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
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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
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