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

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

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.
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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