to be examined in a facilitated discussion with crewmates, either led by one member of the team or an outside member, but not an investigator. FLAs view errors and at-risk behavior as “inherent in any human endeavor” and as “opportunities to gain insights into improving individual and group performance” (U.S. Forest Service, 2010).
FLAs are descriptive and prescriptive in nature. Dwight, a 7-year hotshot, stated that FLAs focus on “who, what, when, where, why, what happened, how it happened, as detailed as can be” as well as “corrective measures for next time.” Details are critical to the learning experience, as they often are the differences between life and death. FLAs may hold members accountable (who is a critical detail), but they are not intended to place blame on members. Jack, a superintendent, noted that “if you go back even 5 years ago, we were doing things to try to find blame,” but that is no longer the case with new FLAs provided by the U.S. Forest Service.
An FLA can be set up in a variety of ways. Dean, a superintendent with 13 years of experience, said that the involvement level of an FLA depends on time allowed and impact desired. Sometimes groups are led as a whole by facilitators. Other times they are split up into groups of three or four. And some supervisors request that crew members examine FLAs online in their spare time (the most popular FLA-hosting website is called Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center; wildfirelessons.net). Whatever the setup, the purpose is to learn from the actions and decisions of others. As Curt, the forestry technician, explained, “Even though you haven’t experienced, you’ve read about whether something worked or it didn’t.”
An FLA is only created for an accident that meets certain conditions: (a) there must have been no fatalities or serious permanent medical disability; (b) litigation against an employee must not be a serious concern; (c) there must be no evidence of intentional recklessness, dishonesty, or substance abuse; and (d) employees must be willing to talk openly about the event (U.S. Forest Service, 2010). In addition, if all the conditions are present, but the event is indicative of a larger organizational failure or training program deficiency, the event would be written up as a complex FLA, which is designed for examination by those at the organizational level of control rather than at the team level (U.S. Forest Service, 2015).
After action reviews (AARs)
While FLAs are designed to review events that occurred in a different time and space, AARs are much more immediate and present. AARs are structured debriefing processes that occur soon or immediately after a fire (Allen, Baran, & Scott, 2010; U.S. Army, 1993). All members of a crew, including supervisors, discuss questions surrounding the event. According to our interviews, the four main questions of an AAR are as follows: (a) What was the plan? (b) What actually happened? (c) Why did it happen? and (d) What can we do better? The focus is on describing what happened and prescribing future actions. “What was the plan?” and “What actually happened?” are questions meant to focus crew members on facts and details (description), while “What can we do better?” is designed to link the discussed fire to future events through experience-based learning (prescription).
Interviewees noted that the third question “Why did this happen?” is asked to assess whether the outcome was based on skill or random factors—not to praise or blame teammates. Josh, the sawyer, said that the question is often synthesized as “Did that go well because we’re good, or did that go well because we got lucky?” This mirrors the intent of case studies and FLAs in two ways. First, critical teams are asked to be cognizant of the role of fortune in their work; it may be simple and easy to attribute success on a particular day to decision making when wind conditions and weather may have had outsize influence. Second, AARs focus on maintaining describing actions and prescribing solutions, not placing blame or giving credit.
Even though firefighters discuss their own actions in AARs, they are still considered opportunities to borrow others’ experiences. Not all members are involved in each activity or decision on a standard wildfire. In addition, each member has a different perspective on what occurred in the firefighting event. The AAR is an opportunity for each member of the team to know more about their actions as well as the actions of their crewmates, as sharing of information after an event allows members to simultaneously make sense of their own experience as well as borrow others’ experiences.
Sand table exercises
Wildland fire crews also engage in tactical decision games known as sand table exercises that use three-dimensional terrain models as well as props and figurines to represent assets, such as water and human capital, and liabilities such as a fire line (National Wildfire Coordinating Group, 2003). These tactical games use a large sandbox placed in the center of a room, allowing participants to gain the advantage of a top-sight perspective that shows how individual pieces and actions fit into the whole scenario. According to one instruction manual intended for Forest Service leadership, sand table exercises enable learners “to ‘experience’ the terrain features of their problem” (National Wildfire Coordinating Group, 2003, p. 4). In addition, one of the primary objectives of such an exercise is to “provide vicarious experience to develop pattern recognition skills . . . since actual fire experience may be limited and involves certain risk” (National Wildfire Coordinating Group, 2003, p. 6). A sand table exercise is a classic example of how high-hazard organizations look for experience opportunities for their members beyond their firsthand experience within a genuine event.
The setup of a sand table exercise has numerous variables, but it is generally based on a past experience of either the facilitator or the wildland fire community as a whole. The person in a management position on a crew will mold and rake the sand to simulate the topography of the scenario, and they will show assets and liabilities using props (e.g., using red string for fire line). Some basic information, such as date and location, are provided to participants, so they will understand weather and wind conditions as well as types of fuel present (timber, grass, or brush). The facilitator generally guides participants to focus on decision-making skills in a tactical context, as well as communicating those decisions. Ed, an assistant superintendent with 34 years of experience, described this as putting somebody in the “hot seat.” Afterward, if the exercise was based on a genuine event, the group will discuss what actually happened: “These are the decisions that we actually made and these were the actual outcomes” (Josh, sawyer). In this way, sand table exercises have a lot in common with case studies with the added benefit of having what Josh described as “good visual, tangible things to be able to see and touch.”
