A naturalistic decision-making approach to managing non-routine fire incidents: evidence from expert firefighters

The current paper builds on the naturalistic decision-making paradigm to advance meaning and application of expert intuition in real-life settings. While conventional models often link intuitive competence pattern recognition skills, advances prior knowledge by demonstrating that expertise is inextricably linked actors’ ability discriminate between subtle informational cues through process information filtering. Drawing data from a phenomenological study involving thirty (30) fireground commanders (UK = 15, Nigeria 15), utilised critical decision method (CDM) explore cognitive strategies these fire-fighters. entailed each participant shared retrospective non-routine fire incident particularly challenged their expertise, allowing resulting qualitative be coded analysed using combination emergent themes analysis (ETA) interpretative (IPA). Specifically, develops discusses: (i) theoretical model emerged directly accounts (ii) an inventory forty-two aided fireground, alongside cue classification framework. Competence was found function experts’ discriminatory filtering abilities subsequently allowed multiple sources processed efficiently. Although firefighting domain formed central focus this study, findings are deemed generalisable across other high-risk organisations.