Understanding Wildfire Culture From A Human Perspective With Ben Iverson
Beyond the massive destruction caused by wildfires are the people who risk their lives just to put them out. In this episode, Ben Iverson of the Forest Service shares with Brandon Dunham a glimpse of the wildfire culture beyond the protocols and into its relatable human aspects. He talks about their project Meta Review, which looks back on the commonalities and differences of past wildfire events to find their most valuable lessons that could help improve fire response and address the poor education on wildfires. Ben also explains how they use focus groups to gather real-life experiences from firefighters to improve their catalog and encourage their colleagues to open up even their most harrowing wildfire encounters.
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Understanding Wildfire Culture From A Human Perspective With Ben Iverson
This episode is going to be brought to you by MYSTERY RANCH Built for the Mission. If you don't know the origin story about MYSTERY RANCH, Dana Gleason, the OG of MYSTERY RANCH itself, went down to South Ops tied in with the Hotshot crew and decided to change how wildland firefighters go to work. How did he do that? He just listened to him. “What sucks about your packs? How can we make it better?” That's pretty much how we came to the iteration of the pack. That's probably soon to be on your back when you get off the buggy, engine or helicopter next.
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This show is also going to be brought to you by our homies over at Hotshot Brewing. You thought I was going to say Starbucks, didn't you? Hotshot Brewing makes the most kick-ass coffee for the most kick-ass cause. A portion of the proceeds will always go back to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. If you're in the market for some good coffee, all the tools of the trade to get your morning started right or a whole list of Wildland Firefighter-themed apparel, then look no further than Hotshot Brewing. It's awesome. While you're over there, you can get some stuff. We have a little deal going where you can get some exclusive merch by going over there. Search for it and you will find it.
Go over to www.HotshotBrewing.com and get all the tools of the trade to start your morning off right and all the kick-ass coffee for kick-ass causes that you can ever need. This show would like to give a quick little shout-out to our buddy Booze over at The A.S.S. Movement. What does that stand for? It stands for the Anti Surface Shitting Movement. I don't know if you have a problem pooper on the crew but I hate that shit. It needs to stop. Good thing our buddy Booze, who is an artist, a photographer, an entrepreneur and a hell of a firefighter, is he's got a solution for you. You want to spread the good word about bearing returns. Go over to www.TheFireWild.com where you can check out The A.S.S. Movement.
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If you don't know what the American Wildfire Experience is, they house this Smokey Generation and I know for a fact a lot of people out there have seen that rolling around. It's pretty freaking awesome. It is a digital storytelling platform telling the story of Wildland Fire. There have to be over 250 of these stories out there but it's preserving the legacy of the folks in the field and the story of Wildland Fire. Some of these stories even date back to the 1940s. It's pretty freaking bitching.
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Welcome back. I hope everybody's doing well. It looks like the lower 48 is starting to heat up but it's still being domineered. At least the news has been domineered by the whole Canadian wildfire catastrophe that's happening. I got my thoughts about that but if there's fuel on the ground, eventually it's going to cure. If it's happening up there, it's going to happen down here eventually too. All fuel will dry and we always have no shortage of starts, whether that be human-caused or lightning caused so buckle up. Cheatgrass out here in Nevada is pretty tall but we'll see what happens. No one has a crystal ball.
We're going to be tying in with the Innovation and Organizational Learning team. It's pretty cool. I don't know if anybody's been aware of it but they're developing this thing called the Metareview. It's a shitty name for this but what they're doing is taking a lessons-learned approach by taking an overall approach, like a meta approach to systematically reviewing past events, looking across multiple incidents and some themes to identify things that go wrong down from your fatality fires and injuries, how we perceive our culture with financial incentives.
Why are we chasing thousand-hour overtime seasons? That's a big one. Some societal norms and cultural norms go on and on. It's pretty cool. I'm pretty pumped to have our good buddy over there by the name of Ben Iverson on the show to explain what it's all about. I would like to introduce my good friend, Ben Iverson, from the Forest Service Metareview. Welcome to the show.
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I've got my good friend Ben Iverson. He is with the United States Forest Service and is performing and putting out all this information that is part of the Metareview. I don't know if everybody has seen the Metareview yet but it is asking some hard questions. Ben, how's it going?
It's going great. It’s good to be here with you.
It’s a pleasure to see you. Tell us about yourself.
I work for a small group within the Forest Service called Innovation and Organizational Learning. That group is most known for learning reviews for serious accidents, fatality events or chiefs level reviews of bad days. I work in the Organizational Learning part of that group and now, I'm the only one. We are a new group. The Metareview was our first project ever. We're learning who we are and how we do what we do every day. The Metareview is the first thing we put out there for folks to check out and see.
What about your fire history? What do you got under your belt? I understand you've done a lot of fire as well and that's why you're part of this Metareview because you speak the language. Tell us about that.
It’s been a bit of a winding road. Most of my career I spent on engines in Northern California in the Modoc National Forest. I've worked for 4 to 5 Federal Land Management Agencies. I started in the park service, went to Fish and Wildlife for my permanent and then worked with the BLM at NWCG training. My fire career is operationally engines. I've been involved in Type 3 incident management teams but for the most part, I made a transition over to training and then ultimately to Organizational Learning.
That's underrated and not talked about. Everybody wants to be ops, a ground pounder and run saw but there's a wide world of opportunities out there, especially in things like you're doing or finance. The sky is the limit.
Early on in my career, up until about 2009, I was very operations oriented. I thought that that was my path. I did some hell attack details. I enjoyed that. I was doing what many of us do. A very bad day in 2009 had me thinking differently. I started to try to learn my way through the problem, understanding human factors, like what happened that day and how can I learn my way through it.
