Lookouts...

"The afternoon of June 26, 1990, as I knelt beside a dead Perryville firefighter, I made a promise to the best of my ability to help end the needless fatalities, and alleviate the near misses, by focusing on training and operations pertinent to these goals."

Paul Gleason - Former Zig Zag Hotshot Superintendent

June, 1991

"LCES and Other Thoughts"

Good day! This week I have taken the opportunity to do some research and understand the background/meaning of an acronym (LCES) that I have encountered while reading numerous wildland fire fighting documents.

A quick look at LCES: "Protection of human life is first priority for firefighters. The elements of LCES form a safety system used by wildland firefighters to protect themselves from entrapment from free-burning wildfires and other fireline hazards. Since 1995, when arriving on a scene, a fire crew will establish safety zones and escape routes, verify communication is in place, and designate lookouts (known in the U.S. by the acronym LCES, for lookouts, communications, escape routes, safety zones)."

What is the role and responsibility of a Lookout in LCES?

• Have experience to recognize potential threats
• Be decisive
• Communicate clearly
• Be in a position to see potential threats and the entire crew
• Be in a safe location

As I explored the LCES concept and specifically Lookouts, I couldn't help but note the similarity to what we developed in our persistence awareness (PA) concept and use of Lookouts during real-world collaboration operations. In our PA concept, the Lookouts were responsible for unblinking environmental scan for mission-relevant change. John G., Research Scientist, Sandia National Laboratories developed the following graphic to depict the function of "Collaboration Lookouts" in maintaining PA for the enterprise. 

Fort Model for Persistent Awareness
Collaboratively Mastering Overwhelming Information
"Keeping Up"
John G., Sandia National Laboratories

Some basic principles for Lookouts in the PA concept, as outlined by John G., included:

• Lookouts must scan the environment at a rate matching information change
• Lookouts must pay attention as many critical threat indicators are subtle and fleeting
• Return on attention will be reduced if Lookouts are hyper-focused on any narrow issue/part of the horizon
• To help analysis, Lookouts can not perform analysis

Furthermore, we trained our Lookouts to:

• Look for and notice the subtle vibrations related to unanticipated threats for personnel, equipment and structures
• Be decisive in alerting the crowd in chat rooms to what they were observing/hearing and dialog as part of the sense-making
• Communicate clearly using chat
• Access and pay attention to hundreds (if not thousands) of chat rooms looking for the unexpected
• Do all of the above from a safe location 

Sound and look familiar? Bottom line - Collaboration lookouts are not distracted with building reports, making powerpoint charts, attending briefings or analyzing information.

To wrap-up, I continue to be encouraged with the similarities and opportunities of the collaboration concepts developed/executed in my previous career with what I am seeing in the emergency response world today. So, humor me a little as I think out loud...

Does the wildland fire community use an online collaborative Lookout in their chat tools in a similar way the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD) teams use Lookouts as part of their Human Net? If not, why not?

Thoughts?

Humbly,
Collabman