Your situation awareness can be impacted by your Frame of Reference.
As part of your Recognition Primed Decision Making (RPDM) process, firefighters and officers must realize the impact their Frame of Reference can have on the quality of their decisions. A firefighter or officer is likey to judge, in part, the severity of an incident and the effectiveness of their action plan based on similar experiences they have recently had in similar properties (especially if the outcomes were good).
A post-incident review of a Mayday Incident may reveal the officers and firefighters operating at that scene had several positive experiences (incidents without consequence) in like structures. This could cause a firefighter or officer to view the actions at the current incident through a filter that was developed at previous (albeit similar) incidents that resolved favorably.
The problem with this is that your Frame of Reference may not include the worst case scenarios and thus it can be difficult to see a drastic situation developing until the incident reaches that break point which requires a mayday.
This SA blog contribution was made by:
Battalion Chief (ret.) Dennis Reilly
Cherry Hill (NJ) Fire Department
NOTE: Dennis Reilly currently serves as a firefighter in Linville, North Carolina and recently completed a three-year tour as a security specialist and team medic in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He can be reached at: chfdharley@gmail.com
______________________________
Dr. Gasaway's viewpoint:
I agree completely with Chief Reilly's observation. Firefighers and fire officers reply on their memory of past events to make reasonable predictions of future events. This is called mental modeling and it is part of the size-up and a significant contributor to situation awareness. Officers and firefighters may fall victim to developing a false level of confidence about the outcome of an incident because they may have many stored positive experiences of similar incidents (where things turned out well). Elevated self-confidence is one of the Fifty Ways to Kill a First Responder. Visit www.RichGasaway.com for more.
Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
rich@richgasaway.com
Friday, December 31, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Building situational awareness in new recruits
Question 6: How do you develop situational awareness skills in new recruits when they have been “programmed” to react instead of respond in the academy?
Chief Gasaway: I’m not completely sure I fully understand the difference between react and respond though I suspect the difference was crystal clear in the mind of this question’s author. As I noted at the start of the webcast, a person who develops a deep knowledge of a subject is in a favorable position to be a resilient problem solver.
I believe every academy should be teaching recruits how decisions are made under stress and how to develop and maintain their situational awareness. To be effective, situational awareness needs to be engrained in every aspect of training, both in words and in actions. For example (and I was trained this way, so I’m a as much a victim of this as any of you): We conduct training sessions of EMS providers where they are taught, repeatedly, to acknowledge they are wearing their personal protective equipment and the scene is safe.
However, the more times they SAY it, without actually DOING it, the more likely the script of SAYING it and NOT DOING it will become the behavior they display under stress. It is not enough to say you will do physical tasks, you must actually perform the task to program muscle and cognitive memory in the scripts the brain will run under stress.
When an EMS provider, in a training session, says the scene is safe without actually looking for and articulating those things they are looking for that ensures the scene is safe, they are programming a potentially dangerous script into their subconscious brain – one that when played during a real emergency the responder may find themselves replaying the verbal script in their mind that the scene is safe, without actually doing anything tangible to ensure that it is.
Richard B. Gasaway, PhD
www.RichGasaway.com
Chief Gasaway: I’m not completely sure I fully understand the difference between react and respond though I suspect the difference was crystal clear in the mind of this question’s author. As I noted at the start of the webcast, a person who develops a deep knowledge of a subject is in a favorable position to be a resilient problem solver.
I believe every academy should be teaching recruits how decisions are made under stress and how to develop and maintain their situational awareness. To be effective, situational awareness needs to be engrained in every aspect of training, both in words and in actions. For example (and I was trained this way, so I’m a as much a victim of this as any of you): We conduct training sessions of EMS providers where they are taught, repeatedly, to acknowledge they are wearing their personal protective equipment and the scene is safe.
However, the more times they SAY it, without actually DOING it, the more likely the script of SAYING it and NOT DOING it will become the behavior they display under stress. It is not enough to say you will do physical tasks, you must actually perform the task to program muscle and cognitive memory in the scripts the brain will run under stress.
When an EMS provider, in a training session, says the scene is safe without actually looking for and articulating those things they are looking for that ensures the scene is safe, they are programming a potentially dangerous script into their subconscious brain – one that when played during a real emergency the responder may find themselves replaying the verbal script in their mind that the scene is safe, without actually doing anything tangible to ensure that it is.
Richard B. Gasaway, PhD
www.RichGasaway.com
Sunday, October 17, 2010
The difference between typical responses and special hazard responses
Is there common ground for the process between typical response scenarios and special hazard responses in industry?
Chief Gasaway's response: I am assuming in the context of this question the “process” you are referring to is Gary Klein's Recognition-Primed Decision Making (RPDM) process. In that context, the answer is the process has been proven, through research, to be universal and widely used in a variety of high-risk, high-consequence decision making environments including: Airline pilots, jet fighter pilots, submarine commanders, tank commanders, air traffic controllers, police officers, emergency room teams, surgical teams and, of course, fireground commanders.
