B Shifter
Fire command and leadership conversations for B Shifters and beyond (all shifts welcome)!
B Shifter
Why Risk Management Matters
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This episode is hosted by Josh Blum, Chris Stewart, and John Vance.
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This episode was recorded on August 13, 2025 in Orlando, Florida at Fire Rescue International.
The B-Shifter podcast explores the critical importance of risk management on the fireground and how it integrates with strategic decision-making for safer, more effective operations.
• Risk management follows Brunacini's risk management model: risk a lot to save lives, risk a little for property, risk nothing for what's already lost
• Effective risk assessment requires understanding critical fireground factors including building construction, fire behavior, and occupancy
• Risk perception changes as firefighters promote through the ranks, shifting from personal risk acceptance to responsibility for others
• Strategic decisions must be reevaluated throughout the incident as conditions change or new information becomes available
• Organizational culture around risk management must extend beyond emergency scenes to daily operations and training
• A systematic approach to command ensures consistent, safer operations compared to the "we've always done it this way" mindset
• Fire departments often implement better systems only after experiencing line-of-duty deaths instead of learning from others' experiences
• Continuous improvement requires honest assessment of all incidents, not just those with negative outcomes
Come visit the B-Shifter team at FRI in Orlando at booth 1151 in the Tech Zone. Register to win free passes to the Hazard Zone Conference in Sharonville, Ohio.
Welcome to the B-Shifter podcast. You've got John Vance here, along with Josh Bloom and Chris Stewart, and we are live on the floor. Can you feel the energy? We are moments away from the doors swinging open and we're going to get visitors to the booth at the FRI conference here on the floor in Orlando, florida.
Speaker 1I think they called it a buzz. There was a buzz, that's right A buzz.
Speaker 2Yeah, we felt the buzz.
Speaker 3Well, if the listeners listen, they can probably hear the buzz. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2I can hear it I hear the buzz?
Speaker 3Yeah, there is definitely a buzz.
Speaker 2There'll be a buzz after four o'clock when it closes off here.
Speaker 3Six, six o'clock Six.
Speaker 2Are we here until six tonight? Maybe, I don't remember. Oh, if you are listening to this on Thursday, come by and see us. We're over in the tech zone, booth 1161, I do believe, or 51 or 1151. I think, maybe. Ok, we're in the 1100s, you can't miss us. Come by and see us, we'd love to visit.
Speaker 1We're the only booth with a gorilla.
Speaker 2Yes, and we are giving away passes to the Hazard Zone Conference coming up in Sharonville, ohio. All you have to do is come by and register. We're going to give a few passes away, so we'd love to see you. Also, if you have questions about Blue Card or you have some discussions going on, these are the guys to talk to when you come by and see us at the booth. What else have we got going on here?
Hazard Zone Conference Details
Speaker 3Like we had talked about in the last few podcasts, we're fully prepared to talk about the after action reporting system that we launched about 12 months ago 11 months ago I guess at the conference. That's going really well. So we want to make sure that we're sharing, sharing that with everybody and they see it. And then really everything that's going on with Blue Card, whether they want to talk about Silverback leadership or new CE modules or where we are with Fire Command 3. Or, like you had said, john, the Bruno's Timeless Tactical Truth book. That'll be out here soon, yeah, so stop by if you've got questions. Out here soon, yeah, so stop by if you've got questions. Want to re-engage, engage or stay engaged with Blue Card, because there is three fire departments, three kinds?
Speaker 3those that are doing it, those that are going to do it and those that are going to do it again.
Speaker 2So, yeah, stop by and see us. We see so many people fall off and then just have to repeat the whole process over again. It's so much easier to maintain that training and certification than trying to come up and recapture that. A lot of times it's because of either a change in fire chief or some retirements. But plan ahead. We can help you strategize on that too and make sure that you're staying with it for the duration of your fire department, not just your tenure at your fire department. We were talking about the conference and giving away free passes. How's that going? How's registration?
Speaker 3Yeah, conference is going really good. I think the pre-conference workshops out of all five of them there might be I don't know 15 seats left. So Mayday Management has a few seats. The Critical Thinking, decision Making, which is really just helping us create ICs that are actually making decisions on the fire ground and thinking and helping them, giving them some tools that they can actually leave with. Like Eric Phillips always says, they come to a class, it's not just about what they get in the class, they actually leave there with some tools to take back and do some things with.