Over the course of that experience, I met who would ultimately become a couple of important mentors in my career that got me thinking about human factors and system safety. I detailed to IOL before it was IOL with Jim Saveland and Ivan Pupulidy trying to do what they thought was right. That's the evolution of the learning review that took place in conjunction with the FLA evolution as well.
Through that process and a series of details working on Sierra, Saddleback and Twist, the Forest Service sponsored me to go to pursue a Master's degree in Human Factors at London University in Sweden. That whole process got me thinking about things very differently. On Type 3, I go as safety officer, where I try to do that role pretty differently. It's about inspiring and critical thinking.
I'm not going to pressure you into it but as far as the incident, the experience in 2009, do you care to expand on that?
I've talked about it quite a bit in a couple of different places. It's a little different in that I wasn't there when the thing happened. Willow Helibase Rappel’s accident was pivotal for many of us. Thomas Marovich who fell that day was a Modoc National Forest apprentice. I remember that day very well, what we were doing that day. The next day, the phone rang and it was a good friend, my boss who said, “I need you to do something.” I said, “Anything.” He’s like, “Be careful what you say.” He explained what the need was. Ultimately, it fell to me and Alaska National Forest employees to gather up all of Tom's belongings and return them to his parents.
That was back in the day when we were still learning our way through how to handle those kinds of events. At the time there, there were only two individuals down there, Bob Bell and a family liaison that was assigned by the Modoc. They were trying to do the best that they could do but as we've learned over the years taking somebody home, it's an event. It's a thing. I don't even know how to describe it. Ultimately, me and Seth, the other guy looked at each other like, “We're not leaving. We're staying.”
We spent that time, brought Tom home and went around his parents. I wasn't Tom's captain. I knew him. We rolled together to Southern California on an assignment. Immersed in the aftermath made that incident incredibly personal. Seeing the effect on Tom's parents was something we'll never forget. Coming out of that day, I feared what the serious accident investigation would say. We'd gotten pretty used to the 30-mile perimeter. I made a bunch of assumptions as to what the report would say.
What I found was something very different. The human factors analysis of that accident written by Jim Saveland and Ivan was so different from anything I'd ever seen before. That led to a phone call, interaction and several meetings. I asked Ivan, “How could I learn more?” His answer was, “Interested in the detail.” I went down and took a human performance class with him and Todd Conklin out of Los Alamos National Labs. That was my indoctrination into human performance. Over the course of that next year and the years since, I like to think that it helped me learn my way through that bad day.
Put some more understanding into the whole process of everything that went down. You said 2009. This is well before the modern implementation of CISM, critical incident response and all that stuff. Serious accident investigations are no joke. It feels like an interrogation at times. Back in those days when CISM was going down, we were trying to figure it out. They also felt like an investigation.
There's been such an evolution in both over the years. Quite frankly, it's a story that's yet to be told. It's huge, what we did then compared to what we do now. That's not to say we haven't figured it out. We still have tons of learning to do. I believe that. It's a lot better.
Just asking how you're doing with this later down the road. Did you have the opportunity to seek help like therapy or talk to anybody? Was it before the more widespread acceptance of that?
It connects to the Metareview in that I hate being a hypocrite. I would say to my crew, “If you guys need to talk to somebody, we'll make it happen.” I was advocating for it pretty actively while having zero intention to do it myself. Ultimately, it was a put-up or shut-up moment. I called EAP and got set up. Every horror story that you've heard happened.
I walked into my first visit and there was the little table in the corner, the kids' table with the dolls, where the child psychologist worked through horrible days with kids. She had great intentions but no idea much of what we talked about, first responder trauma with PTSD and all that stuff. Thankfully she acknowledged that and she said, “I'll do my best. I'll do my research. We'll engage or I can refer you to somebody else.”
Ultimately, I did my five visits with her but it wasn't the thing. It was the subsequent years working with Ivan and Jim teaching that accident in the human performance improvement course we were teaching and human performance optimization at the academy. Being able to fulfill the promise of making sure that Tom's mom knows that his story and the learning about it would last and he wouldn't be forgotten. It was taking that action that had the greatest impact on me.
It was like a healing process in your way, the understanding of it. Some sense of closure that as well I can relate to with some of my experiences out in the field. Correct me if I'm wrong here but is that what I'm getting?
Absolutely. That's interesting and sad but the cool thing about this is as we talk to people that get involved in this work, almost all of them have that thing that day, that person that they have in the back of their minds or the forefront of their minds. It is why they do the work. It’s not the work that you can do or maybe you can. That's judgmental of me to say it but for many of us, it's that history that drives us.
That's the thing too. A lot of our experiences and training are unfortunate. Take the 10s and 18s for instance. Those lessons are learned in blood, unfortunately. When it comes down to the human factor, like the things that you were talking about, that's something different. It's learned in trauma. It sucks trying to navigate that. I've got my experiences too and I'm pretty sure that a lot of folks out there that are a little bit later in the game of fire all have their experiences as well.
This is the unfortunate thing about being in a dangerous profession. It's not a matter of if. It's when because over the course of a long enough time, a tragedy will happen. Mark my words, it will. The whole idea, especially with the things that you're working on, is it's not to make the same mistakes twice. That's a big thing that we need to keep doing and it's never going to stop.
There's an interaction that took place on the Lessons Learned Center's blog that encapsulates the purpose behind our work. A contributor to the blog was commenting that it was sad. These are the lessons already learned and then repeated. The Lessons Learned Center moderator came back and responded with a brilliant piece. They said, “New people need to learn the old lessons for the first time.” That's easier said than done. To a great extent, the Metareview goes back to those previous incidents and we seek to learn from them. 2007 to 2016 is history. It's back then.
