Let's go back to John Chambers, Silicon Valley. Those four good precepts from the Officer Candidates School of the US Marine Corps at Quantico, Virginia. Think about Charlene Barshefsky. Think about the problem with neckless trading. And now, we're going to do a bit of a deeper dive into a very difficult circumstance. Take me about five minutes to describe it. And then, I've got four or five questions I'm going to throw at you. So, absorb the information as we go forward in that I'm going to take all that we've done up to this point and ask you to apply what we learned from Silicon Valley, from John Chambers, from the US Marine Corps, from Charlene Barshefsky, from Andy Livermore, from Charles Elachi, and beyond. To interpreting the good and timely decisions that are going to be made as the team drops. There is the DZ, the drop zone you see now, and as they are on the ground and I'll do this a non-metric. The drop zone is about one mile from the fire. The fire, again, scope very small by Western US Fire Standards. It's about 30 acres, small fire. Fires like this start all the time with a lightning strike. That's what happened here. It's a very dry and combustible area. It's early August rather and thus, as you hit the ground, the drop zone, with a total of 16 firefighters, you're going to be heading towards that fire about a mile away. In a relatively routine operation. I've been doing this dozens of times across the summer months. As I said already, it's August 5th. And at 5:00 o'clock, after the team is on the ground at 4:00, the team leader, the team manager, this could be you, aged 33, his name is Wagner Dodge, simply turns to the other 15 members of his team and says, "Let's go." Three words. Let us go. Let's go. And the team heads down, there's the arrow, towards the fire, but a half mile on its way to the fire alarm. And now, the manager of this team without explaining himself, in fact, behind the scenes, other firefighters refer to him as a man of few words. Technically brilliant, but very often almost saying nothing. And true to form, when he gets to that one mile, sorry half mile point between the drop zone and the fire, he turns to the team and he says "All right everybody, stay here, eat something, I'll be back." And now to add to a point to anybody's good and timely decision making template, he heads towards the fire, the team leader, the team manager, to do what, to give it a fancy or maybe a more academic phrase, his due diligence. What that means is nothing more than knowing what our strategy is, which is to safely put out the fire. I'm now going to check to see, can we do it from the side? What are the fire conditions I should be savvy about? Due diligence. By the way, he's doing it by himself, keep note of that. As he comes close to the fire, his name is Wagner Dodge aged 33, nine years of experience, he abruptly turns around and goes back to where the team is finishing off their sandwiches. And to give that a time point, the lunch spot, that first arrow, they began at 5:00 o'clock and they get to the head of that first arrow at about 05:20. He's now come back and he says to the team without explaining what he saw, which was very bad news. I'll come to that in just a second. "I want you to go directly down on the chart here. I want you to go down the mouth of the gulch to river's edge." By the way, the river is the Missouri River. It originates in Montana. Most Americans, myself included, didn't appreciate that till I went there. And thus, he sent 15 firefighters without himself down to river's edge. In the meantime, he's going back to the drop zone, and that's that upper wavy arrow that actually has an arrowhead back at the DZ, just to the right. He doesn't explain that. He doesn't explain why the firefighters have been sent down to the mouth of the gulch, and that's characteristic of Wagner Dodge. Everybody says behind his back who have worked with him he's a man of few words, technically brilliant, nine years of experience, four front line, five years now as a team manager, and he knows how fire behaves, but he never seems to really want to put that into words in any form whatsoever. And thus, the team begins to head down to the mouth of the gulch without the boss. The team manager has gone back to the drop zone for reasons unexplained, that's the upper arrow. Now, if you were on that team, let's say a person being managed by Wagner Dodge, I'd like to now calculate or maybe just try to understand why has he sent you down to the mouth of the gulch? If we had a opportunity to talk about that pretty quickly, we're all saying that because there, I didn't mention this, I'll mention it now, because of a wind, very strong gusty blow that's coming from the lower right hand corner heading up towards the upper-left hand corner is probably hitting 40 miles per hour. This fire is very dangerous, could blow up. And what Wagner Dodge also discovered when he got close to the fire doing his due diligence, good that he found this out, is that the material on the ground is very dry, very thick, very combustible, more so more dangerous than what he could see from the aircraft as he circled twice around the drop zone. So, he's got 16 people now in potentially a lot of harm's way. So, the firefighters are now heading to the mouth of the gulch to come back to my question. I'd like you to think for a second the first of five questions. Why have you been sent down to the mouth of the gulch? Well, some of you are thinking, no doubt that it's to get around, call it the leeward side of the fire. The fire is blowing away from you, harder to stop it, but a whole lot safer. Secondly, though very important, firefighters then knew this, if you have a stream, a lake, swimming pool, an ocean close by, if the fire goes nuts, begins to spread, blows up to use the phrase of that particular profession, then you simply get into the water. To become a firefighter ironically at that time, you had to pass a swimming test, and you will survive any fire condition. So the firefighters, they are thinking, as I hope you thought too, "We're going to the leeward safer side." Consistent with the strategy, safety first is the top of the strategy for a firefighter. And also, we are thinking about worst case scenario. Okay? Part of the manager's template, if you will. You get to think about worst case, what can go wrong, and we got to guard against that. We got to be ready to bring overoptimism down so, it's extremely realistic. With that being said, I'm going to take us now to the next point. Wagner Dodge, that's the name of the firefighter in charge. The manager of this team gets up to the drop zone, comes racing back, and overtakes the team at