I am not aware of a specific study of RPDM within an industrial fire protection setting but I can infer that the same principles would apply. Granted, the “typical” response scenarios found in an industrial setting are going to be different, but nonetheless many of them are common within industry and are the basis for training programs to develop expert knowledge of practitioners.
Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
www.RichGasaway.com
Chief Gasaway's response: I am assuming in the context of this question the “process” you are referring to is Gary Klein's Recognition-Primed Decision Making (RPDM) process. In that context, the answer is the process has been proven, through research, to be universal and widely used in a variety of high-risk, high-consequence decision making environments including: Airline pilots, jet fighter pilots, submarine commanders, tank commanders, air traffic controllers, police officers, emergency room teams, surgical teams and, of course, fireground commanders.
I am not aware of a specific study of RPDM within an industrial fire protection setting but I can infer that the same principles would apply. Granted, the “typical” response scenarios found in an industrial setting are going to be different, but nonetheless many of them are common within industry and are the basis for training programs to develop expert knowledge of practitioners.
Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
www.RichGasaway.com
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Building expert knowledge
What can a new officer do to enhance their skills in decision making?
Chief Gasaway: In a word… Plenty! There are many ways to enhance your knowledge on a topic. Perhaps one of the best is experience, but that’s not the only way (but there are plenty out there who favor experience, as reflected in additional points awarded on promotional exams for years of service). This can prove to be a foolish (if not dangerous) way to promote. Why? Years on the job do not automatically correlate with the advancement of knowledge.
Maybe you’ve heard the saying that a person can have twenty years of experience or they can have one year of experience repeated twenty times. Perhaps no truer words have been spoken when talking about some people in our profession. Experience does not equal job knowledge. Some of the readers aren’t going to like hearing this (send your hate mail to rich@RichGasaway.com) but others will know it to be true and have seen it first hand.
In defense of experience, research has shown that for a person to develop expert-level knowledge and performance in their chosen profession requires TEN YEARS of experience… IF the person practices their skill/art an hour a day, five days a week. Unless you have a severe arson problem in your town, you’re probably not going to get that kind of practice.
So what do you do? Research has shown that the brain stores and recalls vividly imagined experiences the same as if the experience were real. In other words, when your brain is storing experiences, it cannot distinguish real experiences for vividly imagined experiences. It stores and uses both the same way. Research has shown the encoding of a memory is made more robust when attached to strong emotional responses. If you are imagining yourself at the scene of an incident you are reading about, relive it in your mind vividly and allow yourself to become emotionally attached to the incident.
This can be a tremendous asset for a young fire officer or aspiring officer. When you participate in training, simulations, read case studies, line of duty death reports or Fire Engineering articles, vividly imagine yourself as being involved in a real event and your brain will store the event for future recall. During the webcast I talk about the way your brain uses Recognition-Primed Decision Making. The vividly imagined experiences gained under non-emergency conditions can become part of the knowledge stores your brain will search through when you are under stress. In summary, it is possible to get ten years of experience in less time by preloading experiences.
Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
www.RichGasaway.com
Chief Gasaway: In a word… Plenty! There are many ways to enhance your knowledge on a topic. Perhaps one of the best is experience, but that’s not the only way (but there are plenty out there who favor experience, as reflected in additional points awarded on promotional exams for years of service). This can prove to be a foolish (if not dangerous) way to promote. Why? Years on the job do not automatically correlate with the advancement of knowledge.
Maybe you’ve heard the saying that a person can have twenty years of experience or they can have one year of experience repeated twenty times. Perhaps no truer words have been spoken when talking about some people in our profession. Experience does not equal job knowledge. Some of the readers aren’t going to like hearing this (send your hate mail to rich@RichGasaway.com) but others will know it to be true and have seen it first hand.
In defense of experience, research has shown that for a person to develop expert-level knowledge and performance in their chosen profession requires TEN YEARS of experience… IF the person practices their skill/art an hour a day, five days a week. Unless you have a severe arson problem in your town, you’re probably not going to get that kind of practice.
So what do you do? Research has shown that the brain stores and recalls vividly imagined experiences the same as if the experience were real. In other words, when your brain is storing experiences, it cannot distinguish real experiences for vividly imagined experiences. It stores and uses both the same way. Research has shown the encoding of a memory is made more robust when attached to strong emotional responses. If you are imagining yourself at the scene of an incident you are reading about, relive it in your mind vividly and allow yourself to become emotionally attached to the incident.
This can be a tremendous asset for a young fire officer or aspiring officer. When you participate in training, simulations, read case studies, line of duty death reports or Fire Engineering articles, vividly imagine yourself as being involved in a real event and your brain will store the event for future recall. During the webcast I talk about the way your brain uses Recognition-Primed Decision Making. The vividly imagined experiences gained under non-emergency conditions can become part of the knowledge stores your brain will search through when you are under stress. In summary, it is possible to get ten years of experience in less time by preloading experiences.
Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
www.RichGasaway.com
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Balancing risk with getting the job done
In the risk management area, how do you equilibrate risk assessment with getting the job done?
Chief Gasaway: This is a question I hear often. We are in a profession that has an inherent risk associated with what we do. This does not mean, however, that we need to be uncalculated in how we assess our risk. (There’s an old saying about love and romance that may apply here… “Only fools rush in”). The fire service does a good job, for the most part, of training firefighters how to arrive and attack a fire from the interior.
However, we don’t do nearly as good a job training firefighter on what a “no-go” situation looks like. Thus, firefighters arrive and perform based on their training, which is most often (if not always) “go” inside and put the fire out. Many firefighters I have spoken to acknowledge they’ve never had meaningful training (or even a meaningful discussion for that matter) on what “no go” looks like and when they should be defensive versus offensive in their attack. With a single script programmed in a firefighter’s mind (go), it becomes predictable that will be the script deployed under stress.
As firefighters, we are tasked with trying to save lives from the ravages of fire. Unfortunately, not all lives are savable. There are conditions civilian victims cannot survive in. There are also conditions firefighters cannot survive in. Knowing what these conditions look like and knowing what the precursor conditions leading up to non-survivable conditions looks like, will help firefighters make better “go” or “no-go” decisions.
Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
www.RichGasaway.com
Chief Gasaway: This is a question I hear often. We are in a profession that has an inherent risk associated with what we do. This does not mean, however, that we need to be uncalculated in how we assess our risk. (There’s an old saying about love and romance that may apply here… “Only fools rush in”). The fire service does a good job, for the most part, of training firefighters how to arrive and attack a fire from the interior.
However, we don’t do nearly as good a job training firefighter on what a “no-go” situation looks like. Thus, firefighters arrive and perform based on their training, which is most often (if not always) “go” inside and put the fire out. Many firefighters I have spoken to acknowledge they’ve never had meaningful training (or even a meaningful discussion for that matter) on what “no go” looks like and when they should be defensive versus offensive in their attack. With a single script programmed in a firefighter’s mind (go), it becomes predictable that will be the script deployed under stress.
As firefighters, we are tasked with trying to save lives from the ravages of fire. Unfortunately, not all lives are savable. There are conditions civilian victims cannot survive in. There are also conditions firefighters cannot survive in. Knowing what these conditions look like and knowing what the precursor conditions leading up to non-survivable conditions looks like, will help firefighters make better “go” or “no-go” decisions.
Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
www.RichGasaway.com
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Mayday Procedures & Close Calls
Our department doesn’t train on Mayday procedures at all. What can I do to make our chief and training division understand how crucial this is? We have had several close calls in our department and I am really concerned.
____________________
Chief Gasaway: You are really addressing two critical issues here. First is the need to have a procedure in place for a Mayday (and the training of personnel on how to deploy the procedure). Second, is the issue of the number of close calls your department has experienced. Close calls are the precursor, the warning signs if you will, to catastrophes. Every time you have a close call it should invoke a thorough review of what happened, how it happened and an analysis of how to prevent it from happening again (which may involve changes in policy or procedure and most certainly training of personnel on how to prevent the near-miss in the future. There are many things that need to be addressed for every near-miss (or casualty) event, not just the things that went wrong at the moment of the incident.
As far as how to get your department leaders to embrace safety, I think the best approach is through education and subtle persuasion. Send them the link to this webcast or suggest it be played for a department drill and then open up some discussion about things your department could be doing differently.
May everyone you command return home safely after every call.
Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
www.RichGasaway.com
____________________
Chief Gasaway: You are really addressing two critical issues here. First is the need to have a procedure in place for a Mayday (and the training of personnel on how to deploy the procedure). Second, is the issue of the number of close calls your department has experienced. Close calls are the precursor, the warning signs if you will, to catastrophes. Every time you have a close call it should invoke a thorough review of what happened, how it happened and an analysis of how to prevent it from happening again (which may involve changes in policy or procedure and most certainly training of personnel on how to prevent the near-miss in the future. There are many things that need to be addressed for every near-miss (or casualty) event, not just the things that went wrong at the moment of the incident.
As far as how to get your department leaders to embrace safety, I think the best approach is through education and subtle persuasion. Send them the link to this webcast or suggest it be played for a department drill and then open up some discussion about things your department could be doing differently.
May everyone you command return home safely after every call.
Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
www.RichGasaway.com
Welcome to SA Q&A
Welcome to my new blog - a forum to discuss your questions, concerns and ideas about situational awareness issues faced by firefighters, EMS providers, police officers, dispatchers, emergency managers, medical professionals, military personnel, pilots, and industry.
Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
www.RichGasaway.com
Fire Chief (ret.) Richard B. Gasaway, PhD, EFO, CFO, MICP
www.RichGasaway.com
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)