We have current events to learn through. There's an old saying too that history repeats itself but I prefer Mark Twain’s, “History doesn't repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.” I am not that captain in 2009. You are not the same person that went through your event. Tomorrow will go out and interact in a world that is different in every way from today, yesterday and the day before. It all comes back to human performance and everything is an exercise in human performance.
Another personal question I have for you is this chain of events back in 2009 with the repel incident. I'm going to make the assumption. I don't know if it's accurate. Correct me if I'm wrong but is it one of the motivating factors to pursue this path down the lessons learned, the Department of Learning, the Metareview?
I didn't know it at the time. I often joke with Ivan especially because he had to teach me to do this. When people ask me, “What do you do,” my answer is, “I ask a lot of questions.” At the time, I wasn't asking questions. I was so insecure about who I was as a firefighter, a captain and a human being. There was even a time in my career when I stopped doing after-action reviews. I didn't want to hear it. I'm not proud of that. I've come a long way since.
Over the course of the years working with Ivan, learning through learning reviews and teaching Tom's accident to people, I realized that how I work through those bad days is through learning. It's not just the bad days. It's learning from the good days and learning through the bad days. That emerged over time. I had no idea. At first, it was better training. How do I become a great instructor? If I can teach this well, it means that the other side can learn it well.
It evolved to the point where Metareview and Ivan's work were about going from Individual Learning to Organizational Learning. I had no idea what that meant when I joined Innovation and Organizational Learning. Through Metareview, I learned what it is to be a learning organization. I had heard our chiefs espouse to being a learning organization but I had no idea what it meant and how to make it happen. I learned my way through that challenge. It was very much a team effort. I can't take all the credit for the Metareview for sure. It began long before I got there and it will continue long after I'm gone. It's important. I don't just say it because it's my project.
It's wildly important. There's the whole old adage of if you want to understand and learn about a subject, try teaching it. That's what we're doing. We're teaching and learning every day in this organization. The day that you stop learning about fire or what it means to be a human, a leader or any of the little things, all the little nuances that go into Wildland Fire is probably the day you should stop doing this and move on.
It's a terrifying time, quite honestly. When I hear our best things like, “I don't have time to read or learn,” we're too busy wearing six hats. If we aren't learning, it's back to trial and error.
It opens up a lot of risks. Especially, since we have a lot of people that have a lot of slides. It's no secret. We've talked about this 1,000 times before but a lot of the agencies, Forest Service included, across the Federal agencies, a lot of people are leaving and we're losing that institutional knowledge. It sucks because we can't become that learning organization. It's a two-way street. It doesn't matter if you're a rookie. I've learned stuff from rookies and 25 to 30-year Hotshot vets.
Once you say that you don’t have time to read or learn, it’s back to trial and error. You are opening up a lot of risks.
I've learned something even entering the most unassuming thing. If we're losing those quality mentors, whether it be on a career mentorship, a knowledge of fires or slideshow mentorship context, it sucks. It's like, “Where are we heading?” What are your thoughts on that? It's hard to say because no one has a crystal ball but where are we going?
I like the old sayings and there's an old saying, “May you live in interesting times.” We certainly live in interesting times. One of the things that a learning organization ensures is that when people leave, critical knowledge doesn't leave with them. We got a lot of work to do in that arena. I do want to be clear that being a learning organization isn't something that you ever arrive at. It's not like, “I'm a good person and I will always be a good person.” No, you move in and out. Smart people do dumb stuff all the time. A learning organization is always trying to figure it out.
A learning organization must ensure that critical knowledge doesn’t leave with the people even when they leave.
As I see good quality people leaving, they're taking a ton of knowledge with them that we haven't captured and that's scary. That means that the rest of us are going to be learning those old lessons without the benefit of them there to guide us through it. I'm in an incredibly privileged position. I have a job where I'm paid to learn, think and read. That’s the family liaison from Tom's event. He became my mentor and he's now my boss. We've been together on this crazy learning since then. I have benefited from Ivan and that experience. Even though he is retired, we still talk often. He's still teaching me how to be whom I'm trying to be inside of this crazy little group that very few have ever even heard of.
I don't assume that there are a lot of folks out there that are privy to the Office of Innovation and Learning. There are not a lot of people out there that even know this stuff exists. A lot of people probably don't know a lot about Metareview either. To expose this to a wider audience and get more data, feedback and lessons learned, it's going to be a good thing because you can never stop learning. It's my opinion. The day I stop learning about something is the day I'm going to quit it.
It’s been an interesting challenge. The Metareview was released before Thanksgiving of 2022. I'm the first to admit bad timing. There were reasons for it. We needed to get it out. We'd been waiting so as soon as we got the thumbs up, we acted on it and got it out there. In the Metareview, we critique email as a form of communication. Everybody is doing their email triage. I don't blame anybody for not knowing about the Metareview. I jokingly ask people to check their deleted folder when they say they've never heard of it because it's in there.
It got auto-filtered with every other forward and every other thing that didn't appear to matter to me and them. There are many things, if I had to do over again with the Metareview. Probably the top one is the name. The Wildland Fire Metareview doesn't exactly inspire curiosity. At least it doesn't for me and many that I've talked to don’t either. If you have a data bent and you like numbers, Metareview sounds cool but we've got a lot to learn on how to get this into the hands of people that we need to use it. We spent a boatload of time creating products that we hope will be useful but if they never open that email or attend a webinar, they'll never see it.
That is compounded by people being busy, doing stuff. It's another thing too. I'm guilty of it. A lot of people are guilty of this. How many all-call, all-forests, all-agency emails like an all-call email that goes out there? You didn't even read it. You just marked it as red and check it off your list so it's not sitting there in your inbox. How many times does that happen? For me, it happened all the time but I didn't care.
