During fighting against forest fires the situation can change quickly, thus, managers must also be ready to change the strategy and tactic. Firefighting managers have a typical profession, during which – depending on the time – making both analytical and naturalistic decision. Trainings usually focus on traditional – analytical based – decision making, which takes time, however, in many cases there is not enough time to do that. Therefore managers make many times recognition-primed decisions as a symbol of naturalistic decision-making. The first part of this article gives a thorough review of the topic. The second shows a simple and a complex model, created by the author. Method: the author used different tools and methods to achieve his goals; one of them was the study of the relevant literature, the other one was his own experience as a firefighting manager. Other results come from two surveys that are referred to; one of them was an essay analysis, the second one was a word association test, specially created for this research. Results and discussion: the author created a simple and a complex model for firefighting managers making decisions, taking into account time pressure, the limited capability of processing information and also a mechanism complementing the recognition-primed decision.