Center Posts “Learning From The Experts” Videos

The interagency Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) has posted a series of videos containing interviews with a number of people with extensive expertise in wildland fire on its “Learning from the Experts” web pages.

Current videos focus on fire behavior, prescribed fire and wildland fire use; more on other subjects will be appearing in the future.

The videos are part of the Fire Management “Deep Smarts” project, which has been undertaken “to capture the experience of our seasoned employees who are acknowledged by their peers to have high expertise in planning and implementing fire programs.” The “Deep Smarts” project is a cooperative effort with the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute and the National Park Service Fire Management Communication and Education Program.

The project stems from a realization by senior fire managers that a tremendous amount of real-world knowledge and experience on wildland fire issues is being lost daily due to the retirement of so many highly-qualified field personnel. In order to capture and relay this experience to a wide audience, a decision was made to video as many of these people as possible and post these videos on the LLC web page. This effort has been groundbreaking – as far as is known, no other group within a natural resource agency has made a similar attempt to capture the expertise of its departing or retiring employees.

Some of the inspiration for this effort and many of the techniques employed have been drawn from the “Deep Smarts” methodology advanced by Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap of the Harvard Business School. Additional background can be found in a paper on this project on the LLC web site: http://www.wildfirelessons.net/documents/Deep_Smarts_Final_052107.doc

The project has three parts – interviews with veteran fire behavior, prescribed fire and wildland fire use experts; interviews with fire management personnel involved in the 1988 Yellowstone area fires, which fire professionals believe was a major watershed in fire management practices; and interviews with NPS fire management personnel involved with the development of the NPS fire management program. Each of the interviews that members of the LLC staff have conducted is from one to two hours long, then edited down to a much shorter segment, generally 10 to 15 minutes long.

The “Learning from the Experts” project addresses three of the six critical tasks of a learning organization:

1. Learning from our past history and experiences.
2. Experimenting with new approaches (this was the first attempt to use the “Deep Smarts” model to convey knowledge through videotaped interviews).
3. Sharing the knowledge throughout the fire organization.