This stuff didn't pertain to me. The name is fine but it's the explanation and putting out the word. Also an understanding. We jumped right into some personal experiences and like Metareview, we talked about the topics, individual and little juicy chunks so far. Let's get down to the brass tacks of it. What is the Metareview?
Metareview started a twist but it's not about a twist. As a safety action plan item for the Twisp River Fire Fatalities and Entrapments Learning Review, talk about a mouthful of a name, it tasked the Forest Service with conducting a Metareview. That was one of the first things I had to learn like, “What is a Metareview?” If the Twisp River Learning Review is a singular event, a Metareview takes a bunch of them. What we did in the Metareview is took 2007 to 2016. If the event took place in Forest Service jurisdiction or involved a Forest Service employee, it became part of the review. Something like 273 incidents were reviewed. I could be off on that number, I apologize if I am.
The idea is if you learn some things from singular events, what can you learn from sequences of events? What are the trends? What are the commonalities? What are the differences? It would be easy to say and we did, it started as a quantitative analysis where we asked, “How many HIPAA events do we have? How many motor vehicle accidents do we have? How are our people getting hurt or killed?” We generated a report and it's called the HIPAA Eye Report because it highlighted how often our folks get hit by rocks and trees.
They put it out there and it generated some dialogue. It got people thinking a little bit about the work that we ask our people to do but it didn't fulfill the hope. The challenge with this is, what is the hope? We're still trying to figure that out. What happened next was it evolved. It went from the numbers to the stories, the experiences of wildland firefighters, anybody that is part of the Wildland Fire System could contribute to this.
IOL did a series of focus groups that focused on five topic areas. How do our interactions with society at large impact while on fire safety and risk? How does our knowledge of ecology and fire's role in the ecosystem impact how we engage with it? That series of five focus groups was incredible. The lived experiences of the people doing the work added the story to the data.
This is when three others and I were brought on board, Lakota Burwell, Wendy McCartney and Craig Conley. We were all brought on board to take this data, these qualitative stories from focus groups and these numbers and do something with it. Sarah Brown, an amazing individual and mentor in this gave us the most important and unreasonable leader's intent that I've ever received. She said, “No matter what you do, don't just write another report that no one ever reads.”
The last thing I wanted to hear about an incident is it was not as captivating. It doesn't provide the human complexities right there. You can have all the data in the world and it doubles in the details. It makes sense. If you don't throw that human component into it and provide any context to it, then what's the point?
Arianna Huffington, the Founder of Huffington Post believes and I've adopted this as my core belief with Learning too, “People learn best by combining two things, data and story.” We had no idea that that's what we were doing but that's what we were doing.
People learn best by combining two things: data and story.
It's all put out there with another review.
It was a funny evolution because no matter how great Sarah's leader’s intent was, none of us knew what to do with it. We started writing a report. It was on a road trip with my wife. Whoever's driving gets to control the radio. I'm driving and I love audiobooks. She hates them. I put on David Goggins Can't Hurt Me. The book is one thing but the audiobook has several cool things in it. If you haven't listened to it, check it out.
The ghostwriter reads it and then they do a podcast-style interview between Goggins and the writer. Each chapter has a challenge. As we were driving across the country, I'm looking at my wife and she was digging it. She's enjoying it. I'm like, “If this is working here, maybe we need to do an audiobook. Maybe we need to have chapter challenges and do a podcast-style interview at the end of each chapter.” We didn't end up doing that at the time, mainly because I have no idea how to do what you do but here we are.
What the work became is figuring out what can we do differently. The way that it's structured, each chapter is a standalone chapter. If you only have 15 minutes, go to chapter 8 and read that chapter. You don't need to start at page 1 and end at page 73, whatever it is. Find the topic that interests you. If it's The Quest for 1,000 Hours of Overtime: Money as an Incentive to Risk, go to that chapter and read it. Do the chapter challenge with your crew. If it’s Is “Safety First” a Myth?, ask yourself, to you is safety first? If it's not, what does that mean? If it is, how do you live it? Each chapter has that thing to it. It's short and consumable. It has a chapter challenge that helps you talk about it with your group.
Ultimately, the best feedback we've gotten is with the audiobook version. People are incredibly thankful for that. The chapter challenges have been used in fire refreshers, regional leadership team meetings and forest leadership team meetings. In the interagency community, I've had a couple of other champions like Eric Fransted with the Risk Management Committee who picked it up and had it as a dialogue with the NWCG Risk Management Committee. I can't say that everyone's read it but people have read it and picked it up. That's super cool to see.
I'm looking at all the different ways you have this produced and there are a lot of different ways to digest this information. It kicks ass. There's some good stuff. I went down a rabbit hole and was digging into it on my cell phone, which is hard to read. Maybe that's because I have terrible eyesight as I age. You have a bunch of different ways to digest this. Just like you were saying with the book with David Goggins book. It's the same thing with Jocko's books.
If you listen to it on audio, there's a little bit more of a feel to it. There are explosions in the background as Jocko is reading the chapter. It adds so much. When you have all these varieties, you can even follow along. You could pull up the interactive PDFs or the individual chapter PDFs. You can pull the story maps and then follow along with the audiobook version of that chapter. That's pretty awesome because it's adding more complexity to it. It's a different way of understanding. People that are tactile learners, auditory learners or visual learners have everything out there. You can do it all. There's some good stuff in there. I'm not going to lie.
Sometimes I get down on myself talking about an audiobook as an innovation. Is that an innovation? They've been around forever. Through my learning, I learned that creativity is doing something new or coming up with something new. Innovation is doing something new, bringing something out there into your organization or company and doing it. We weren't doing audiobooks. The El Dorado Fire Learning Review has an audiobook. It's in our future. I trust that we will see more and more audiobooks. Story maps are incredibly engaging and you're seeing them all over the place. Still, there are readers. For you, we've got the interactive PDF.
