The Mann Gulch Incident: The Importance Of A Role System In New Teams.

 

In 1949 thirteen firefighters died at the Helena National Forest, Montana. A forrest fire got completely out of hand, and surprised the team that was dropped by parachute to control the fire. The Mann Gulch fire is an incident described in detail in Norman Maclean's book "Young Men and Fire".

I became fascinated of this sad story by the article "The Collapse Of Sensemaking" by Karl Weick. In this article the author uses the case of the Mann Gulch Disaster to analyze what went wrong in this professional team under stress conditions.

This group of firefighters didn't know each other very well. A couple of team members had worked together before, but for the largest part this was a new group. Trust wasn't established yet, people didn't know how other members thought and how resourceful they were.  

But in professional teams trust isn't necessarily needed to operate.

The profession itself provides a role system that guides the individuals in what they should do and what they can expect from the others. In software projects we can have the project leader, technical team lead, tester and business analyst. This is one particular form of our role system. In hospitals there are strict role systems when operating on patients.

Firefighting in the 1940s also had a role system. A leader at the front of the crew who constructed the orders, a second in command at the end of the line who repeated the orders and made sure they were understood. And the firefighters in the middle, that followed and repeated the orders given by the leader.

What happened in this particular case is that the crew got separated from their formal leader, and the spaces between the remaining crew members became so wide they couldn't pass the orders around any more. The person replacing the formal leader wasn't skilled in strategy, so his orders weren't any good. And even if they were any good, no one behind him could hear his orders.

The role structure was simple.

A leader passing orders around, and a person at the end of the line making sure the orders were heard and understood. Remove the leader and disable the ability to pass the orders around, and the role structure broke down.

In "The Collapse of Sensemaking" Weick writes:  "If a role system collapses amongst people for whom trust, honesty and self-respect are underdeveloped, then they are on their own."

Trust holds teams together. We know that. But, trust also needs time to develop. We know that also.

In the meantime we are left with our role system. The formal structure that our profession and our companies provide to us. But this will only provide support when it is functioning properly.

Weick again: "The recipe for disorganization in Mann Gulch is not all that rare in everyday life. The recipe reads. Thrust people into unfamiliar roles, leave some key roles unfilled, make the task more ambiguous, discredit the role system, and make all these changes in a context in which small events can combine into something monstrous."

Before we get to know each other, before trust can be established, the role system is all we have.

Is it?
 

Bas de Baar is a writer who draws about people in transition. He loves to make visual maps and travel guides for the collaborators of our brave new world.