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THE IMPERMANENT ORGANIZATION



a competitive runner as well as a wildland firefighter, his specialty being 50 to 100 mile

runs. He designed his own packs to carry snacks and water on his long runs. Putnam

reports that routinely, about 3 miles from the finish, he would throw off his pack and be

astonished at the feelings of ‘exhilaration’ and increased speed when he did so. Later,

when Putnam began investigating wildland fire fatalities, he started to measure how far

people who died would have gone if they had dropped their packs and heavy tools.

He found that, in most cases, they would have made it to safety. However, for reasons

explained in Chapter 14, dropping one’s tools to gain speed in life-threatening conditions is tougher than it looks.

Back in Chapter 6 we referred to the ‘cardinal meditation’ in Buddhism that involves

impermanence, grasping/clinging, and egolessness’ (p. 93 of the reprinted article).

Suffering occurs when people become attached to impermanent things that disappear

in a changing world. In a world of ceaseless change, no tool, including the tool of an

organized form, is indispensable. To take impermanence seriously is to recognize that, ‘In

pursuit of knowledge, every day something is acquired; In pursuit of wisdom, every day

something is dropped.’ (Lao Tzu, cited in Muller, 1999, p. 134). Wisdom is the acceptance that things of the world go away.

If we do drop our tools, then what are we left with? Why is wisdom a possible byproduct of dropping? Consider the tools of traditional rationality as expressed in the rational

actor model. Those tools presume that the world is stable, knowable, and predictable.

To set aside some of those tools is not to give up complete reliance on the tools that

are ill-suited to the impermanent, the unknowable, and the unpredictable. To drop some

tools of rationality is to gain access to lightness and wisdom in the form of intuitions,

feelings, stories, improvisation, experience, imagination, active listening, awareness in

the moment, and empathy. As Lance Sandelands (personal communication, May 2005)

has suggested, tools preclude ways of acting. If you preclude ways of acting, then you

preclude ways of seeing. If you drop tools, then ideas have more free play. Just think of

the maxim that when you have a hammer, the entire world turns into things that need

to be nailed. Take that one step further. If you drop your hammer, then the world is no

longer a world of mere nails.

In a practical sense, to learn more about what happens when you drop your tools,

compare performance with and without the tool. Learn how much of a difference a

tool makes. In the case of firefighters, during their training they compare how fast they

can move with their packs on and with their packs off. When firefighters drop their

packs, this makes a big difference in speed if they are small people, but a smaller

difference if they are big people. The fascinating question is what is the equivalent

dimension for big and small size when we’re talking about people who benefit more

and less from dropping their overused ideas?

Part of the process associated with dropping one’s tools may include an audit of what

tools you do have. It helps to date when tools were first acquired because older tools

tend to be overlearned. These are the tools that people regress to when under pressure,

and they are the tools that are harder to drop (see Tenerife in Weick, 2001). Notice that,

if dropping one’s tools is a relatively new skill and not overlearned, stress will dissolve that

skill and force regression back to much earlier, much more resistant skills.

Dropping one’s tools is seldom a one-off process in the way that it is in a retreat

from an exploding fire. However, if you take a closer look at firefighting practice, there



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was a learning curve for dropping one’s tools. Initially, people in the Forest Service were

trained to drop their packs, but then it was discovered that the chances of survival

were better if they dropped their packs but kept their water and their radios. Initially,

people also learned to drop all their tools to pick up speed. However, this was later

refined to the directive that they drop their heavy tools like chain saws, 5 gallon water

containers, and sigg packs containing gasoline but keep light tools such as shovels,

which might help them clear away brush and create a spot that wouldn’t burn.

The following article was published in the 40th Anniversary Issue of Administrative

Science Quarterly, 1996, 41(2), 301–313.



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Drop Your Tools: An Allegory for

Organizational Studies

Karl E. Weick

University of Michigan

The following article was published in

301/Administrative Science Quarterly, 41 (1996): 301–313

© 1996 by Cornell University. Reproduced with permission.



The failure of 27 wildland firefighters to follow orders to drop their heavy tools so they

could move faster and outrun an exploding fire led to their death within sight of safe

areas. Possible explanations for this puzzling behavior are developed using guidelines

proposed by James D. Thompson, the first editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly.