There are a lot of quality topics in there and I want to dive into some of them. There are fourteen chapters.
The final chapter is pretty short.
There are some hard questions that we always talk about on the line. This is like mop-up talk but it's presented in a very scientific form. It's combining the data, the science and the anecdotal storytelling process all into one. It's very powerful. Some of it is very moving and it makes you question some of your actions in how to be a better leader or firefighter and all that stuff. Did you even question some of the things with even policy that we pursue?
Chapter 11 for instance, The Quest for 1,000 Hours of Overtime: Money as an Incentive to Risk. I can't tell you how many times over the course of my career I've used chasing OT and hazard pay as an excuse to stay out on the line a little bit longer and do stuff when I was fatigued. It's not the right thing but we're broke and we got to survive the winner. I get it. That's a hard decision to make.
Do what's right. We're a high-performance learning organization, yet we have to do some of these hard things and make those hard decisions, especially, if it's the agency's bottom line or even your own. That bottom line could be financial health, mental health and a litany of things. It’s a huge list of stuff.
The process of learning our way through this was enlightening. There was so much that I didn't know. The Quest for 1,000 Hours of Overtime is a great example. When that question was first posed to our focus group participants, they struggled with it. You don't want to admit that.
That's the basis of our job. We're exchanging it. No, it doesn't feel good but even at the end of the day, whether you're chasing OT, our job is inherently dangerous and it goes into that. You're exchanging for money.
It's to understand the conditions that are influencing people's decisions and actions. What I like to say and what I hope we do a good job saying in this chapter is that while people live paycheck to paycheck, there is no wonder that they make decisions that put money in their pockets. This is part of the challenge. If you live paycheck to paycheck, you get that because you're living that.
If through either chasing grades, you’re getting paid better. My wife is a great example. She's a money genius. She was financially stable much earlier than I was. For those that don't live that anymore, it's easy to forget. To a great extent, this chapter is to remind those that no longer live that experience what it was like to live that way.
Especially when they get into the GS fantastic level.
Once you remember, it's like, “I was there too.” Every GS fantastic was so it's looking at it from another perspective. It's acknowledging that as long as that condition exists and people are living paycheck to paycheck and thinking about the money instead of the work, we can't be surprised with where we're at. If you want to change it, as Dan Pink says, what we present in this chapter is, “Pay people enough to take the question of money off the table so that they're focused on the work, not the money.”
The challenge with our folks is time and time again they make great sound risk management decisions. That's what we try to highlight in Is “Safety First” a Myth?. We shift the focus from the individual making the risk decision based on their financial conditions to a certain extent, what the organization says and what it's willing to do. We say, “No tree is worth a life than send people into burning fours.” They're doing it.
There are a lot of outside pressures too, which is the safety one, I'm breezing through it. I didn't get the chance to read this one in particular but it goes and alludes to the fact that we make decisions based on outside pressures. I'm going to say this because sometimes it's a bullshit mission, like mopping up 500 feet in on a dead fire and you're looking for something to do. Why is that motivating us to go into a patch of fire-weakened trees and mop up for days and days on it for political smoke?
For me, one of the greatest experiences with this was recognizing that whether it's a District Ranger, Forest Supervisor, Regional Forester or Chief, I will never say that their risk is the same as the sawyer under a tree. They're walking into the governor's offices and the fields of Congress. They're working in areas that I would never walk into. The idea of a public meeting isn’t me. That's terrifying to me.
They walk this super important different fire line and them being successful in resisting those political and social pressures so that you are not mopping up 500 feet of interior, we need them to be great at their work. I don't need them to be great Pulaski swingers. I need them to be in that public meeting and that meeting with the governor's office advocating for the Pulaski swingers.
Educating the public so people understand what we do. Fires just don't go out. We say it's out. In reality, public messaging and public education about how Wildland Fire works are extraordinarily lacking. Those folks that are taking that enormous social and political risk and risk of being crucified in front of the general public were fired. It's not the same risk as standing under that tree and falling a hazardous tree, by no means but it's still a risk.
It's a battlefield that I don't understand. It's been a bit but I still got a pretty good feel. I know the world changed. I don't know what it is to be an engine captain anymore. The stuff that engine captains are dealing with is nothing like I was dealing with them but we still have a similar language and walk the same line. That provides a connection. I don't walk the same fire line as the chief does but through this process especially the Socio-Political Pressures: Real and Perceived, the Telling Our Story and Communication Leading to Trust, I don't envy anybody walking those fire lines. I'm very deliberative in saying that. It is a different fire line.
I was going to point out something too between a lot of these chapters. A majority of them are all interconnected. They all play off of each other. I was looking through Is “Safety First” a Myth?. That's also tied into chapter eleven. It's all of them. Maybe except for chapters 1 and 14 but 14 could be argued again as well because that's continuing the story.
One of the challenges is how do you tell a cohesive story that is consumable in bite-sized chunks. It was a back-and-forth between how much we repeat ourselves because they do connect and how much we point to other connections. They're interconnected. The fun part about the focus groups is the A Focus Group might be there to talk about fiscal incentives. Another one talks about fatalities and injuries. Another one talks about society. They're all talking about the same stuff from a different perspective.
It all plays into each other. It's a fantastic job because it's explaining the data-driven methodology behind explaining the culture behind Wildland Fire, whether it's your GS fantastic or up in the WSES position down to your GS-3 rookie and how they're all interconnected. It's good. It's brilliantly done. Kudos.
It's a lot of great minds working towards that leader's intent that Sarah laid out. My focus is on the written document but I can't downplay the data review, combing through hundreds of learning reviews, FLAs and Rapid Lesson sharing. The research scientists put their specialty to play which resulted in the HIPPA report. The cultural themes that we unpack here, all of this, probably 30 or maybe 40 people over the course of the years contributed to this.
