Five two-day dialogue sessions were held with a variety of U.S. wildland fire personnel to assess and improve learning from escaped prescribed fire reviews, although participants also discussed wildland fire accident investigations. In this paper we explore participants’ desire for participants to be more forthcoming during reviews and investigations so that the fire community can learn from unintended outcomes. Apply metadiscourse theory (Craig, 1999¹ ), we examine how participants used “open and closed” metaphors for communication to diagnose communication problems in the culture and to propose solutions. Specifically, we examined instance of open, closed/shut in nearly 1,000 transcripts pages of dialogue, along with “up” and “down” directionals in order to understand how participants viewed communication problems across hierarchical lines. We found three recurring combinations in the dialogue (“open up,” “shut/close down,” and “shut up”), while one pairing (“open down”) was absent. Results included both personal and organizational dimensions of the first three. For example, we noted conversational parallels between people shutting down but also burn programs being shut down after escaped prescribed fires. Fire managers express a desire to get younger people in particular to “open up” during reviews, and we draw parallels to the desire to put more fire back on the ground to open up landscapes. Power comes into play in the other two combinations: Participants characterized silencing in the culture, historically, in terms of the phrase “shut up and dig.” Although “open down” is not a natural language combination, it prompted us to look at what participants had to say about managerial transparency, both normative suggestions and perceptions about cultural change. Preliminary results suggest that the open/closed metaphor engenders discussions of communication as managing risk (e.g., career risk, risk of escape, risk of exposure). Implications will explore the productivity of this framing for establishing a learning climate.