Shifting the safety rules paradigm - Introducing doctrine to US wildland firefighting operations

A really interesting study. It explores the shift the US Forest Service took from seeing rules from a compliance/violation logic that people *must* obey & which apparently prescribe safe actions, to an operating philosophy where rules are instead adaptable.

Here, rules are tools to expand options for actions where firefighters use judgement to selectively choose rules or bend their use (‘flexible decision-making’). Excessive limits via rigid rules, especially for dynamic contexts like firefighting, are argued to stifle innovation to novel situations; nor can they always be followed.

This policy change (called 'Doctrine') was traced by the author by analysing various internal documents produced over a 12-year period. Including rules, training materials, newsletters, incident investigations and more. It's cool that you can read many of the aforementioned documents in the study via Google.

First, internal documents suggested that Doctrine wasn't considered rules or prescribed activities but rather as general guidance, tools or principles to enable firefighters on how to think and respond to conditions under change.

The Doctrine handbook “explicitly rejected the old way of viewing rules as procedures applied to specific situations” (p241). However, they didn’t throw away rules or history – recognising “firefighters needed to make decisions grounded in … previous firefighting experience” (p241). Changed was the meaning and uses of rules, which was hoped would allow members to reinterpret them. It was framed as a change towards a “culture of thinking”.

Rules were reframed towards principles that members could draw on with their expertise & judgement – and avoiding reprisal for accidents. Leadership training bolstered roll-out of Doctrine. This included covering what leadership should look like under Doctrine – including the idea of “leader’s intent”, where leaders provide a broad goal on what their orders are to accomplish and allow members discretional judgement in how to achieve.

Instead of rules delineating boundaries for what members weren’t allowed to do, Doctrine was framed around what actions might enable members to perform.

A challenge of Doctrine was determining how to investigate accidents & accountability. The prior system, emphasising rules as rigid actions to take and deviations to be punished needed to be revised to incorporate how members used judgement in events. They created a Facilitated Learning Analysis (FLA) process, which sought to explore normal work grounded in how occupational and social factors shape judgement. It saw accidents not as just problems to be solved but “moments in time that reflect networks whose interactions and influences must be mapped and understood” (p242).

These FLAs contained substantial metacommunication and narratives on how “members are expected to talk and think about … firefighting” (p243) and how to consider unforeseen circumstances. Importantly, the FLAs were written in an engaging conversational tone, said to be, probably, written directly for firefighters rather than lawyers, insurance & others. Accidents were not necessarily seen as abnormal situations where deviations led to disaster, but part of normal work practices that didn’t pan out as desired.

A challenge with Doctrine is it relies heavily on firefighters’ experience – an issue for the less experienced. E.g. rules can help situate team norms & action & place limits on things.

Another challenge is how rules are used to exercise dissent. A shift to Doctrine means more judgement & less constraining action. The author says “If rules are now designed to enable members to say “yes”, then it becomes more difficult for members to find mechanisms for saying “no.” (p245).

Under the old system, rules were members’ “first concern in their decision-making sequence as they evaluated situations based on the question: Do these circumstances allow me to follow the rules?” (p245).?If a worker couldn’t follow rules then their actions were curtailed. After Doctrine, firefighters first used judgement & then selected the rules that justified their decisions. By moving towards flexibility & selective disregard of some rules, the rules lost “rhetorical force as regulative documents” (p241); making it more difficult for some to voice dissent on unsafe conditions.

A response was for teams to develop charters, helping provide guidance on how to respond to events & interpret rules – which supervisors could foster.

Link in comments.

Authors: Jahn, J. L. (2019).?Safety science,?115, 237-246.