When I was working with Ivan, I had the opportunity. He and I went and met Dr. Edgar Schein. I had no idea who Schein was at the time. His book is thick and I leave through it. I was a horrible student and I never dug into it. Schein is a brilliant guy with culture. One of the things that he taught me was that all too often we say it's culture and we shrug our shoulders as if there's nothing we can do about it.
Schein teaches that leadership's response to events shapes culture. What you do in response to events matters. I've expanded that a little bit over the years, recognizing that the guy sitting in the back seat, their response to events is going to shape culture on my crew too. It's not just me. Every one of us has a role to play in this. If we respond to this as an event, what do you mean by “Safety First” a Myth? We talk about it and then we're getting somewhere.
Those sitting in the backseat must actively play their role in shaping the culture of their crew. It is never just about themselves.
I even think it's more than that. After years of doing this show and interviewing people, there's not a lot of institutional trust with the boots on the ground. I'll be the first one to say that. Boldly enough with this Metareview, you call yourselves out and hold yourselves accountable as an agency. Bold move. I don't think a lot of people know about this because half the problem of changing that culture that you're talking about is understanding why we've gotten to this state in the first place over the last few years. This has taken a lot of stuff from the past.
You're right. It does take a lot of stuff from the past. We scrolled down but if you check out the website, I can't understate the importance of the message from Jaelith Hall-Rivera and Cynthia West. The Metareview was done and we sent it off to leadership for approval. It took over a year to get to the release date. Over the course of that year, I lost hope.
I was at best expecting them to come back and say, “You need to delete this.” A great one in the Mental Health and Suicide, a Call to Action chapter, there's a focus group statement where an individual said that people are committing suicide because they aren't getting the help that they need through OWCP. That's a compelling statement.
I expected leadership to say, “You can't say that. You got to delete that,” but it's in there. It took time to get it out. Ultimately, I didn't release it. I was advised to leak it out there but no. Leadership is saying, “We are going to share this experience with everybody.” That's how you build trust. It’s one of the ways. We still have a long way to go. I'm not saying that we're there but trust is a product of what?
There are a lot of things that go into trust and what builds trust. There's leadership, sacrifice, dialogue and asking the hard questions. After reviewing this thing, I'm very surprised that you got a carte blanche to say all the quiet parts out loud, which is cool. It's not as graphic as the quiet parts out loud. We talk on the line per se like a human-to-human interaction or when we're bored out in the middle of the Nevada desert, mopping up some BS fire. It's written down and recorded in a way where it's easily digestible but also calls out some of the glaring issues that our culture faces and holds you accountable as an agency. Also, holding the individual part of that agency accountable as well. You have the power to change things.
Every one of us. If it had been either IOL or researcher leadership saying, “Here is the Metareview and the list of recommendations. This is what we're going to do to fix this,” this stuff isn't like that.
It may not have even happened. This episode right here is going to have to have multiple parts because we're going over a broad overview but a lot of this stuff is so complex. I would love to see if we can go into some of these individual chapters with some of the subject matter experts that assisted in writing these chapters and what they've identified. Do you think we can do that and make a couple of parts? I want to talk about the mental health one, The Quest for 1,000 Hours. There are a few of them that I want to take a deep dive into.
The website itself is the first part. What comes next is the important piece, the dialogue about these things. What we're doing is every third Wednesday of each month, we hold a Metareview webinar and do a different chapter each month. Those webinars are open to everybody. I have GS, I don't know what the lowest level is, the 5 or 6 somewhere in there up to Washington Office, senior leaders attending these things. I even had a congressional staffer at the last one. This is all about coming together and talking about these things.
These are open to everybody. Extend that invite to every one of your audience, including yourself, to join those webinars but we're more than willing to come and talk about them anywhere. Here's one of the things that I'll say. Take a look at a chapter and the challenge. I hope you'll realize that you don't need me. You need you and your peers and those you lead and follow to talk about this stuff.
Come up with the ideas and then engage. You guys have the solutions to this, not research and development. Wherever you're sitting in the organization, those closest to the work often have the best ideas on how to improve that work. That is a foundational philosophy of learning in this organization. We got to live with that.
Not the truth but it's hard. I get it. The time alone that's required to dedicate something like this sucks because a lot of us are still seasonals. During the winter, the last thing we want to do is do something like this. 1) We're not getting paid for it. 2) You probably want to chill. Even if you're still on duty, you want to go do your pile burning and then relax like in The Quest for 1,000 Hours of Overtime season.
Time for reflection is a foundational building block of learning and a learning organization. Time for reflection is finite. Even if we could seal back a few scraps of time, how will you use that time? If you use that time to take a breath, also necessary, first thing, recover, breathe and then use that time to do the other stuff that's on your plate a little bit better and quicker. You need to do that. Learning is down the way a little bit but if we are going to live as a learning organization, that's our task. Create the time for learning, engagement and dialogue. This is the tricky part. Hopefully, through that engagement, your life will get better. It is worth it.
I have a question for you regarding the people that want to get involved with the Metareview and do these webinars and stuff. There's an obvious fear factor. There's a fear factor of reprisal, being judged by your peers and a huge list of stuff. As far as saying some of the quiet parts out loud, you probably have heard it all during this whole development process.
You probably heard some pretty terrifying stuff. The distrust of the institution is alive and well, especially in the fear of his prize little thing. What do you have to say to the folks that are reading this that would like to get involved? Telling those hard stories, either privately or publicly, how do we ensure their protection? That's going to be a big barrier to people wanting to be involved.
There are a couple of different ways to approach this. One of the things that we do in focus groups is to participate in a live interpersonal focus group, you do extend your trust to the people in the room. In the review, you'll see that quotes are never attributed by name. It’s by position only so that you get the perspective. IOL makes that commitment to protect your thoughts and that's in a focus group. That's a way that we do it. If that is still a bridge too far and I get it, it is for many. It was for me in a lot of ways.
