Professional background
David became the founder and CEO of a consultancy group primarily doing business as O4R: Organizing For Resilience, after he retired from his position as Assistant Center Manager of the interagency Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC). David helped to design, build, manage and lead the LLC from 2001 through 2014. He focused on creating a widely used knowledge management system as he helped create a new Learning Center with his nation’s 300,000-member wildland fire community.
He has served as a High Reliability Organizing Technical Specialist with national and regional incident management teams (IMT) during wildfire and non-fire incidents. He engaged in the integration of Resilience Engineering, Risk Management and Social Science with the Organizational Learning and High Reliability Organizing areas of effort. He was the lead facilitative instructor of the High Reliability Organizing portion of the Advanced Incident Management course (S-520) and has been responsible for the integration of HRO in this National Advanced Fire & Resource Institute's featured upper level class qualifying Type 1 IMT leaders since 2009. He was a co-chair of the French/USA HRO in IMTs 2006-2010 Project. He was an invited speaker on these subjects for professional audiences in Spain, Greece, Sweden, Norway, France, Australia and Slovenia in addition to all regions of the USA.
Dave came to the U.S. Forest Service from the private sector where he was a national program manager for a spatial technology decision support system development firm.
He has previous government service as a remote sensing and GIS specialist, soil conservationist and program manager for several projects in a position co-sponsored by both the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and the research division of the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS).
Dave was also a Master Sergeant in the US Air Force, training teams of an Alert Interceptor Force in Europe. He graduated from that career as the production superintendent over a squadron of F-15 Eagles at Holloman AFB, NM.
