On July 6, 1994, Donald Mackey was helping oversee a team of 49 firefighters on Storm King Mountain in Colorado. It looked like a routine fire, but it is always a mistake to treat any back-country blaze as routine. Bad luck and a fatal confluence of environmental factors contributed to the flaming ambush of the firefighters, but individual decisions were critical. Fourteen firefighters, including Mackey, died on the mountain that afternoon as the fire blew out of control. Wildland fires are special. But the experience of those who fight fires in the outdoors has much to teach us about decision making indoors, especially when there’s little room for error or delay. And like so many critical business decisions, fire decisions brutally punish those who do not keep both the big picture and small detail in mind.

Acute Stress and Decision Making

Wildland fires can reach 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, race at speeds up to 25 miles per hour and leap overhead without warning. At their most dangerous, such fires are said to “blow up,” acquiring a manic momentum of their own. A blowup is one of nature’s most terrifying spectacles—one reason tension is ever-present in a fire zone. For crew leaders and incident commanders, the tension can become acute. The more severe the stress, the less optimal decisions are likely to be just at a time when they are becoming most consequential.

The decision-making burden on fire leaders is made even greater by three organizational factors that are prevalent in combatting wildland blazes. First, crew leaders guide a workforce that is largely seasonal since fires are most common in the summer. Second, leaders are required to collaborate with agencies over which they have no control. And third, as fire crews meld into temporary amalgamations on larger blazes, crew leaders and incident commanders find themselves working with, reporting to, or instructing others whom they have never met or barely know.

The weak relations among the parties also tend to result in information hoarding as much as sharing. Add up the parts—a reduced flow of information to the fire leader, a weakened commitment by the leader to exercise authority and diminished team compliance with the leader’s instructions—and you have the makings of a decision crisis.

Authority Begins to Blur

As light dawned on July 5, Butch Blanco, 50, a veteran firefighter with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, hiked up the mountain to evaluate the situation. Just a few months before, Blanco had qualified as an incident commander, the person who takes charge of a blaze. He and his team of seven began digging a line around the slow-moving fire. But this blaze was more tenacious than Blanco expected, and at 8:19 a.m. he radioed for help.