Jayson Coil has spent more than 1,100 days in command roles on complex incidents across 17 states — decisions made on degraded information, under time pressure, where failure was measured in lives. He is a U.S. Army Sapper veteran, an assistant fire chief, and a Type 1 Operations Section Chief on a national incident management team.

He trained in red teaming directly under the originators of the modern discipline and has taught it across the Department of Defense, federal emergency-management and land-management agencies, and the National Fire Academy. He has taught decision-making at Berkeley Haas, a national security laboratory, and the NATO Command & Control Centre of Excellence.

His work joins decision science to an operator’s record — theory that has survived two a.m. on the fireline. He is the author of the Operational Leader’s Field Guide and a three-volume analysis of the American wildfire system spanning the system, incident, and operational-leader tiers.

Decision quality is independent of outcome.
Judge the process, not the luck.