Recent research and the development of an alternative understanding, termed naturalistic decision making, has demonstrated that under the pressures of an emergency situation there is just not time enough to weight up alternatives (Flin, Salas, Strub and Martin Klein). Grouped together they are commonly described as ‘traditional’. These models understand decision making in terms of a rational choice between various options (Dowie) and tend to oversimplify decision making. The complex reality of a fireground incident is not effectively explained by decision making models based on logic. As a result I have developed my own theory of decision making on the fireground, termed ‘Multimodal Decision Making’, which is distinguished from formal rationality and informal sense-based rationality in that it approaches art, science and practice as a complex and irreducible whole. Twelve senior ranking Australian fire officers participated in the investigation from which I propose that fireground incident commanders are relying on aesthetic awareness and somatic responses, similar to those of an artist, and that due to the often ineffable nature of their responses these sources of information are usually unacknowledged. The split second decisions that must be made by incident commanders on the fireground demonstrate that the dominant models of rational, logical argument and naturalistic decision making are incapable of dealing with this complexity. Decision making on the fireground is a complex activity reflected in the cultural image of fire in contemporary Western societies, the expertise of firefighters and the public demand for response to fire.
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