These explanations are then used to show that scholars of organizations are in analogous threatened positions, and they too seem to be keeping their heavy tools and falling

behind. ASQ’s 40th anniversary provides a pretext to reexamine this potentially dysfunctional tendency and to modify it by reaffirming an updated version of Thompson’s

original guidelines.*

Anniversaries, such as ASQ’s 40th year of publication, are occasions to take stock.

Taking stock is an activity that is often a complex mixture of appreciation, wariness,

anticipation, regret, and pride, all fused into thoughts of renewal. Carlos Fuentes (1990:

49–50) talked about the complications of renewal when he described the modern

dilemma as “how to accept the diversity and mutation of the world while retaining the

mind’s power of analogy and unity so that this changing world shall not become meaningless. Being modern is not a question of sacrificing the past in favor of the new, but of

monitoring, comparing, and remembering values we created, making them modern so

as not to lose the value of the modern.”

In this essay, I explore a set of remembered, founding values for organizational studies

articulated by the first editor of ASQ, James D. Thompson (1956) in the first issue of the

journal. The vehicle I use to explore these values is a story of organizing and death that

played itself out in two separate disasters involving crews engaged in wildland firefighting.

In 1949, 13 firefighters lost their lives at Mann Gulch, and in 1994, 14 more firefighters

lost their lives under similar conditions at South Canyon. In both cases, these 23 men and

four women were overrun by exploding fires when their retreat was slowed because they

failed to drop the heavy tools they were carrying. By keeping their tools, they lost valuable

distance they could have covered more quickly if they had been lighter (Putnam, 1994,

1995). All 27 perished within sight of safe areas. The question is, why did the firefighters

keep their tools? The imperative, “drop your tools or you will die,” is the image that I want

to examine more closely.

* I am grateful to Ted Putnam, Mark Linane, Martha Grabowski, Lt. Col. Thomas Sawner, Kate O’Keefe, and

especially to Kyle Weick for their help with the details of this argument.



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The reluctance to drop one’s tools when threat intensifies is not just a problem for firefighters. Navy seamen sometimes refuse orders to remove their heavy steel-toed shoes

when they are forced to abandon a sinking ship, and they drown or punch holes in life

rafts as a result. Fighter pilots in a disabled aircraft sometimes refuse orders to eject, preferring instead the “cocoon of oxygen” still present in the cockpit. Karl Wallenda, the

world-renowned high-wire artist, fell to his death still clutching his balance pole, when

his hands could have grabbed the wire below him.

Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility, in short,

for many of the dramas that engage organizational scholars. It is the very unwillingness

of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies. These dramas, however, are not confined simply to the people in organizations that scholars study.

The scholars themselves are equally at risk. Kaplan’s (1964: 28) “law of the instrument”

portrays part of the risk: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he

encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques

in which he himself is especially skilled.” What else is “the law of the instrument” but a

pointed comment that social scientists refuse to drop their paradigms, parables, and propositions when their own personal survival is threatened. To drop one’s tools, then, is an

allegory for all seasons that is capable of connecting the past with the present.

To introduce the allegory as a vehicle for stocktaking, I develop the following argument. First, I briefly paraphrase Thompson’s four guidelines for inquiry in administrative science. Second, I analyze the puzzling reluctance of firefighters to drop their tools

and craft this analysis using Thompson’s guidelines. Specifically, the analysis highlights

the power of context, the complex relationships that determine organized behavior,

and the power of abstract concepts to reflect the details of firefighting into systems of

thought. Third, I exploit the allegorical quality of the story and suggest that organizational scholars are in a similar threatened position to that of the firefighters and face a

similar imperative to drop their heavy tools or they will be overrun. To drop one’s tools

is simultaneously to accept mutation and to modernize remembered values or to believe

the past as well as doubt it. These complex simultaneities are the essence of renewal and,

therefore, provide a suitable way to observe ASQ’s 40th anniversary.



Thompson’s Founding Values for ASQ

In the first issue of ASQ, the founding editor, James D. Thompson, published his own

vision of what the then-emerging field of administrative science might look like. The

abstract for his essay, titled “On Building an Administrative Science” (Thompson, 1956:

102), reads as follows:

The unique contribution of science lies in its combination of deductive and inductive methods for the development of reliable knowledge. The methodological problems of the basic

sciences are shared by the applied fields. Administrative science will demand a focus on

relationships, the use of abstract concepts, and the development of operational definitions.

