Organizational Learning in Wildland Fire

The Lessons Learned Center got its start in 2002 because of three primary reasons. First, the interagency wildland fire community is a diverse community since it involves hundreds of wildland fire organizations at field and management levels. Second, the Tri-Data study that was completed after the 1994 South Canyon Fire fatalities recommended that the wildland fire community create a program where lessons learned could be shared widely with wildland fire professionals. Lastly, a recommendation from the re-engineering plan for the National Advanced Fire and Resource Institute (NAFRI) recommended incorporating lessons learned and best practices into the fire training curriculum. Organizational learning For the wildland fire community to successfully and safely perform its missions, it needs to be a learning organization. A learning organization is skilled in creating, acquiring, interpreting, transferring, and retaining knowledge, and purposefully modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights (Garvin 2000). The Lessons Learned Center is assisting the wildland fire community in becoming more of a learning organization by performing six critical tasks. These tasks are: • Collect intelligence about the environment; • Learn from the best practices of other organizations; • Learn from its own experiences and past history; • Experiment with new approaches; • Encourage systematic problem-solving; and • Transfer knowledge throughout the organization. To assist in organizational learning, the Lessons Learned Center is organized around three Focus Areas: collection and analysis, knowledge retention, and knowledge transfer. Collection and analysis