Sun Mountain Fire Case Study

1. What features are there in the wildland fires decision making context? What type decision context and decision problems is it? What are the decision objectives and criteria in such sort of context? What decision tools can be used?

1) From my point of view, the major feature in the wildland fires decision making context is management confusion. There’s several leaders in the decision making process, and eventually Mr. Wang, who should be the real decision maker actually was doing the final decision.

2) There’s two major problems in this decision making process :

a. Not having the right decision maker

b. Confirmatory bias

Although there were different voices and some data to hint that Wang’s decision might be wrong, he chose to ignore them and look for favorable info.

3) The decision objectives are effectively put off the fire as well as to guarantee the safe execution.

The criteria includes :

a. Safety first.

As always, the premier criterion for decision making by fire crew leaders and incident commanders is the safety of their team.

b. Speed actions to control the situation

Firefighting is a world of decision urgency. Speed is key to the successful execution.

c. Suppression of the fire

The final criterion for decision making in a fire one is a set of technical considerations

to actually suppress the fire.

4) We can use the decision tree or the pay off matrix decision making tools to analyze

The various situation and corresponding solutions or alternatives. It can help the

Decision maker to make the right and safe decision.

2. How the task group be formed? How was the group leader generated? Who made the major decisions?

The task group was formed in a rush by three different crew ships. Each group has different background and their own leaders.

The bigger group leader also has been wrongly generated. None of the team member knows who the incident commander is, and then automatically Wang thinks he is the one, and started to lead the group with out sufficient knowledge and experience. In this case, Mr. Wang made the major decisions, which caused irretrievable failure later on.

3. How many decisions did the