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