What Firefighters and Medicine Teach Us About Mental Resilience

In 1949, fifteen elite smokejumpers leaped into the Montana wilderness to confront what appeared to be a routine forest fire. Within hours, thirteen of them were dead. The Mann Gulch disaster has since become the definitive case study for how high-performing teams collapse under extreme pressure. It was not a lack of fitness or training that killed these men; it was a breakdown in sensemaking. When their commander, Wag Dodge, realized the fire had turned and ordered his men to drop their heavy tools and lie down in a patch of grass he had intentionally set ablaze – an “escape fire” – the team failed to recognise his genius. Tethered to their training and unable to make sense of an unprecedented command, they ran uphill, tools in hand, and were overtaken by the flames.

Today, Dr. Paul Barach – a physician, former military officer, and global expert in patient safety – uses the haunting legacy of Mann Gulch to challenge our modern understanding of mental resilience. With a career spanning emergency medicine, anesthesiology and health systems reform across four continents, Barach argues that the “heroic-individual” model of medicine and emergency response is not only outdated but dangerous.

Nordic Wellbeing Academy had the pleasure to chat with Barach in relation to the MentaStress project. 

Microsystems – not individuals

Barach’s central argument is blunt: resilience has very little to do with the individual if the team doesn’t support them. “The unit of performance is not the individual. The unit of performance is the clinical microsystem.”

This insight came from five years in the military, where everything he had learned in medical school was challenged. He was trained in martial arts not for violence, but to learn that even after taking a punch, you continue to do what you have to do. He went on solo navigations for dozens of miles in uncertain terrain to practise being comfortable with not knowing. Working alongside special performance teams, he concluded that the heroic-individual model that medical training had given him was simply the wrong and unsustainable model.

“Resilience has very little to do with the individual if there’s no team that supports you.”

For volunteer emergency organisations, this reframing is fundamental. A volunteer fire crew, a civil protection unit, a search and rescue team – none of these can function as a collection of individually resilient people. The resilience either lives in the team or it doesn’t exist.

Sensemaking – a skill few teach

Karl Weick, an organisational theorist, analyses the Mann Gulch disaster in 1993. According to him, the 13 smoke jumpers lacked sensemaking: the capacity to construct enough understanding of an unfolding situation to take the next step. The question Barach puts to trainees is not “what is happening?” but “do I have enough to move to the next point of uncertainty?” Waiting for certainty before acting is not caution; in dynamic environments, it is paralysis.

“He used it as a metaphor for organism – for how to survive by changing the environment around you, not just responding to it.”

The Mann Gulch commander’s escape fire was an act of applied sensemaking under extreme pressure: he changed the terms of the problem rather than trying to solve the original problem with insufficient resources. The lesson for volunteer organisations is not to train only for expected scenarios, but to always train for the routine moments when the scenario stops making sense.

Uncertainty is a resource, not a threat

A great and initially counterintuitive point from Barach is that certainty is more dangerous than uncertainty. “Certainty is very comforting, but it’s a great danger: it offers an artificial construct of security.” When practitioners feel certain, they stop scanning. They stop adapting. They stop being afraid. They miss the signals that the situation has changed.

For volunteer emergency organisations, this has direct training implications. Programmes focused exclusively on correct procedures for expected scenarios may be producing practitioners who are capable in familiar situations and brittle in unfamiliar ones. What Barach advocates for is explicit training in the unexpected – through simulation, role-playing and scenario variation – so that not knowing what to do next becomes itself a practised, navigable state.

“Mike Tyson says everybody has a plan until they’re punched in the face. Resilience is agility – a willingness to accept that there are multiple ways to reach your solution.”

Learning by design, not by chance

Barach has spent more than two decades designing structured learning moments for clinical and emergency settings. His conviction is simple: “I don’t believe in learning by chance. Learning happens when there is an explicit effort to codify the lesson, reflect on what it meant, and extract from it what’s meaningful for future encounters.”

Structured debriefing is central – but not as mere incident review. What Barach is after is what he calls “good emotional residue”: a debrief that leaves practitioners with a sense of having been seen and supported in processing what happened. This includes self-forgiveness. The “second victim” phenomenon – the responder traumatised by their own involvement in an adverse event – is real, lasting, and systematically under-addressed, leading to much burnout, broken spirited healthcare providers and turnover in emergency services. For organisations operating with limited time and resources, his advice is to start small and make it structural: even a brief, well-designed check-in after each significant call, led by a leader who models vulnerability, begins to build the reflective culture that complex emergency work requires. He advises: “Lean into near misses and near failures as they offer deep knowledge about system complexity.”

The Lesson That Took Thirty Years

Between the Mann Gulch disaster and Weick’s analysis over 40 years passed. The escape fire technique is now standard worldwide enabled by years of institutional learning. Barach finds this story both hopeful (because learning does happen) and troubling (because the pace may not be adequate for the complexity of the crises we face). However, he highlights that the pace can be accelerated through explicit, structurally embedded and deep learning processes, not through hope nor individual heroism. 

“These things are shaped,” he says. “You have to shape them deliberately.” That, perhaps, is the deepest lesson from Mann Gulch: Dodge, the commander’s escape fire was genius in the moment. The work of resilience is turning individual genius into collective knowledge – before the next fire arrives.

Further Reading

Karl Weick (1996)  “Prepare Your Organization to Fight Fires” – Harvard Business Review.

Norman Maclean (1992)  Young Men and Fire – The definitive account of the Man Gulch disaster.

U.S. Fire Administration  Man Gulch analysis and policy lessons – how the disaster became standard procedure.

Firefighter Nation  “Sensemaking and Its Effect on Firefighter and Fire Officer Decisions.”

Weick (1993)  “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster” – JSTOR.

Barach P, Phelps G. Clinical sensemaking: a systematic approach to reduce the impact of normalised deviance in the medical profession. J R Soc Med. 2013 Oct;106(10):387-90. doi: 10.1177/0141076813505045. PMID: 24097963; PMCID: PMC3791099.

Mohr JJ, Barach P, Cravero JP, Blike GT, Godfrey MM, Batalden PB, Nelson EC. Microsystems in health care: Part 6. Designing patient safety into the microsystem. Jt Comm J Qual Saf. 2003 Aug;29(8):401-8. doi: 10.1016/s1549-3741(03)29048-1. PMID: 12953604.