about 5:20 PM. So, there's a final arrow I've drawn, a little hard to see there, in the middle of the gulch. They're almost to water's edge. And now, Wagner Dodge, the team manager, has resumed his place at the front of his 16, a total of 16 firefighters. And by the way, for the last few minutes, the number two person, momentarily, this is going to figure into the architecture of the moment, the number two person's first name is Bob. When the incident commander as the title goes, when Wagner Dodge went back to the drop zone, the number two person temporarily becomes number one. That's the protocol. The number two person's name is Bob Roberts Sallee, French Canadian name, is feeling probably pretty good about the fact that even though he's aged 17, he's actually the front leading firefighter, only temporarily. But for a moment, he's the team manager. But now, it's 5:40. And again, thinking strategically for a strategic intent, where does the intent come? Well, we've got to think strategically. I'd like you to take just a couple of seconds here. And if you're the team manager, what are you thinking? Right now, it's 5:40 PM on this fateful day, August 5th of a summer. What are you thinking about in light of what we've talked about so far and even go back to the section of this whole course on strategies? So, just take a second, think through what's on your mind or should be on your mind. Good. Sure enough, you're thinking about the condition of the people behind you. Got to worry about the people in our organization, are they fit? Are they staying with us? Got to think about where we could hunker down at nighttime, kind of forward planning. Got to understand what the fire is doing. I have to appreciate, do we have the right equipment and is there a need maybe for backup, more firefighters, because this fire, with a 40 mile an hour wind, threatens to become a much larger inferno? Unfortunately, in a few minutes, we just paused ever so briefly to think strategically and make our next good and timely decision that fire misbehaved. Just like humans, sometimes, fires are unpredictable and instead of going up towards the upper left hand corner, that fire has cut off our escape to the river. We're not getting into that water. And now, speaking of good and timely decisions, Wagner Dodge, 5:40 PM, abruptly turns and begins to head actually back up towards the drop zone. And in his head now are grave concerns about there, in a sense, entrapment behind a wall of fire. It's about 100-feet vertical. It's about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It's got a big wind coming up its backside. And so, he doesn't hesitate to take action. Good and timely decisions here. He says to number two, remember his name is Bob, "Bob, drop everything, get rid of it, throw it down. And now, stay with me. It's going to be a run for our lives. You got that Bob? Pass it down the line." Well, can you imagine? Got some summer volunteers, are all firefighters, but a few people have only been at this business for eight or nine weeks. They haven't heard this before. Word passes down the line, and they are really moving now up towards the drop zone, really. Where else can they go? And at this point, Wagner Dodge though makes a final terrible discovery. He kind of knew this, of course, but just didn't put it all in a broader context that he's coming out now of a forest. And so far, no problem in a sense because a fire will cut through a forest. A standard trees had about four or five six miles an hour. Most people can outrun that on a sustained basis even going up hill, which is what they've been doing of course. But now, all of a sudden, Wagner Dodge, everybody else strung out behind them, some feet away, appreciates that he's leaving the forest, and he's coming into an open area that is populated, covered with thick, shoulder-high, bone-dry prairie grass. I think intuitively, we know the problem. He knew it technically. A fire in prairie grass can spread through it at 15-20 miles an hour. It feels like the grass is blowing up. It's not. The fire just moves at a pace nobody can outrun under the circumstances or uphill. We've got big boots on. If you do a four minute mile, you're doing 15 miles an hour. You've got to do 20 miles an hour going uphill. Thick grass, heavy combat boots on, you're not going to do it. And so, for the moment, Wagner Dodge stops right now, probably 5:49 PM, and takes a match out of his pocket and starts a small fire right there, little red dot. Fire spreads out through the grass, becomes a burning ring of rest. Wagner Dodge steps back, takes a running dive through that burning ring, untouched by the flames, really. And now, he's in the middle. He's a man of few words. So he's not going to explain his actions. But Bob, the number two guy, can see that the boss, the team manager, is starting a fire up in the grass, and it's spread out very quickly. And the boss now has gotten inside a burned out area. I'd like you to take just a moment to think about what's the purpose of that fire. Unexplained, but you can imagine Bob is trying to understand what's the boss doing. We've got plenty of fire coming up our tailpipe. Why does Wagner Dodge want to put more in the landscape in front of us? Couple of seconds pass, Wagner Dodge signals to Bob, "Bob, get in here now." And Bob, for reasons I'm going to have you think about, start thinking right now about this decision, decides to go left, and he goes up over a cliff side or kind of a cliff crest and plunges into the next valley, over to the left of the screen there. The third firefighter today in this line, sort of like circus elephants almost, is named Walter Rumsey, and Walter takes a look. Does he follow the guy he's been following? Does he follow the team manager hue? He doesn't understand necessarily what that fire is all about. And whatever the thinking is, Walter decides to go with Bob. So, very physically, the red dot now has one person, the team manager. Two people have broken away from the team manager, and they're now down on the other side of a crest. The other 13, with fire increasingly coming up their backside, their shirts are beginning to smolder from the radiant heat. And I'm going to sum it up with three final arrows right here, the final 13 represented by three arrows only. Take a look at Wagner Dodge and a small burned out area. They kind of appreciate, we think, that two ahead of them had gone over to the left, but they're in the thick prairie grass when the fire does overtake them. And thus, the summary, terrible tragedy, I'm going ask you now to interpret what happened, the after-action review, looking back on decisions, so we can make them better next time.