One-on-one interviews are available. Attend a Metareview webinar and lurk. The breakout rooms are not recorded. We record the intro piece but not the breakout rooms. You got to trust the people that are in the breakout room and do your internal risk assessment. You'll look at the names and see, “That person here I can't trust.”
Probably the greatest thing I would say and I steal this from Brené Brown is, “Vulnerability without boundaries is not vulnerability.” Know what your vulnerability boundaries are. If you're in a room where you can't cross that boundary, even if it's your honest truth, then find another way to speak that honest truth. If it's one-on-one with me, great. If it's one-on-one with one of the other IOL employees, fantastic.
If it's on the podcast or somewhere else, whatever it takes, find a way to share that. With the focus groups, I say that everyone in the Wildland Fire System is one invitation away from participation but you do have to conduct your social and psychological safety risk assessment. If you're not safe, don't but find a way to get safe and do.
Bringing it back to the same conversation and topic, it's even with third parties. It's not just my show but there are a lot of folks out there that have been on different third-party shows outside the agency. The thing that sucks is I have to have this disclaimer in this talk with folks that don't have permission. They're begging for forgiveness to tell their story and speak their truths. It's like, “I can't protect you.” You have to find a way to say the quiet parts out loud without getting your ass in a crack.
I was advised to leak the Metareview. I say advice but it was a friend who was like, “Just send it out. What are they going to do to you?” It was so important to me for trust and leadership to say, “Yes, we are going to share this with everyone.” Not just with the organization but with our interagency partners in the public. It's wide open. I've had several people ask, “Isn't this sharing your dirty laundry?” My answer is, “Yeah, you got to pull dirty laundry out of the closet to deal with it.” It's human and that's the beauty of these topics.
You need to pull your dirty laundry out of the closet if you want to deal with it.
The real challenge is they transcend time. How long have we as a culture been dealing with suicide? It wasn't that long ago. We didn't even bury them in the same cemetery as everybody else but now maybe we're approaching it differently. Talk about standing on the shoulders of giants. Twenty years of war forced this country to address the impacts of suicide. We're learning a ton from them. I wish we didn't have that resource to learn from but we do. The conversation now is very different from years ago. Years from now, the conversation's going to be even further along. Will we have the nut cracks? I hope so but it's human. Will we ever figure out this human thing? I don’t know.
The day we do is probably this time we should stop trying. Hopefully, we don't figure out the human experience and what the meaning of life is because if I knew everything, I wouldn't want to be a part of it. Sorry, it sounds cold. I don't mean to tie it into the suicide thing but what's the point of life if you know everything about it?
People often ask, “Where are the recommendations? What do we need to do?” The whole thing is a recommendation. The recommendation is to talk about it. Talk about Is “Safety First” a Myth? and Socio-Political Pressures. This is the tricky one because a lot of us aren't ready to talk about the heavy mental health and suicide topics that are necessary. We got to do the work to get ready. In that chapter in particular, skillfully, we can address this but without that skill, we can cause harm. Don't go into these dialogues flippantly. Do your homework and have a plan but silence doesn't serve us. That's how we got here.
Some of these chapters are heavy and a lot of them come with trigger warnings as well, which is needed. We need to have those things. We're going to be talking about some heavy stuff here, reading and learning about these heavy topics.
One of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman, has something cool to say about trigger warnings. He hates them. I understand their necessity and so does he but his position is, “Stories should move us. It's in the movement that we work our way through it.” Trigger warning but it should move us.
Tying the emotional and human component into all this stuff of why we operate the way we do and how we operate as a culture. It's all pretty much laid out there. It's condensed. Don't get me wrong. It's not a bridged version of the human condition but for the most part, it's all on there. I'm rather impressed. I want to say thank you to you and everybody involved with creating this because it needs to be talked about it.
I've been grinding on Metareview 2.0, the next one. If we're still talking about the same stuff, it means we have more work to do. I trust we will be talking about different stuff as well. Dig into this one. Have the dialogues, prove me wrong and make the next Metareview about something different. I'd be thoroughly pleased about that but that's another unreasonable expectation.
It takes time. Bring it back to the beginning of this, the time we don't have. I'd throw a suggestion out there. I would like to see a little bit more expansion on substances and self-medication, drinking and all that stuff. It's brushed upon but do a whole chapter on that. That'd be interesting. We're going to get rolling to the end of the episode. I would love to have you back on the show. Maybe we can do some live and go into some of these individual chapters as third-party, not like the webinar. That'd be cool. If we expanded on some of these with some of the folks involved and they're willing, I would love to have that and go down that path.
I'd like to think it's a sign of increasing trust. It might be something else. The more people I talk to, the more willing they are to have their names attached to their positions. I don't mean a position like a job. I mean what they think. On the website, you'll see a couple of focus group participants that were willing to be interviewed and they share their names in there.
Thom Taylor, Persephone Whalen, Ken Watkins, Kim Lightly, Jason Kuiken and Ted Adams. You can hear a little bit from those people in their words in those interviews. That's on the website. I'd be more than willing to reach out to some of our focus group participants to see if they'd be willing to do this and we'll see where we go.
I can't wait to see what's next. This is going to be cool. This is all stuff that's part of our culture and it needs to be addressed. If we don't talk about it and we don't understand it, then how are we going to change it? Thank you to you and everybody involved in putting this together. We'll get some more information on it as well.
It’s my pleasure to represent that group. A lot of great people have been involved in this.
As far as where to find all this stuff, where do we go?