Applied sciences have the further need for criteria of measurement and evaluation. Present

abstract concepts of administrative processes must be operationalized and new ones developed or borrowed from the basic social sciences. Available knowledge in scattered sources



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needs to be assembled and analyzed. Research must go beyond description and must be

reflected against theory. It must study the obvious as well as the unknown. The pressure for

immediately applicable results must be reduced.



At first this sounds like standard visionary boilerplate. On closer inspection, it foreshadows values that stand up well as a framework for renewal that both accepts mutation and creates analogy.

Thompson’s first sentence in the essay hints at his approach: “The issue of science

vs. art for administration seems to be vanishing with the realization that one approach

does not rule out the other” (p. 102). Nevertheless, since Thompson is not launching

the “

Administrative Art Quarterly,” he makes clear that his concern with science does

not mean that he is preoccupied with measurement, quantification, statistics, or laboratory experiments. Instead, he is interested in work that uses “both deductive and inductive techniques for the development of logical, abstract, tested systems of thought” (p.

104). Here’s where the remembered values surface, all four of which Thompson regards

as vital if inductive and deductive approaches are to be “blended” (p. 104).

First, administrative science should “focus on relationships” among phenomena

under stated conditions. Straightforward as this sounds, Thompson goes on to note that

relationships are often assumed rather than demonstrated. Configurations and contingencies are ignored in favor of simple relationships, and people settle for assertions that

A and B lead to C without asking the further questions of what else do A and B bring

about, and what else leads to C (p. 108)?

The second value is “the use of abstract concepts” to permit generalization and to move

beyond concrete events and research organized around “ad hoc hypotheses” (p. 106).

Thompson is worried that organizational researchers expend too much effort compiling

incidents that support rather than test particular points of view. He also worries that people will forego abstraction in favor of the immediately applicable and settle for “commonsense hypotheses framed at low levels of abstraction, without regard for general theory”

(p. 110). In a statement that could have come right out of the ‘90s, he insists that “current ‘best practice’ must be examined critically” (p. 111, italics in original ).

The third value involves “the development of operational definitions” that bridge concepts and raw experience. His interest in operational definitions is driven not by positivist

dogma, but by a desire to avoid concepts that are sterile, forever debatable, and unable to

be tested widely. Though Thompson labels his concern as being that of “definition,” in

fact he is arguing for operational distinctions or delineations so that theories can be differentiated at the scientific level, as well as at the metaphysical level. Theories are tested

only by imperfect exemplifications of their parameters, which means that definitional

operationism is impossible, but multiple operationism using designations that are flawed

in different ways, is not (Campbell, 1988). The key issue for Thompson is grounding and

approximations to knowledge, not spurious hard-headedness. Thompson resorts to some

unusual verbs to make his argument about bridging, noting, for example, that empirical observations need to be “reflected” against theoretical systems and that scientific

progress requires “convertibility of symbolic currency” (p. 107).

The fourth value discussed is that of the criterion problem: How do we judge that one

relationship yields a more desirable net effect than another one? Values of achievement,

utility, service, preservation, and maintenance are mentioned as examples, with the



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clear caveat that administrative science has yet to address this issue. The importance

of doing so lies in trying to predict the consequences of various administrative actions.

In the present essay, for example, I invoke literal death as the criterion against which

the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of organizing can be judged. By doing so, I have

implied that deaths of a different kind, such as those involving censored ideas, loss of

face, depression, loss of spirit, withdrawal, and avoided tests, are also legitimate criteria. When we try to assess the effects of new organizational forms, examination of the

effects on bottom-line financial performance is narrow and misses the larger issues of

the unique qualities behavior assumes by virtue of its being organized. Forms of organizing may hasten or slow other forms of death than bankruptcy, divestiture, acquisition,

merger, or dissolution. But we won’t know that if we restrict the criteria we examine.

Thompson was uneasy about the criterion problem in 1956, and renewal in 1996 may

well benefit from reinstatement of his unease.

It is remembered values such as these four that need to be modernized rather than

sacrificed if we in organizational studies are to accept current diversity and mutation

without losing either a sense of unity or the power of analogy. To illustrate how these

values can be deployed, I briefly analyze the relationship between tools and tragedy at

two separate wildland fires.



