Judgment Under Fire: Lessons from Wildfire for High-Risk Professional Decision-Making

Wildfire response is a demanding decision environment. Leaders must interpret incomplete and rapidly changing information, weigh competing risks, and make time-sensitive decisions with lasting effects on lives, communities, and landscapes.

Wildfire management, as with many technical fields, is experiencing an explosion of data: predictive models, remote sensing, decision-support tools, and increasingly sophisticated analytics. However, increased information does not automatically lead to better decisions. Drawing on experience responding to some of Canada’s largest wildfire incidents and working at the intersection of operational practice and applied research, this session explores what high-consequence professions can learn from wildfire decision making. Attendees will learn how high-performing teams combine analysis, intuition, and structured decision processes to navigate uncertainty and avoid common cognitive traps.

Using emergency response as a case study, the session will highlight practical approaches that engineers, geoscientists, and other professionals can apply when making critical decisions where stakes are high, information is imperfect, and consequences are real.