From the Battlefield to the Workplace: How Staff Rides Improve Safety Decision-Making
A military-inspired training method offers organizations a powerful way to strengthen judgment, adaptability, and safety outcomes.
- By Michael Burke
- Sep 22, 2025
Early in 2025, the L.A. region was hit by one of the most devastating series of wildfires in the region’s history. Thousands were evacuated as overwhelmed firefighting crews were forced to make split-second decisions that meant the difference between containment and catastrophe. Amid the destruction, firefighters sustained multiple injuries while working to contain the blazes.
Now imagine that you’re a firefighter, months or years later, standing in the Palisades hillsides with your team, retracing the physical path of the fire, stopping at critical decision points where key decisions were made. At each of these locations you consider all the circumstances your colleagues had faced while fighting the fires such as the terrain and weather conditions. You ask yourselves, “What would I have done in this situation?”
This method of physically retracing decision points and reflecting on them is what’s known as a staff ride. It is a team safety training method with military roots that is not widely used outside of a handful of emergency response contexts. But in an age with a growing array of workplace-related risks, they can be used by organizations to better ensure the health and safety of both their workers and the managers who lead them. And while staff rides can’t turn back the clock, they help teams and decision-makers internalize the lessons from past incidents and prepare them for future ones.
Workers Still Face Many Dangers in the Workplace
Every year about 3 million workers around the world die from work-related accidents or illnesses, and nearly 400 million receive non-fatal injuries. While advancements in technology and public policies have led to improved conditions for certain dangers, such as accidents while using industrial equipment, workers face a growing array of newer risks such as climate-driven disasters (e.g., wildfires, hurricanes, and floods), novel infectious diseases, and unpredictable outcomes of AI/robot technology.
Even in industries where safety practices have improved considerably over the years, we are seeing high rates of injuries and fatalities—for example, in construction, chemical processing, and energy infrastructure. This underscores why organizations must try to do more to ensure the health and safety of their teams, and that traditional safety training methods alone may not be enough. This is where staff rides can be highly beneficial.
Military Origins, Universal Applications
The origin of the staff ride lies with the Prussian Army in the mid-19th century. They are called staff rides because military officers would literally take their personnel on horseback rides to historical battle sites. There they would walk through the site, analyze the terrain, and apply factual knowledge gained through previous study to put themselves in the shoes of the battle’s original participants. The purpose was to foster critical thinking, adaptability, and independent decision-making skills under unpredictable circumstances.
In 1906, the U.S. borrowed the idea and integrated staff rides as part of their own military officer training. After over 90 years, the first non-military agency to formally adopt them was the U.S. Forest Service, in the mid-1990s, after a series of wildfires claimed the lives of 14 firefighters. Forest Service leadership wanted a way to cultivate better judgement and decision-making skills under dangerous circumstances. This demonstrated true organizational foresight because we now know that active learning—and staff rides are a form of active learning—are an effective way to enhance safety training outcomes. Moreover, staff rides help participants bridge the gaps between learning, thinking, and action. Yet despite their effectiveness at promoting critical thinking and decision-making, and their promise in workplace applications, staff rides remain greatly underutilized outside of military and Forest Service contexts.
Healthcare, emergency and disaster management, law enforcement, agriculture, chemical processing, transportation and logistics, construction, energy and infrastructure—in just the last handful of years we have seen unfortunate accidents occur in all of these industries. Since staff rides draw on real incidents, analyze critical decision points, and prepare teams for good decision-making in real-time, any industry where leaders and teams face complex risks—and where safety mishaps or near misses have occurred—could benefit from integrating them.
The Three Phases of a Staff Ride
Before we explore how organizations can potentially integrate staff rides as part of safety training, let’s look at the three phases of a staff ride which will help further understanding of how they work:
Phase 1: Preliminary Study
Before physically visiting the location, participants are provided with physical and/or digital background materials such as books, articles, reports, interviews, photos, videos, maps, and any other relevant information. Before any physical traveling is done, participants should have a general understanding of the timeline of key situations and decisions made by those present at the historical event.
Phase 2: Field (or Virtual) Study
This is the heart of the staff ride. Participants retrace the steps of the incident, stopping at each critical decision point while facilitators ask questions to spur critical thinking and reflection. If done virtually, participants are guided through maps, videos, or 3D models that reconstruct the physical scene of the incident.
Phase 3: Integration
Participants gather to debrief on everything they have observed, discussed, and learned. Facilitators again ask questions to prompt reflection. This phase helps participants internalize the lessons and put them into practice during real-life situations.
Getting Started With Staff Rides
Integrating staff rides into your organization’s training does not have to be a heavy lift. You can start small, and the method is highly adaptable to your organization’s needs. While this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive guide, here are some basic guidelines to get you started (more details on the staff ride and other means of individual and team safety training are presented in my book A Workplace Safety Approach to Good Health):
- Choose an incident. Use one in which one or more safety mishaps occurred. Research suggests that workers retain lessons from safety training more effectively when narratives involving safety mishaps, along with discussion questions, are used as part of the training. The incident may have occurred within your own organization, specifically, or perhaps within your industry. Choose an incident for which there is rich documentation that can be used as part of Phase 1, the preliminary study phase.
- Create a timeline. Construct it out of multiple points of decision-making. Match the available documentation (maps, photos, videos, etc.) with each decision point.
- Do a walkthrough of the event. If feasible, this could mean visiting the physical site, but virtual walkthroughs can also work well as per your organization’s needs. Virtual staff rides are often easier to organize, though they still require time and effort to prepare visual and printed materials. The U.S. Army University provides a guide for putting together a virtual staff ride. While designed for military use, it can be adapted for an occupational safety context.
- Encourage a climate of psychological safety. Allow participants to openly and honestly express their thoughts and feelings.
- Conclude with a debriefing. Lead and moderate the participants in a discussion where they get to articulate their impressions. It can be more or less formally structured as preferred but, either way, is an opportunity for the participants to process and deepen their understanding of the incident and what can be learned from it.
How long should a staff ride be? It largely depends on the situational context, the complexity of the incident being used, and the resources you’re able to commit. There may be practical limitations involving time, space, budget, access to materials, or other practical concerns. Staff rides can be conducted in as short as just a few hours (as my colleague Wendy S. Becker and I did while facilitating the Great Bear Wilderness Staff Ride in a conference setting) and as long as two weeks. In most cases, a full day is sufficient for on-site staff rides. This allows the time for traveling to the site and all three phases. For virtual or modified staff rides, several hours or a half-day can be enough.
For all their value, staff rides are not meant to replace traditional forms of safety training. But when used as an adjunct, and one with particular emotional impact, they can help teams and leaders close the gap between knowledge and action, between theory and practice. In an era with many uncertainties and increasing workplace safety risks, staff rides can equip leaders and teams with the foresight and adaptability to confidently face the challenges of today—and the crises of tomorrow.