In What do you do if the fire does get "out of control"?, someone asked a legitimate question, and @berry120 wrote detailed response, and ended with a "tl;dr" saying, " but if the proper precautions are taken, you should very rarely or never need to resort to them. Prevention is 100x better than cure in this case."
I would think a comparison with defensive driving would suggest the right mindset for preventing out-of-control fires. Defensive driving does not assume that every other driver will follow the laws; it is meant to give you best chances when someone is driving like an idiot and deals you a card off the side of the deck. And my impression is that defensive driving is now expected.
In terms of defensive driving, I expect an attorney could say a lot about, for instance, "A missed turn is much less painful to recover from than an accident."
But I wanted to ask: What are the basic approaches, actions, and measures taken to see that what starts in the fire pit, stays in the fire pit?