When a Good Idea Isn't Am Here We Go Again

16 smoke jumper jumpers died trying to outrun a fire. The forest service discovered that the 13 men who died had carried their cumbersome tools, a pole, axes, saws, shovels as well as very heavy back packs. For those fire fighters, their tools represented who they were, why they were there and what they were trained to do. Dropping their tools meant abandoning their existing knowledge, training and experience. In hindsight, it seems obvious they made a catastrophic mistake in judgment. But because they hadn't been trained to think about outrunning a fire, they had no alternative models for behavior. Chances are those old solutions for the previous problem are useless. We have new problems