What We Can Learn in Policing from Wildfires

By Dr. Anita M. McGahan, Academic Director, Police Leadership Program, University of Toronto and OACP

I had trouble figuring out where to begin this year’s renewed version of the Police Leadership Program. The challenge was too many options. The leadership issues in policing today range all the way, for example, from community mental health to organizational budgeting to technical skill development. On this last point, a police Sergeant was recently quoted in saying that, “You can’t send officer Snuggles out to face the dragon [when a mass shooter is on the loose in a school],”[1] by which he meant that what makes an officer excellent at dealing with routine high-school problems is not the same as what makes an officer excellent at responding in the 17 seconds between an alarm and student death.

The problem that I have is in finding a way to do justice to the range of the issues, especially since I know that the people that will be sitting in my classroom are expert in them.

Here’s what I settled on: Fighting wildfires, and particularly a case study on what the firefighting community learned from the Mann Gulch fire. There was professional, organizational, and personal failure at Mann Gulch that caused the death of 12 high-potential, young smokejumpers. But there was no ill intention or loss of purpose or loss of commitment. The root cause of failure Mann Gulch was lack of resolution of known paradoxes. And there’s a lot to learn about that for policing today.

The U.S. Forest Service set up the smokejumpers that were airlifted into Mann Gulch as an elite, military-style service in which members were expected to be “the best of the best.” At the same time, it sought to control costs by dispatching members on a rotation rather than in teams. Training focused on trench-building on the assumption that wildfire could be readily controlled if addressed before the fire rose into tree crowns and blew up high across forested terrain. The culture was of heroism during crisis. All of that created confusion as the smokejumpers sought to make sense of what was happening in real time on the ground because neither the fire nor the team leader acted in ways that the culture – or their training – anticipated. Resolving the confusion during the emergency was impossible. Acting heroically made no sense.

An individual’s flight response

The Mann Gulch fire has been studied by outstanding researchers – and particularly by University of Michigan psychologist Karl E. Weick – as a crisis of ‘sensemaking,’ by which he means a profound disorientation in which members panic and revert to primitive survival responses that don’t work – i.e., that don’t lead to survival. Members of the smokejumping crew could not understand what was happening in the moment. They were experiencing what Weick calls a ‘cosmology episode,’ which is his name for the abandonment by an individual of all prior plans for the situation during a period of deep confusion.

Members feel utterly alone in an unrecognizable, unprecedented, non-sensical environment in which nobody is available to help. The impulse is to escape as fast as possible. This led crew members to try to outrun a fire on a steep uphill ridge when better escape options were available.

Organizational Failures

The organizational failure in the moment was in the failure of the crew to follow the direction of the team leader, Wag Dodge, into a backlit escape fire. There were a number of reasons for this, including that Dodge’s direction wasn’t clear, the technique was counterintuitive, the team wasn’t cohesive, there hadn’t been training in this, nobody understood crown fires, and the option of trying to outrace the fire appeared more attractive. All of these problems were addressed after a post-fire analysis through better training and planning and expertise development.

The broader agenda for public-service organizations that emerges from reflecting on this situation is also invaluable. We will focus in the Police Leadership Program on these, especially creating organizational resilience, resolving professional paradoxes, and investing in personal strengths. The organizational agenda includes becoming more creative through baked-in expertise; building strong relationships and then relying on them; cultivating attitudes of wisdom that rest on knowing what we don’t know; and sticking rock-solid with respectful interaction, which involves trust, honesty, and self-knowledge. I hope you can join us.

Anita McGahan is a Professor of Strategic Management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, where she holds the George E. Connell Chair in Organizations & Society, and where she leads the Police Leadership Program, a partnership between the OACP and the Rotman School of Management. Dr. McGahan can be reached at Anita.McGahan@Rotman.Utoronto.ca.
This year’s PLP program runs from October 28 to November 15, 2024, in Toronto. For more information on the PLP, click here.

[1] Jamie Thompson, “To stop a shooter: Why would an armed officer stand by as a school shooting unfolds?,” The Atlantic (March, 2024)

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