Frame of Reference

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