Desert Flames, ©Jarrett Scott Gladstone, 2020
The now eight-year-old documentary film Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare opens with a story about the fatal 1949 Mann Gulch forest fire in Montana, where thirteen elite Forest Service smoke jumper firefighters had parachuted into a remote canyon along the Missouri River expecting to put out what they saw as a routine fire. Instead they faced a deadly "blow up" when the small fire grew 3,000 acres in 10 minutes. As the fire roared toward them from the canyon below, the firefighters ran up the steep slope they were on. Their only hope for survival was being on the other side of the ridge forming Mann Gulch. Only three survived the blow up. Two because they were already on or close to the top of the canyon and didn't have far to run. The third survivor came up with a solution on the fly. Unfortunately his solution was too unusual to be used by those caught in the flames.
Although it’s about U.S. health care policy, Escape Fire refers to the Mann Gulch tragedy because the fire crew's leader, Wag Dodge, lived through the conflagration by doing something that appeared incomprehensible to his crew as they raced past him in their attempts to reach and crest the canyon ridge line and escape the flames: he set the grass ahead of him on fire. When you think about it, his idea appears crazy, because why would any sane person start a fire ahead of himself while an inferno is rapidly closing in behind him. Why would anybody block their escape by setting another fire in their path to survival?
What Wag did was make sense of the situation and create a sensible solution in response.
I find this story interesting because I used to fight forest fires in my younger days. I also read Norman Maclean's book exploring in detail the events that led to the tragedy. For now, I will focus on the Mann Gulch fire and then I will briefly go into the Escape Fire video. But this article is about sensemaking, which is one of four processes that people do to explain situations to themselves. By situations, I mean events that they find themselves experiencing in-the-moment. The other three explanatory processes are understanding, interpretation, and attribution. These processes help us understand how organizations and organization leaders make decisions in response to novel situations.
Making Sense of
Mann Gulch Fire
The Mann Gulch fire is an example of sensemaking because Wag and each individual firefighter found themselves trapped in a novel situation, a forest fire that didn’t behave as they expected it to behave. Sensemaking is relevant for us now because we are experiencing failures in health policy and leadership that we didn’t fully expect in our time. What makes sensemaking distinct from the other forms of explanation, understanding, interpretation, and attribution, is that it is in-the-moment. Sensemaking results in immediate action to a situation. This is what Wag did when he made sense of the fact that he and his crew were never going to out run the fire, and that there was one opportunity for survival. And when everything before him made sense, he acted. Unfortunately Wag’s sensemaking moment did not make sense to the rest of his crew, and understandably, he didn’t have a lot of time to convince his crew that his solution was sensible.
Recall that what Wag did was set fire to the grass ahead of him as the much larger raging fire approached him and his crew from behind. While this sounds completely crazy, the solution makes sense. Fire needs fuel to burn. Wag quickly made sense of this and set fire to the grass ahead of him intending to jump within the area he burned out. His thinking was that the fire closing in on him wouldn’t have anything to burn and would go around him.
His thinking was correct.
My firefighting experience helps me understand how his crew could have not understood what Wag was doing. In his post-incident report, Wag said that he was yelling at his crew to join him in the area he burned out, but none did. It’s theorized that it made better sense for them to get away from the fire rather than to let it catch up to them.
Escape Fire
If you have not seen the Escape Fire film, the preview on the film’s home page summarizes their metaphor with Mann Gulch. Prior to Wag’s idea to burn out fuel for the fire behind him and then use the burned-out space as refuge, the usual thinking was to get away from a fire. Escape fire is about the United States’ need to get out of its current paradigm for delivering health care: private, usually employer-financed insurance. Other than for a few people, health care is paid for by private insurers, and these insurers make their money by selling plans to employers who use the insurance plans as compensation for their employers. Like firefighting mindset prior to Wag Dodge’s idea to burn out a refuge area to survive an uncontrollable fire, Escape Fire argues for a dramatic change in how we think about financing health care in the USA.
Beside arguing for new financing models, Escape Fire points out how our thinking about health care in the USA is based on treatment rather than prevention. And many times we over-treat people, which leads to other health issues requiring further treatment, such as opioid dependency.
During this current Covid era, I find that Mann Gulch again helps us reflect on both critical weaknesses in the U.S. health care paradigm requiring us to think on-the-fly and come up with a new escape fire, and it continues to serve as a reminder about how we make sense of a situation will lead to our survival or not (see Karl Weick’s The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster, in Administrative Science Quarterly, 1993).
Today We Actively Are Practicing Sensemaking
Karl Weick says that sensemaking is about placing items into frameworks, comprehending, redressing surprise, constructing meaning, interacting in pursuit of mutual understanding, patterning (see Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations, SAGE Publications, 1995). Covid has forced us to place many items into frameworks for understanding: health care policy, leadership, politics, education systems, economics, to name just a few. The pandemic rolled into the USA in full force in early March and forced school and business closures, restricted travel, and caused related economic havoc through unemployment and reduced productivity. What many expected was mass hospitalization and deaths. The economic shutdown and forced isolation among ourselves created a major interruption in our lives.
Interruptions and failed predictions create havoc for our sensemaking processes (see Weick, 1993 and 1995, referenced above). Mostly for our top national leadership, who made sense of the looming pandemic as only a bad case of influenza. Unfortunately for our nation’s health care system and economy, top political leadership’s predictions about Covid had broken down, and as I write this article, he is unable to make sense of the magnitude of the crisis beyond the impact on his ego.
Escape Fire, Escape Paradigm
Escape Fire is a metaphor for creating solutions to life-threatening problems. The film’s focus was critical about an irrational funding system and over-reliance on disease treatment rather than prevention. At this moment, many conservative citizens are lamenting public health efforts for preventing a very serious Covid pandemic within the USA. For them, their lives have been interrupted, and as did the firefighters who chose to run rather than follow Wag Dodge’s lead to jump into a safe zone he burned-out for them, it appears that there might be some panic among people who find their lifestyles being changed. These conservatives protesting quarantining measures are acting in accordance to the way they made sense of the risks from Covid relates to public health orders meant to protect populations. Escape Fire says that we as a nation are stuck in a reactionary mindset when it comes to our health. The quarantine protesters shows the persistence of this mindset.
Leadership Sensemaking
While leadership fails, how do people lower down the leadership chains continue to function? To ensure that the sick receive care? To ensure that the healthy remain so? When leadership fails, people seek leadership elsewhere. I suspect readers of this article are my students in business and health care administration, leadership and ethics, so this paragraph is directed as a lesson for them.
Sensemaking
Sensemaking theory describes the processes that go on inside our heads when we are suddenly confronted with something new, unusual, and for the most times in sensemaking theory applications: harmful. Sensemaking is about how we react when the routine norms we experience in our daily lives are suddenly upset. Sensemaking is about when our safe routines are interrupted. Sensemaking is how we react to surprise.
Karl Weick goes into greater detail about sensemaking theory and I could continue, but for sake of time, I’ll summarize sensemaking in my classic brevity. In this case what sensemaking theory is about can be summed up in nine words:
Keep a cool head and fix the problem. Now!
This is easier said than done. But the best way you can react to a sudden threat is to always think ahead. Think about risks. As I teach to all my business management students, it’s one thing to know how to manage something, but management knowledge does you know good if you have no clue what you are managing. That is, know your job.