Sand table exercises can be used in conjunction with AARs. One way this occurs is that teams are likely to debrief after a sand table exercise. The value of debriefing after a sand table exercise is that all participants were afforded the valuable top-sight perspective. This unique perspective also plays into the second way that sand table exercises are used in conjunction with AARs, as an actual fire event may be followed by a debrief around the sand table—offering participants the opportunity to recreate the event they just experienced from a different perspective.
Staff rides
On a staff ride, firefighters tour the actual grounds on which a fatality fire occurred, such as the Mann Gulch and Storm King fire near Helena, Montana, and Glenwood Springs, Colorado, respectively. Staff rides are often facilitated by wildland crews in the area and usually include people from different crews, of different statuses, and even from different agencies. Hearing a “bunch of experience levels integrated into one conversation during a staff ride” is helpful in making more well-rounded firefighters and “adds more slides to the tray,” shared Josh, the sawyer. Crews walk on the actual ground where a fire occurred and are informed by the facilitator about background information as well as where and when decisions were made. Walking through the event chronologically can show participants how “a bunch of little, bad, or inadequate decisions can be made to lead up to one tragic event,” shared Clint, a hotshot with 5 years experience. Staff rides are generally set up as linear tours of past actions, in contrast to the tactical game approach of a sand table exercise or FLA that asks critical team members to think through the scenario and make their own decisions.
In addition to conversing with other members of the community and analyzing decision making, staff rides have many advantages over other forms of borrowed experience. Much like a sand table exercise offers a rare top-sight perspective, staff rides provide both kinesthetic and emotional involvement that may not be contained in other forms of borrowed experience. The kinesthetic experience of standing and walking on the actual terrain is a major advantage in training. As Luke, a superintendent, explained, “Anything we can put in 3D or 4D, so to speak, and play with and touch and experience, resonates with us a lot more than sitting in a classroom and hearing lectures.” While staff rides are generally set up as tours—and therefore do not require participants to make decisions under pressure—the fidelity offered by standing in the location of the fires gives these events a sense of realism that is hard to achieve with other forms of borrowed experiences.
Interviewees also highlighted the emotional connection one gains from being in the location where their colleagues died. This was presented as a major advantage over sand table exercises, case studies, FLAs, and other forms of borrowed experience, as the emotion involved in reliving harrowing events can make a learning experience stick in one’s mind. As Luke explained,
I don’t know anybody that’s a big fan of standing on the ground that a brother or sister has died on. So there’s a little bit more of an emotional hook there. And on the other side, part of the hook is, it almost propels us to pay as close attention as we can to all the details involved, and take those going forward to make sure we don’t repeat the same thing.
Clint recalled a moment when he was looking down “the same canyon that somebody else was looking down, just before they passed away” as the kind of seminal learning moment that can break the mentality of being immortal that many young firefighters may have. Staff rides are designed specifically for these moments.
Discussion
This study contributes to the understanding of the learning process in critical teams in multiple ways. First, our review of the literature culminated with the following argument: Experiential learning is labor-intensive, hazardous, and limited by the realities of team process, and these characteristics inhibit opportunities to learn from one’s own experience. In response, our analysis revealed that firefighters speak of appropriating the experiences of their colleagues into their own bank of experiences. This adds to the literature arguing that organizational learning comes about through a variety of activities, including communication (Argote et al., 2000). Finally, our analysis detailed five distinct training interactions through which firefighters are encouraged to appropriate the experiences of their colleagues. Based on this analysis, we argue that the unique team process of critical teams, as explicated in the Nested Phase Model (Ishak & Ballard, 2012), is formed in large part by the desire of HROs to have their members learn from the experiences of others. Below, we discuss how our findings draw from and extend the principles of that model to address the concept of borrowing experience.
Critical teams engage in short, complex, life-or-death scenarios that require immense amounts of effective team process and taskwork, with no opportunity to redo their work. The Nested Phase Model argues that critical teams progress through four phases because of these complexities (Ishak & Ballard, 2012). The production phase, in which teams apply relevant skills and knowledge directly to goal attainment (e.g., fighting a fire), is a critical team’s reason for being. However, the three other phases are also necessary for critical teams to do their work effectively. In the preparation phase, team members focus on activities that will help guide them toward their goal. In the simulation phase, team members practice the activities of the production phase, which is when work counts. In the adaptation phase, teams stop or slow their work to communicate with one another and realign their efforts (Okhuysen & Waller, 2002).