Tool Dropping at Mann Gulch and South Canyon

The first of the two disasters, Mann Gulch, was made famous in Norman Maclean’s

(1992) book titled Young Men and Fire. This accident occurred on August 5, 1949 when

14 young smokejumpers, their foreman Wagner Dodge, and a forest ranger were trapped

near the bottom of a 76-percent slope in western Montana by an exploding fire. Thirteen

of these men were killed when they tried to outrun the fire, ignoring both an order to

drop their heavy tools and an order to lie down in an area where fuel had been burned off

by an escape fire Dodge lit. Of the three who survived, Dodge lived by lying down in the

cooler area created by the escape fire, and two others, Bob Sallee and Walter Rumsey, lived

by squeezing through a break in the rocks at the top of the slope. Maclean (1992: 73)

describes the crucial episode of tool dropping this way:

Dodge’s order was to throw away just their packs and heavy tools, but to his surprise some

of them had already thrown away all their equipment. On the other hand, some of them

wouldn’t abandon their heavy tools, even after Dodge’s order. Diettert, one of the most

intelligent of the crew, continued carrying both his tools until Rumsey caught up with

him, took his shovel, and leaned it against a pine tree. Just a little farther on, Rumsey and

Sallee passed the recreation guard, Jim Harrison, who, having been on the fire all afternoon, was now exhausted. He was sitting with his heavy pack on and was making no effort

to take it off.



At South Canyon, outside Glenwood Springs, Colorado, roughly the same thing happened 45 years later on July 6, 1994. Again, late on a hot, dry, windy afternoon, near

4:00 P.M., flames on the side of a gulch away from firefighters jumped across onto their

side beneath them and, in the words of the inquiry board, “moved onto steep slopes and

into dense, highly flammable Gambel oak. Within seconds a wall of flame raced up the



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hill toward the firefighters on the west flank fireline. Failing to outrun the flames, 12

firefighters perished. Two helitack crew members on the top of the ridge also died when

they tried to outrun the fire to the northwest. The remaining 35 firefighters survived by

escaping out the east drainage or seeking a safety area and deploying their fire shelters”

(U.S. Forest Service, 1994: 2).

The firefighters who perished did not drop their tools or packs while trying to escape.

For example, a portion of the site and thermal analysis of the body of firefighter #10,

written at the time the bodies were being recovered from the hillside on July 7, reads as

follows: “was still wearing his back pack. . . . Victim has chain saw handle still in hand

with chain saw immediately above right hand. Saw blade is parallel to firefighter #9’s

left leg.” Dropping their tools or packs would have significantly increased the firefighters’ chance of escape. “Since this crew walked part of the way out, an analysis was

made based on the assumption that they ran all the way out. Another analysis assumed

that they dropped their packs and tools and could have moved quicker exerting the

same amount of energy. Both analyses reveal that the firefighters would have reached

the top of the ridge before the fire if they had perceived the threat from the start” (U.S.

Forest Service, 1994: A3–5).



Explanations for the Failure to Drop Tools

There are at least ten reasons why firefighters in both incidents may have failed to drop

their tools:

1.



2.



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Listening. There is some evidence that the sheer roar of the fire precluded people from hearing the order to drop their tools and run. At Mann Gulch, Robert

Sallee reported that he couldn’t understand foreman Dodge when he ordered

people to move into an area cleared by his escape fire (Sallee, 1949: 79), and

Rumsey agreed that he couldn’t hear instructions clearly (Rumsey, 1949:

104–107). This dynamic also cannot be ruled out at South Canyon, since the

people shouting at the retreating crew to run were separated from them by several hundred feet, and the fire had begun to roll with flame heights reaching

300 feet.

Justification. People persist when they are given no clear reasons to change. At

Mann Gulch, foreman Dodge did little briefing of his crew throughout the incident. One of the few times he spoke to them was when he gave the order to drop

their tools. When the accident investigation board asked Dodge to tell them what

reason he gave for dropping tools (Dodge, 1949: 121), Dodge replied, “It wasn’t

necessary. You could see the fire pretty close and we had to increase our rate of

travel some way or another.” What was clear to Dodge may not have been as clear

to the other 15, nine of whom were first-year smokejumpers and all of whom had

more experience fighting fires in timber than in the dry grass where they now

found themselves. At South Canyon, the firefighters who kept their tools were also

not given a reason to drop them. No one told them that they were at the head of

an onrushing fire, which is crucial information, because it was plausible for them

to perceive that they were on the north flank of the fire.



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3. Trust. People persist when they don’t trust the person who tells them to change.

