Insights from Michael Burke is the Earl P. and Ethel B. Koerner Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business. This article draws on his analysis originally published in Occupational Health & Safety.
Picture yourself standing on a hillside in the Pacific Palisades months after the catastrophic L.A. wildfires of early 2025. You’re with your team, retracing the path the fire took, stopping at the exact points where firefighters made decisions that determined whether neighborhoods were saved or lost. At each location, you study the terrain, the weather conditions, the choices available in that moment. And then you ask the most important question in safety leadership: “What would I have done?”
That immersive, location-based exercise is called a staff ride — and according to Dr. Michael Burke, the Earl P. and Ethel B. Koerner Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, it may be one of the most underutilized tools in modern workplace safety.
“While staff rides can’t turn back the clock,” Burke writes, “they help teams and decision-makers internalize the lessons from past incidents and prepare them for future ones.”
Why Traditional Safety Training Isn’t Enough
Burke grounds his argument in a sobering global reality. Each year, approximately 3 million workers around the world die from work-related accidents or illnesses, and nearly 400 million suffer non-fatal injuries. While technological and policy improvements have reduced certain categories of risk, an entirely new set of hazards is reshaping the safety landscape — climate-driven disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, and floods, novel infectious diseases, and the unpredictable consequences of AI and robotics in the workplace.
Even mature industries with decades of safety investment continue to see troubling injury and fatality rates — construction, chemical processing, and energy infrastructure among them. For Burke, this points to a fundamental gap.
“Traditional safety training methods alone may not be enough,” he writes. The classroom modules and compliance checklists that anchor most safety programs struggle to prepare leaders for the ambiguous, high-stakes moments where good judgment matters most. That, Burke argues, is precisely the gap staff rides were built to fill.
A Method With Prussian Roots
The staff ride traces back to the Prussian Army of the mid-19th century, where military officers literally took their personnel on horseback rides to historical battle sites. There, they would walk the terrain, study the geography, and apply prior study to put themselves in the position of the original combatants. The goal was to develop critical thinking, adaptability, and independent decision-making under unpredictable conditions.
The U.S. military adopted the practice in 1906, but it took nearly a century for any non-military agency to embrace it. The U.S. Forest Service became the first in the mid-1990s, after a series of wildfires killed 14 firefighters. Burke points to that adoption as a turning point — not just because it expanded the use of staff rides, but because it confirmed something safety researchers have since validated: active learning is one of the most effective methods for improving safety training outcomes.
Yet despite that evidence, Burke notes the tool has barely traveled. “Staff rides remain greatly underutilized outside of military and Forest Service contexts,” he writes — a gap he argues is no longer acceptable given the range of industries facing complex, evolving risk.
The list of fields that could benefit is extensive: healthcare, emergency and disaster management, law enforcement, agriculture, chemical processing, transportation and logistics, construction, energy and infrastructure. As Burke frames it, any industry where leaders face complex risks — and where safety mishaps or near misses have occurred — is a candidate.
How a Staff Ride Actually Works
Burke breaks the process into three distinct phases.
Phase 1, Preliminary Study, happens before any physical visit. Participants are provided with background materials — reports, articles, maps, photos, videos, interviews — and develop a working understanding of the incident’s timeline and the key decisions made by those who were there. The goal is to arrive at the site with context, not curiosity alone.
Phase 2, Field (or Virtual) Study, is what Burke calls “the heart of the staff ride.” Participants retrace the steps of the incident, stopping at each critical decision point while facilitators ask questions designed to spur reflection. When physical access isn’t possible, the same exercise can be conducted virtually using maps, video, or 3D models that reconstruct the scene.
Phase 3, Integration, is the debrief — a structured gathering where participants process what they’ve observed and surface the lessons that emerged. This phase, Burke emphasizes, is where insight becomes practice.
How to Get Started
Burke is direct about something organizations often get wrong about staff rides: integrating them doesn’t require a massive institutional commitment. The method is highly adaptable.
His starting framework is straightforward. Choose an incident — one involving a safety mishap, ideally from your own organization or industry, and one with enough documentation to support the preliminary study phase. Burke notes that research consistently shows workers retain safety lessons more effectively when training uses narratives involving real incidents paired with discussion questions.
Next, construct a timeline built around multiple decision points, matching available documentation — maps, photos, videos — to each one. Then conduct the walkthrough, either on-site or virtually. The U.S. Army University publishes a virtual staff ride guide that, Burke notes, can be readily adapted for occupational safety contexts.
Two principles matter throughout: cultivate psychological safety so participants speak openly, and close with a debriefing that lets them articulate impressions and lessons. Without honest discussion, the exercise becomes performative rather than transformative.
The Practical Question of Time
One of the most common objections to staff rides is logistical. Burke addresses it head-on. Staff rides can be calibrated to nearly any organizational reality — as short as a few hours, or as long as two weeks. He cites his own work with colleague Wendy S. Becker, where they facilitated the Great Bear Wilderness Staff Ride in just a few hours within a conference setting. For most on-site applications, a full day is sufficient. Virtual or modified versions can fit into a half-day.
The format is flexible. The commitment, in Burke’s framing, is not optional. Practical constraints — time, space, budget, materials — should shape the staff ride, not prevent it.
A Tool, Not a Replacement
Burke is careful to position staff rides correctly within the broader safety toolkit. They are not meant to replace traditional training. Compliance modules, technical drills, certifications, and conventional instruction all retain their value.
But staff rides do something those tools struggle to do: they close the gap between knowing and doing. They make abstract lessons emotionally real. They force people to think through ambiguous, high-pressure decisions before they encounter them in actual crises.
“When used as an adjunct, and one with particular emotional impact,” Burke writes, “they can help teams and leaders close the gap between knowledge and action, between theory and practice.”
In an era defined by uncertainty — climate disruption, technological change, emerging risks no training manual can anticipate — Burke’s conclusion is grounded and clear. Organizations need leaders capable of foresight, adaptability, and judgment under pressure. The staff ride is a centuries-old tool refined for exactly that purpose. The only question is which industries will adopt it before the next preventable disaster forces the conversation.
Dr. Michael Burke is the Earl P. and Ethel B. Koerner Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business. His research focuses on learning, workplace safety interventions, and the situational factors that shape individual and organizational outcomes. He is the author of more than 100 articles and book chapters and, most recently, of A Workplace Safety Approach to Good Health: Interdisciplinary Insights for Sustainable Development.