Drop Your Tools

This summer has been dry in Utah. And, we've had some pretty big wildfires in the state. One of the largest fires in the country at the time was the Babylon fire. It burned around 107,000 acres. What set this fire apart from the others was that it burned extremely close to my family ranch. Luckily it was a ridgeline away and it never actually got there, but it was close, and the ranch was on standby in case the fire broke loose and came our way. At this point it's contained enough and nearly out that we don't have to worry about that precious land anymore. We now know it was lightning that started it. A strike up on Elk Ridge on June 25th, and nobody saw the smoke until the next day.

Another fire started the same way in 1949, in the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness along the Missouri River in Montana. Lightning, and nobody saw the smoke until the next day. Fifteen smokejumpers parachuted in and met a fire guard already working it — sixteen men, led by a foreman named Robert Wagner Dodge. Everybody called him Wag. Their radio was destroyed when its parachute failed to open, so they were operating blind.

The fire crossed the gulch below them and cut off their route to the river. Dodge turned the crew and ran them uphill toward the ridge. On a steep slope in dry grass with the wind behind it, the fire moved faster than the men could climb.

Dodge did something nobody had ever seen. He stopped, lit a fire in the grass in front of him, and lay face down in the ashes as his own burn cleared a patch the main fire had nothing left to consume. He shouted for his men to drop their tools and join him. None did. The scene looked like madness and they kept running.

In the end, thirteen firefighters died. Dodge survived in his escape fire. Two others, Robert Sallee and Walter Rumsey, made it through a narrow crevice in the rimrock at the top. The aftermath reshaped wildland firefighting: it drove the creation of the Ten Standard Firefighting Orders and made the escape fire standard training.

Karl Weick writes about this story in a paper he published in 1993 called "The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations." It's standard reading for PhD students in strategy and organizational behavior programs across the country. It was for me. His main question isn't why the fire won. It's why thirteen trained men died carrying tools they'd been ordered to drop, and why the one man who found the answer couldn't get anyone to follow him. In a sentence, the organization dissolved before the men did.

The crew was a minimal organization. Sixteen strangers, assembled that afternoon, held together by almost nothing but role structure and the authority of a foreman most of them didn't know. There was no history. No shared vocabulary. No accumulated trust. That thinness is invisible when things are going well, but in the heat of battle it becomes deadly.

And this is the thing most people remember. Dodge ordered the men to drop their tools. Most didn't. Some of them were found still holding tight to their shovels. To these men, the shovels were not just equipment. They were their identity. A firefighter carrying tools is a firefighter fighting a fire. Without them, he's just a man running. Dropping the tools means admitting the situation has flipped from one you're winning to one where you're running — you've admitted defeat mid-crisis. Real firefighters don't drop their tools. They prefer the weight over the agility.

First, we have to spend time with the people who matter. The firefighters had barely spent any time together. They were strangers. There was no trust built up. How many of the people who work for you are strangers? What about your kids? Your spouse? When was the last time you paused and created a real experience with them? If you're not spending time together, there's no trust. And trust is what you need when things get bad.

Second, their identity was tied to their tools. How often do we tie our identity to a job, a company, a title? Or to things — a boat, a house, a car? I can't possibly be me without these. That's false. We are imperfectly perfect. Sure, we have weaknesses. We fail. We struggle. We say things we shouldn't. Sometimes we hurt the people we should be loving. I get it. But too often we tie our inherent value to our stuff, and that couldn't be further from the truth.

Here's what connects the two. The men in that gulch couldn't drop their tools because there was nobody there they trusted enough to drop them for. Dodge was a stranger. Trust and identity aren't two lessons. They're one.

I see it at work too. Too often our managers and their teams are tied to their tools. They want to fight the fire. They're good at fighting the fire. But they really struggle to think big picture because they're too concerned with the day to day, and there's always another day to day, so the shovel never goes down. And here's what that costs them. They don't have the time to actually sit with their teams and know them. No time, no trust. Meanwhile their teams are struggling to get the actual work done. They're holding that shovel so tight that they can't build the one thing that would ever let them set it down.

My wife recently asked me if I even noticed her anymore.

The truth was that I did. It's just that I've been too busy. Building PathForgeXP, working my day job, assignments at church. She's busy too. She's going to school and now taking clients as a therapist. I was so busy fighting the fire that I didn't really slow down enough to pay attention to my wife and her needs.

She felt it. My kids felt it.

And the whole time I was too busy trying to provide for them. That's my shovel. It isn't a title or a boat or a house. It's providing. Nobody is going to give you a hard time for working hard for your family, and that's exactly what makes it so hard to set down. Holding it is how I know I'm doing my job.

I suffered, they suffered.

I had to drop my tools and just show up as myself.

Sure, I'm still busy. I am still getting up way too early, but my mentality has shifted. I still have to get stuff done. But, I am intentional. Last night she was working. I had a meeting. I made the kids dinner and they cleaned everything up. The kitchen looked amazing. I apologized to them beforehand that I had a meeting and they understood. And, when I got out of the meeting, we spent time together learning to fly a new drone.

I tried to make up for being gone by being present.

That's why I built the Wilderness Gap Diagnostic. You have one operating system. Your family and your team have another. Too often we're blind to what's really happening — we haven't put in the time to build trust, and we're too tied to a false sense of identity. The diagnostic shows you where the gap is.

Those men in the gulch were doing what they had always done, and it had always worked. That's what makes tools so hard to drop. Let's lay down ours and build trust with those that matter.

See you above the treeline.