Speaker 3I think there's maybe eight seats in there. The Safety Train, the Trainer class, has a few seats. The engine one, the EOC class, I think maybe has four seats left. So the pre-conference workshops are almost filled up. And then conference registration is going good. While we've been here we've gotten quite a few registrations this week. So, yeah, we're looking forward to catching up with everybody at the end of September and first part of October at the conference. How's the hotel block looking? Yeah, so the Hyatt's sold out, been sold out, and I think there's not a ton of seats, maybe 20 or so rooms left at the Marriott I mean, it's just right across the street, still maybe like one one-hundredth of the distance that it is from our hotel here to the conference center.
Speaker 2Yeah, we had quite a hike today. We promise we won't make you walk two miles.
Speaker 3You were right. It was exactly one and a half miles from our hotel to here and this beautiful South Florida humidity.
Speaker 2I thought I'd be a good guy and come over and set up the booth and surprise, then I got over here. If anyone has been involved in trade shows before, they typically do not turn the air conditioner on until the participants come in, so set up day, there's no AC. So it's about 88 degrees outside, a hundred percent humidity, no AC on in here and I thought I was going to die between the walk and setting everything up and it's like, yeah, so much for being a good guy. I was cursing you guys yesterday, so we appreciate it.
Speaker 2yeah, it was it was, and here you are yeah, here I am a couple pounds lighter, which which I could use. All right, chris, what are you teaching at the conference again?
Speaker 1Eric Phillips and I will be talking.
Speaker 1Well, our pre-conference workshop, like Josh said, is the critical thinking, strategic decision making workshop, so we'll be doing our kind of evolved delivery of that and again making sure that folks are leaving with tools to actually go home and practice this, because what training have any of us ever done in our entire careers?
Speaker 1And where you get everything you need in the class and you don't ever have to spend another minute doing anything about it?
Risk Management Fundamentals
Speaker 1So, uh, that's not the case with this. So this is going back and working on, uh, committing to your 10 000 hours, if, if you will, and then, speaking at the workshop, I'm going to talk about the utilization kind of what is in the new NFPA 1700 that's due to be released in January of 26, and then how it actually applies to us on the fire ground and how the only NFPA firefighting standard is now starting to evolve into something that fire departments should probably pay attention to with regards to information they need to know about fire ground and fire ground conditions, and then the most appropriate evidence-based actions that help them align with better outcomes. And so, and whether those outcomes are successful, fire control successfully rescuing people, or locating and rescuing people, or simply keeping it to the building of origin and not killing any firefighters. Sometimes that's a win for us, so we need to know and understand that, and I think this guideline has done a good job of that you know and understand that, and I think this guideline has done a good job of that.
Speaker 2Well, you can go to bshiftercom and get all the information about the conference there. It gives you a full description of the courses, you can meet the instructors and all the registration information. So it is the premier conference for incident commanders and fire service leaders, so we invite everyone there. So today the topic is going to be risk management and then we'll talk a little bit about strategy and how strategy and risk management go hand in hand. We teased this on the podcast last week and, knowing that Chris was going to be sitting down with us, I thought we'd start with you and then see what Josh has to say about risk management and why it matters and how you were talking. We were joking about this at dinner. Is there a mathematical formula? Is this an algebra equation? Or how do we really figure out what risk management is? How do we quantify it?
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 1So I'm going to resort back to things that Alan Berners-Eeney taught us in the Phoenix Fire Department as a new firefighter, as a new officer, and how things were explained to us right and because he did so many smart things right and developed so many smart processes for us and then shared them with the world. And then shoot, he was talking about fire command. He was writing about fire command in the 70s with the NFPA. So like, this is not new concepts, this is not new information. But part of the brilliance of what he did was he can actually take complex issues, challenges, processes and boil them down into something that's actually fairly simple, and the best example I have that is, you know, in his last five years or so in the Phoenix Fire Department, our mission statement was five words right Survive, prevent, harm, be nice. And while the folks who tend to have very literal minds have a hard time looking at that, going God, how are you supposed to run a fire department on that? The brilliance of it is is that is so simple yet so deep that it covers a vast majority of things we could possibly do and it causes us as individuals to actually think about it. So with risk management, he has a very simple approach that he introduced to us with the language that that is published today.
