Managing wildland fire is an exercise in risk perception, sense-making and resilient performance. Risk perception begins with individual size up to determine a course of action, and becomes collective as the fire management team builds and continuously updates their common perception of risk. Dr. Karl Weick has called this sense-making. This act of communication - of collecting and selecting information, naming it, and passing it on, in various forms and stages of completeness, from one individual or team to another determines how resilient and effective the teams performance is. Because all subsequent actions rely on this, risk perception is a critical activity. It is hard work and prone to error, as numerous accident reviews, here and abroad, have found. Although advances are being made in the structure of current reviews such as including human factors analysis, which helpfully focuses on psychological factors (attention, fatigue, etc) - resilient performance requires developing a collective perception of risk, and for this, analysis of communication and interaction is needed. It is time to take a close, structured look at wildland fire incident communication and interaction processes. We propose to examine current communication practices using multiple disciplinary and theoretical angles to map and assess the communication sandbox. We will identify areas of communication competencies and constraints that affect the perception and communication of risk in wildland fire management. We seek to develop- for the first time - a comprehensive and coordinated perspective on incident communications. From this we can extract a set of insights for improving practice, identify appropriate assessment methods to support continuous improvement in risk perception, sensemaking, and resilient performance. We will initially use transcripts of radio recordings from wildland fire incidents,to articulate the operative model of communication for firefighters (the model in use), how firefighters are socialized to communicate (best practices). We will assess those practices for their productivity and efficacy in helping firefighters to manage risks individually and collectively. We will then test these insights by observing a team during a simulation exercise. In doing so, we hope to help the fire community learn to diagnose and repair communication problems in the moment, as well as identify improvements for training and practice.