Members of the firecrew at Mann Gulch did not know Dodge well (U.S. Forest

Service, 1949: 112), which made it hard for them to know how credible his

orders and actions were. At South Canyon, the Prineville firefighters did not

know the five smokejumpers mixed in with their crew, all five of whom had told

the crew either to run or to deploy their shelters. These instructions were not

legitimate orders, nor were they mentioned by trusted people.

4. Control. A prominent definition of technology is that it consists of knowledge

of cause-effect relations (e.g., Rogers and Chen, 1990: 17). In the case of firefighters, keeping one’s hand tools is consistent with a cause-effect relationship

for survival. The odds of surviving in a fire shelter as a fire passes over it are

increased if the area around the shelter is clear of material that might catch

fire and melt the shelter or allow flame to move inside it. Thus people who keep

a hand tool retain a cause that may help them escape a fire. If, however, they

also keep chainsaws or gas cans, then escape is more difficult. Furthermore, the

mere knowledge that one retains some capacity to alter the environment, even

if it is not exercised, may serve as a sort of “panic button” (Glass and Singer,

1972) and improve the quality of problem solving.

5. Skill at dropping. People may keep their tools because they don’t know how to

drop them. I know how absurd that sounds. But think again. At Mann Gulch,

Rumsey mentioned that even though he was running for his life, he grabbed

Diettert’s shovel and leaned it against a tree. At South Canyon, firefighter

Clinton Rhoades’ testimony shows that while outrunning the fire, he spent

valuable time trying to find where he could put down his saw so it wouldn’t

get burned. In his words, “at some point, about 300 yards up the hill . . . I then

realized I still had my saw over my shoulder! I irrationally started looking for a

place to put it down where it wouldn’t get burned. I found a place I it [sic] didn’t,

though the others’ saws did. I remember thinking I can’t believe I’m putting

down my saw” (U.S. Forest Service, 1994: Appendix 5).

People who have learned during training to carry out whatever equipment

they carry into a fire and who hear over and over how much equipment costs

(e.g., a fireshelter costs $23, a parachute $600) might be at a disadvantage

when, without prior experience of what it feels like or how to do it, they are

told to drop their tools and their packs. From what we know about the effects of

stress on overlearned behavior (e.g., Weick, 1990), the safest prediction would

be that firefighters under pressure would regress to what they know best, which

in this case would be keeping their tools. If somehow they could override that

tendency, they still might try to protect these expensive tools by putting them

down carefully away from potential flames, which eats up precious time.

6. Skill with replacement activity. People may keep their familiar tools in a frightening situation because an unfamiliar alternative, such as deploying a fire shelter,

is even more frightening. People at Mann Gulch found it hard to drop their tools,

but they found it even harder to comprehend the function of Dodge’s escape fire.

No one followed Dodge in, and some thought the fire was supposed to serve as a

buffer between them and the oncoming blowup (Sallee, 1949: 77). It is equally

strange to be told to deploy a fire shelter. Firefighters do not get much practice



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7.



8.



9.



10.



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deploying fire shelters. Furthermore, it is tough to open a shelter while running

in turbulent winds, with gloves on, and while looking for a clear flat area in

which to lie down.

Failure. To drop one’s tools may be to admit failure. To retain one’s tools is to

postpone this admission and to feel that one is still in it and still winning. The

year just prior to both Mann Gulch (U.S. Forest Service, 1949: 116–122) and

South Canyon had been a light fire season, and people were relatively rusty in

sizing up fires and their explosive potential. Thus, faced with an ambiguously

developing situation and with an aggressive crew that would prefer to handle

things itself rather than turn over an escaped fire to a more experienced crew,

leaders might well be reluctant to admit failure.

Social dynamics. People in a line may hold onto their tools as a result of social

dynamics such as pluralistic ignorance (O’Gorman, 1986). If the first firefighter walking up an escape route keeps his or her tools, then the second person in line, who feels more fear, may conclude that the first person is not scared.

Having concluded that there appears to be no cause for worry, the second person also retains his or her tools and is observed to do so by the third person in

line, who similarly infers less danger than may exist. Each person individually

may be fearful but mistakenly concludes that everyone else is calm. Thus, the

situation appears to be safe, except that no one actually believes that it is.

The actions of the last person in line, the one who feels most intensely the heat

of the blowup, are observed by no one, which means it is tough to convey the

gravity of the situation back up to the front of the line.