Metareview has a forward-facing website. You don't need to be a forward service employee. Your audience would dig that and we could talk about that next time too maybe. The website is the best. What I would suggest is to sign up for the mailing list. It's in the Metareview final chapter challenge. I won’t spam you. I don't sell your email address but sign up for that mailing address and you'll hear about all things Metareview. Including, I hope Metareview 2. It's on the horizon. My boss is probably going to kill me for saying that in public.
Too late. It's out there. How do we get ahold of you?
I'm in a privileged position. Talking to people about this stuff is my work. Never hesitate. Reach out. We'll arrange a time and chat.
You're the host. I'm a facilitator asking dumb questions. I always give the opportunity for you to give a shout-out to some homies, heroes and mentors. Whom have you got for us?
I've mentioned several of them. It's a long list. Jim Saveland, I have a popularity reform in this. Jim Gum, my boss, was there with Tom's family too. At the time, I didn't know Jim. He was a public affairs officer and you can imagine how that looked to me at the time. Jim knows what it's like to lose a son. He was the right person to be with Tom's family and he's taught me so much about everything, this work being a human. Bob Bell, I owe him so much. Also, Chris Ore. That's a long list.
The IOL crew, in general, is a unique collection of people that want to do some brain-bending but important work. In the future, keep your eye open for details about the group. We're getting bigger. We call them our catch-and-release program where people come in and spend 120 days with us. We suck their brains dry and then send them back out into the wild. Hopefully, we've inspired some interest in that because we'd love to share what we do with people.
Ben, I want to say thank you once again for being on the show and sharing the general overview of what the Metareview is going to be, what it is and where it's going in the future. Honestly, I do think that these stories and information have the power to change the perceptions and also how we go about things in the future as far as culture, operations and all that stuff to making us human and wildland firefighting humans at that. This is awesome. We'll get you back on the show.
It's my pleasure. I’m glad to do it.
Everybody, I hope you check out the Metareview. I Google searched it. It's easy. Forest Service or USDA Metareview. It's right there. SEO is good. You don't have to search for it or dig but check it out. If you want to be involved with the next iteration or do some discussions, we'll get linked up to the proper people.
Even if you think we're crazy, we're open to hearing that too. We're in good company.
Ben, thank you so much. I appreciate it. We'll get you on the next time. Thank you.
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Another episode of the show is in the books with our good friend Ben Iverson. Ben, thank you so much for being on the show and for taking on this monumental project. You're throwing a lot of experience that you've had especially with the past events that you've witnessed into this Metareview process. I deeply appreciate that. It's only going to make our culture a little bit more aware of societal norms, the reasons why we do certain things and leadership blocks. The list goes on. It's crazy.
I honestly hope that this overall look from the top level down and then back up with the Metareview improve some of our safety in the field and gives us a good deep insight into why wildland firefighters do the things they do and why these cultural norms are so ingrained within our society. It's only going to make us safer in the long run. This whole thing is a big deep dive into Wildfire culture. If you want to get involved, hit up Ben. Get involved because the only way we're going to learn about ourselves is by learning about ourselves. It's pretty cool.
This whole Metareview is on the Forest Service website. All you have to do is type in a Google search for Metareview and it'll pull it up. The first three chapters take a look back over some major events. Chapters 4 through 11 are going to be the highlight of the “Big 8.” That's going to be the biggest challenge within the Wildland Fire System. One I found particularly fascinating in there was the “Safety First” culture being a total myth. That's an interesting one.
What I'm saying is this is a pretty cool thought experiment and you might learn something out of it. Ben, thank you for being on the show. I appreciate it. As for the rest of you, I hope everybody's doing well and something picks up because probably people are going a little bit stir-crazy but we'll see what the future has in store for all of us. Canada is ripping off as it has been but the lower 48 eventually will pop off. Keep it together out there and don't get complacent.
Special shout-out to our sponsors. We've got MYSTERY RANCH, purveyors of the finest dam packs in the Wildland Fire game plus more. Do you want to find out more about the MYSTERY RANCH Backbone Series? Go over to www.MysteryRanch.com and check it out. We've got Hotshot Brewing, kick-ass coffee for a kick-ass cause. A portion of the proceeds will always go back to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. Go over to www.HotshotBrewing.com to find out more.
We've got the A.S.S. man, Mr. Booze himself with The A.S.S. Movement. Go over to www.TheFireWild.com and check out The A.S.S. Movement for all your poo-bearing propaganda. Last but not least, we've got the Smokey Generation AKA Wildfire Experience. Bethany, you have a kick-ass organization over there. Keep it up. You all know the drill. Stay safe. Stay savage. Peace.
Important Links
About Ben Iverson
Ben Iverson has had a diverse and evolving career within the federal land management agencies. He spent the majority of his time working on engines in Northern California on the Modoc National Forest. However, he has also gained experience with all five federal land management agencies throughout his career. Initially starting in the park service, he later transitioned to Fish and Wildlife for a permanent position. Additionally, he worked with the BLM at NWCG training, focusing on operational aspects of firefighting.
In recent years, Ben's career took a shift towards training and organizational learning. He became involved in type three incident management teams and embraced the opportunity to expand his skill set beyond operational roles. Ben recognizes the wide range of opportunities available within the field, emphasizing that there is more to firefighting than just being on the ground and wielding tools like a saw.
Ben's perspective began to change after a challenging day in 2009. This experience prompted him to explore human factors and delve into understanding the events of that day. In doing so, he encountered influential mentors who guided him towards concepts such as human factors and system safety. Ben's dedication to learning and professional growth led him to contribute to the development of what is now known as IOL (Innovation and Organizational Learning).
Throughout his winding career, Ben Iverson has shown a willingness to adapt and embrace new avenues within the realm of firefighting. From operational roles to training and organizational learning, he continues to evolve professionally and contribute to the field in meaningful ways.
