Wildfires don’t just burn.

They consume everything in their path. And when they really get going, it’s all hands on deck with everyone doing all they can to try to stop them or slow the fires down.

Hero emergency responders.

Evacuation coordinators.

Transportation agencies.

Hospital systems.

Shelter managers.

Power companies.

The list goes on.

Each group has its protocols, its expertise, its piece of the massive puzzle.

But what happens when all those pieces need to work together at once? When the fire doesn’t wait for proper coordination? When systems designed to operate independently suddenly have to function as one?

That’s the question Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) brought me in to help them and many others explore, using graphic recording to capture their tabletop exercise in late August.

Not in theory, but in an afternoon simulation where everything that could go wrong, would go wrong. All at the same time.

The Perfect Storm Scenario

PNNL is one of the country’s premier research institutions, and they’d designed something incredible: a layered crisis simulation that would test what happens when multiple systems fail simultaneously.

The scenario was deceptively simple. Fire moving from state lands into urban areas and then across state lines. But then the dominoes start falling.

Cell service goes down.

Electricity goes out, and electrical loads start shifting states away.

Evacuation routes close in real time.

State leaders want real-time updates.

Figuring out which helicopters can be used during a wildfire, between the National Guard or Civil Air Patrol.

Realizing that people have nowhere to go, and those trying to help them can’t communicate.

Or worse, knowing that people are notified and choose not to leave - resulting in countless and avoidable calls to be rescued.

It wasn’t a fire scenario. It was a reality scenario.

This wasn’t about putting out one fire.

It was about what happens when the fire forces every system to its breaking point, while all the other systems are breaking too.

The cause? Tiny emerald ash borers killing off trees and creating forests of dead wood just waiting for a spark (illustration in the top right below).

Drawing It As It Happened

I stood off to the side of the room with my markers and large paper sheets, watching seasoned emergency management professionals and people who were just starting their wildfire mitigation planning work through the scenario and content.

The scenario kept evolving. Solve one problem and two more appear.

The goal of these is to have everything “break” in real time and for me to draw as it happens.

As my sheet grew with the scenario injects, then came the responses and the real-time problem solving from the participants.

Then came the “boiling point” moments—when response goes from reactive to chaotic. When good people with good plans realize their assumptions don’t hold.

When Good Intentions Collide

As the scenarios unfolded, I was sketching frantically, trying to pull all these pieces together into something people could actually see.

What emerged on these charts wasn’t just documentation. It was a visual web showing how every expert’s knowledge connected to every other expert’s work.

The prevailing question:

When everything happens at once, how do you even know where to start?

The job of the artist becomes to draw these interconnections as they emerge. Making the invisible relationships visible.

Trying to show people not just their own expertise, but how it fits into the larger system of keeping people safe.

Each expert could see their role in the bigger picture and carry that clarity back to their teams.

Imagine trying to put this into a PowerPoint slide show?

You could do it? But would it travel?

Making Chaos Beautiful

You can’t solve what you can’t see clearly.

Make it visual, and all of a sudden, complex stuff becomes the kind of workable problem experts can point to and discuss.

It’s not about trying to draw answers. It’s trying to draw the chaos clearly enough that people can name it.

This isn't just for wildfire response management.

Complex systems, competing priorities, and high stakes require visual thinking.

Not to make things pretty, but to make them manageable.

I'll be writing more about this PNNL work in the coming months. You don't do multiple days of crisis simulation without many, many takeaways. {This was just one small example/ session in a much larger event}

But the biggest one is this: when everything happens at once, the first step isn't action.

It's clarity.

Sometimes the only way to find that clarity in chaos is to draw it out.

Grateful you are here,

Wade

P.S. - Maybe you have a tabletop exercise coming up.

Perhaps there are many moving parts moving in too many directions.

Drawing it out can help almost instantly, not just to see it, but to decide where or what to do next. That’s exactly why we’re here.

Let's talk about how to bring these to life for your next event.