Consequences. People will not drop their tools if they believe that doing so won’t

make much difference. Small changes in speed and distance, changes on the order

of 8 more inches covered per second, can mean the difference between safety and

death. At South Canyon, if firefighters had dropped their tools five minutes before

the fire hit them, they would all have been able to cover another 228 feet at the

rate they were already moving, which would have put all of them close to or over

the top (Putnam, 1995). But the cumulative effects of a small change made possible by carrying fewer tools are not evident, nor do they feel plausible psychologically, given the intense environment of wind, sound, heat, flying debris, and

smoke. Small changes seem like trivial changes, so nothing changes.

Identity. Finally, implicit in the idea that people can drop their tools is the assumption that tools and people are distinct, separable, and dissimilar. But fires are not

fought with bodies and bare hands, they are fought with tools that are often distinctive trademarks of firefighters and central to their identity. Firefighting tools

define the firefighter’s group membership, they are the firefighter’s reason for

being deployed in the first place, they create capability, they are given the same

care that the firefighters themselves get (e.g., tools are collected and sharpened

after every shift), and they are meaningful artifacts that define the culture. Given

the central role of tools in defining the essence of a firefighter, it is not surprising that dropping one’s tools creates an existential crisis. Without my tools, who

am I? A coward? A fool? The fusion of tools with identities means that under conditions of threat, it makes no more sense to drop one’s tools than to drop one’s

pride. Tools and identities form a unity without seams or separable elements.



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Although these 10 reasons for persistence in the face of threat have been discussed

using the concrete events of firefighting, the analysis builds on Thompson’s principles. First, the preceding list shows that the willingness of endangered firefighters to

drop their tools is overdetermined. Overdetermination is simply another way of stating Thompson’s first point that people have multiple, interdependent, socially coherent

reasons for doing what they do. These interconnected reasons constitute social systems

that become visible only when we “focus on relationships.”

Second, the multiple ways in which people relate to tools can be understood more

fully if we interpret those actions using abstract concepts such as justification, trust,

and identity. It is these abstractions that allow us to compare Mann Gulch with South

Canyon, to infer the likelihood of future tragedies in firefighting, and to extrapolate

to other settings in which analogous threats may arise. These abstractions also convert the ad hoc hypotheses that worried Thompson into more generic processes seen

in other places. It is these connections that bring more resources to bear on the problem of fatalities in fire suppression and in turn provide vivid instances that enrich and

deepen the concepts.

Third, the preceding analysis of tool dropping retains some measure of plausibility

because, following Thompson’s third guideline, abstract concepts are tied to concrete

action: Justification ϭ length and depth of briefing regarding suppression strategy;

trust ϭ willingness to follow unusual orders given by strangers; and identity ϭ preoccupation with reputation as a can-do firefighter. These bridges encourage ongoing

induction and deduction. More important, the bridges forestall endless debates because

the arguments are grounded, focused, and corrigible. If crew foremen lengthen their

briefings or increase crew members’ familiarity with each other or replace a can-do

identity, and if endangered firefighters still refuse to drop their tools, then justification,

trust, and identity, at least as defined here, are suspect explanations. What is more

crucial, it is precisely because of the conceptual grounding that we are encouraged to

move off these explanations to find better ones. This was not news, even back in 1956.

But what made it worth saying then, and worth reaffirming now, is the tendency to

pursue either abstractions or particulars by themselves, independently, as if they had a

life of their own and self-contained meaning. Meaning lies in the connecting of particulars with abstractions, which is why Thompson worried about relationships, abstractions, and bridges.

Fourth, the analysis of tool dropping gains some of its bite because it engages the criterion problem. The “obvious” criterion of survival becomes a good deal more complex

when we begin to see that physical survival does not dominate everyone’s attention at

the same moment, nor is it connected to other issues in a homogeneous manner, nor

does it mean the same thing to everyone. Furthermore, other criteria, such as effectiveness of fire-line construction, efficiency and speed of line construction, and ability to overcome challenges, obstacles, and risks, all compete for attention. Survival is

only one among many criteria that are operating when firefighters try to interpret a

fire that intensifies in ambiguous ways. It is precisely because people persist in making complex tradeoffs among multiple criteria amidst ambiguous cues that they fail to

realize they are in serious trouble. The criterion issue, in this case, “what constitutes

safe fire suppression,” is at the heart of the 10 reasons people refuse to drop their tools,

as Thompson said it should be.



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