We argue that a major impetus for the structure of critical team process is to provide opportunities to borrow experiences from others outside of the production phase as a way to increase overall experience. To this end, Figure 3 details formal interactions that are explicitly scheduled into the process of critical teams. In the preparation phase, teams read case studies, implement FLAs, and attend staff rides, all based on past events. In the simulation phase, they use sand table exercises to replicate the firefighting experience. And immediately after the production phase, they engage in AARs to share experiences with their crewmates (in addition, the adaptation phase may also involve sharing of experiences, although we do not consider this to be a type of training exercise). Each of these activities is designed specifically to help team members increase the amount of experiences in their mental slide tray. The Nested Phase Model posits that the production phase is the focus of critical teamwork because it is the only real experience. This project challenges this notion that experience from the production phase should be privileged. Indeed, the proposed typology offers an explanation of the multiple ways experience is generated to be utilized during the production phase. The activities detailed in the typology are important processes in critical teams, as they are structured to transfer experience between colleagues, thus helping teams partially overcome the limitations on the acquisition of personal experience.
Interactions that encourage the borrowing of experience compared with personal experience.
A critical team’s success relies heavily on the ability to improvise decisions in the heat of the moment by synthesizing large amounts of information, knowledge, intuition, and experience. We take the perspective that experiences are not finite, but rather transferable and expandable; experiences are regularly shared by members within and between critical teams and high-hazard organizations to increase the amount of total experience within the system. The more experience a team and its members have during a production phase, the more likely they are to know how to respond correctly in a given scenario.
Previous reviews of training literature have focused on elements such as mode of delivery and senses used (Lujan & DiCarlo, 2006; Martin et al., 2014). We build on these perspectives by offering an alternative framework to understanding experiential learning in teams and organizations. The proposed figure offers a framework that focuses on the locus of experience (my team’s event vs. another team’s event) as well as the type of training engagement (living/reliving vs. discussing). Figure 3 shows how we might classify the various activities on these dimensions, including a comparison with personal experience and simulations. This framework opens up a team’s entire process to the possibility of experiential learning, and considering training activities on these dimensions offers an opportunity for future researchers to categorize, value, and compare the multitude of ways in which critical team members rely on their own experiences as well as the experiences of others.
This figure also helps to visualize how learning from others can contribute to the foundation of experience. If only firsthand experiences are considered to be valuable, it follows that critical team members will only benefit when they live through their own fire events. This perspective ignores the value of activities such as sand table exercises and AARs. We argue that such activities are a relevant part of the foundation of experience that is so important to critical teams and HROs. Indeed, the nature of these exercises helps ensure that HROs are focusing on their fundamental aspects (see Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007), such as preoccupation with failure, as they often revisit past failures to add these events to the firefighters’ slide trays. They demonstrate a reluctance to simplify as the exercises often go into all the details of the event (e.g., the sand table exercises include such elements as topography and weather). And the act of completing these exercises highlights these teams’ sensitivity to operations. Moving forward, practitioners and researchers should continue to systematically explore the effectiveness of each of the different dimensions offered in the figure.
Future Research
The most meaningful future direction for this line of research would be an exploration of the ease and fidelity with which an experience can be transferred from implicit to explicit knowledge. The main purpose of experiential learning is to gain tacit knowledge, which is primarily accomplished through enactive mastery experience, as it has been argued that one must learn by doing (Leonard et al., 2014). However, in this study, we have demonstrated that firefighters feel that they can borrow experiences from others, and they explained they use the experiences of others much in the same way they would use their own when making decisions. In other words, this current project is about the experiences and attitudes of firefighters, and the U.S. Forest Service, regarding experiential learning. Future research should focus on the fidelity of the psychological process in which borrowed experiences are incorporated into the bank of personal experiences. Another future direction for this line of research is to understand how proximity to an event affects the impact of a borrowed experience on the work of the borrower (Kalnins & Mayer, 2004). We hypothesize that geographic, emotional, and temporal proximity are meaningful variables in this equation. For example, a case study about a fatality fire that occurs in a nearby region may be more applicable to a firefighter than one that occurs in another state. Similarly, an AAR for a fire in which a team member is almost killed may be more emotionally impactful for his or her teammates than one that seems more run-of-the-mill. From our study, we can see signs that emotion plays a key role in turning a tragedy into a learning experience, even if one did not experience the tragedy directly.
Summary
This study highlights how firefighters and other emergency response workers are encouraged to borrow experiences from others through planned training interactions in critical team process. This adds to the literature arguing that organizational learning comes about through a variety of activities, including communication (Argote et al., 2000). By engaging in the activities detailed in the proposed typology, critical teams are supplementing the lived experiences of their team members by exposing them to the experiences of others.
The Yarnell Hill Fire was devastating for the wildland firefighting community. It will serve as a touchstone for years to come. While the formal report had not yet been written up at the time of our interviews, it was clear that the case studies, FLAs, staff rides, and sand table exercises based on the tragedy will undoubtedly provide educational value for the U.S. Forest Service, helping add slides to the tray for generations of wildland firefighters.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.