Speaker 1The risk management plan was based on three positions. Right, a position where we are willing to risk a lot based on a certain condition, and the defined certain condition is savable lives. For whatever reason, through our size up, we believe there is a potential for savable lives there. So in that situation we are willing to risk a lot and everybody wants to know, well, what is a lot? Well, you have to actually know and understand the critical fire ground factors that are present there and then the action that you're going to take to figure out. All right, am I going to be tolerant of us doing that action, taking that significant risk in this situation? So that's the first part of that risk management plan. The second part is we'll risk a little, with that caveat, in a calculated manner, to save savable property. So the question is should we risk ourselves and should we risk firefighters' welfare on the same level for property as we do people? And I think universally we would say no, that's probably not reasonable. We do want to protect property. We are willing to take less of a risk doing that, but we know that saving people's stuff is important. It's a critical part of our job. I spent the vast majority of my career working in areas where virtually nobody had insurance on their property and everything they had was jammed in their apartment or their small house and it mattered that we showed up and did the best job we could to actually try and save their stuff. So the last part of that is of the risk management plan is we won't take any risk at all for what is already lost.
Speaker 1When we show up, we should be able to size that incident up and define what can't we save. If we can't save something, we probably shouldn't be putting a whole lot of effort that's connected to any form of risk towards that and then look around and say, okay, are there things that we can protect? Are there things that we can save? So it's actually a very simple process, but you have to know and understand the fire ground. You have to know and understand fire behavior. You have to know and understand a little bit about building construction. You have to know and understand about the standard actions that fire companies should be taking on the fire ground to mitigate these things, to mitigate or to execute fire control, to execute search operations. And then you actually need to know what are the typical ways in which firefighters tend to get hurt and or killed. For whatever the given situation is the building, the building type, the occupancy type, the profile size, all of those things go into this. So risking a lot is not even at every structure and occupancy that we show up at.
Speaker 1So if I show up at a residential fire single or multifamily dwelling fire and I've got a significant fire, typically the most risky thing we do is working in environments where we don't control the smoke and heat and air movement, trying to look for people and or look for the fire right without the ability or consciously not choosing to control the fire. That is oftentimes the most risky thing we do. Building construction plays into that the structural integrity, not knowing exactly where the fire is. Do we have a fire below us? Do we have fire above us? Do we? You know all of those things connected together. But so when I show up on a residential fire and I know that I'm going to start, I have a high likelihood of dealing with victims. I need to know what risk a lot looks like and it becomes. It goes back to that standard conditions and standard actions part Right, and so I know what the most dangerous things we are going to do at this incident and I need to figure out, as an incident commander of, are we willing to commit to that or aren't we? That's really the simple fact, and you actually have to make a conscious decision when you're doing it effectively on the front end to be able to actually execute risk management.
Commercial Building Risk Factors
Speaker 1If we talk about what Does risk a lot in a commercial building mean, you know, an anchor store, a big box, a strip mall with larger occupancies, we've got to go back to some Don Abbott stuff here. What is typically the most dangerous thing for us to do inside these buildings and we can discern that based on, you know, project Mayday information right, the number one thing is getting lost, getting off the line and running out of air. Those are the things that are killing us in commercial structures the most. There are other things structural collapse, falling off or through roofs. There's other details, but the predominant one is getting lost and running out of air. So, honestly, when we're talking about making offensive interior attacks in commercial buildings, simply stretching the line in looking for the fire and trying to control the fire often is the most dangerous thing we have going on in there, risk a lot in that environment looks like, and be able to measure that and get a sense for what is reasonable for us to do and what isn't reasonable for us to do, and make a decision based on that.
Speaker 1Can we connect life safety to commercial buildings? Absolutely, we can. When we show up and kind of have a standard process to figure out if life safety is a critical factor, right, does this appear to be occupied? Can I identify searchable or tenable space and can I do something reasonably about that? Right, if you answer yes to those, life safety is likely a critical factor for you at any incident you show up on. So if I have a commercial building that's open or it's during business hours, was open for business when the fire started, even though the folks inside the building may go through a process of trying to get everybody out, that's not a guarantee, right? So I'm going inside that structure likely to see if I can locate and control that fire, because that is the absolute best thing I can do for the life safety in that building. So when I talk about risking a lot in there, simply stretching lines into big commercial buildings with the hopes of locating and controlling the fire really ends up looking like risking a lot. And I'm doing that because if I can control that fire I have a high likelihood of protecting and or eventually locating, removing people that are inside that building. So it's process and it has to be connected so risk management doesn't live on its own. I don't show up to an incident, go through this process and then as an afterthought say, well, I'm going to look at risk management. It doesn't work that way. It has to be integrated into the system.
Speaker 1So strategic decision-making in the blue card system starts with size up and defining the critical factors. Once we have a decent idea of them, then we apply the risk management Based upon those critical factors. Where are we in our risk management right? Are the conditions going to allow us to do interior offensive operations? Am I dealing with a potential life safety or aren't I? And knowing answers or being able to discern what I think are the best answers in the moment at that point helps me figure out where should I be in the three positions of our risk management plan. If I've done a good job with identifying that, then I'm going to be able to clearly identify what strategy am I in. Am I willing to work inside the hazard zone based on the conditions, critical factors and my position in the risk management plan, or aren't I? If I am great, I'm in the offensive strategy. If I'm not, I'm in the defensive strategy.
Speaker 1It works very clear. It's actually logical. It works up and down the stream and if one is out of balance, it provides you an opportunity to go oh, something's not right. I need to reevaluate and fix what my perspective is here ongoing process throughout the entirety of the incident. So in the beginning I may be in the green of my risk management plan, but after, let's say I it's a residential fire, let's say we go in, we locate the fire, we get an all clear.
Speaker 1Where are we now in our risk management plan? Well, I don't. I'm not dealing with any savable, the potential of any savable victims anymore, right, and it could be argued that we're the only life safety now inside the building, although I don't necessarily talk about that a whole lot when we teach this class, but it is true and it is a fact. So I need to think about. All right, what should we be doing now?
Speaker 1Where are we in our risk management plan? Am I still willing to be in there, take a little bit of risk, try and protect the stuff that we need to protect. Yeah, likely, I absolutely am. So I'm shifting my risk tolerance, if you will. At that point there's no grand announcements about I'm changing my position in the risk management plan, right, but this is clearly having an understanding of what's going on now and how much risk am I willing to tolerate, based on the given conditions and based on all of our critical factors in the moment. So that is a very long-winded answer to that, but I think that really does set the stage on the beauty of our simple risk management plan. Simple doesn't mean easy, and simple means you actually have to know and understand. It has to be part of a process. So I love talking about this, so I'll let you guys go.
Speaker 2Well, and just for especially non-Blue Card users, or if you're interested in Blue Card, we color code that. So risk a lot to save. A lot is green, risking in a highly calculated manner to save savable properties, yellow and then risk nothing to save. What is already lost is red. So we kind of give you a green light, yellow light, caution, red light, stop. And that's another way that we think about it and we teach this. So you were talking about colors and I just wanted to to make sure that we were coming back on that.
Speaker 3Go ahead, josh, yeah so that was a lot and I that's, that's a. I'm not sure what I can really add to that, but one one thing is uh, we recently just released a podcast of an incident in cobb county where they, you know, clearly started out at an occupied you know, believed to be based on critical factors an occupied single family dwelling with a working fire. They deploy and then, based off of factors, you know, they make an adjustment, but they were using, you know, the strategic decision-making model and plugging all that into their, really into the risk management plan. Where does this really fall? And we talked about so many things in that podcast of yeah, in the beginning they're working on fire control and wanting to get all clears and all of that, but conditions change with a partial collapse. Companies had already been inside and gotten an all clear of some spaces.
Speaker 3The incident commander talked to the actual owner of the property and, chris, as you said so very well on that one is, we didn't just count on the owner saying that everybody's out, because we really don't like to do that. It's valuable information, but it was verified by another company that was already inside and when all of those factors lined up, it's like no, we're there's no, there's no lives to be saved here and now. We have a partial collapse and we're not going to risk ourselves any further. So one thing that's a trigger I know for you a little bit, chris, it was a Bruno thing is we have to survive, right? So that fits into this whole risk management plan thing. So we should be thinking about what are we going to do and can we survive, whatever operation we're going to get into, and that's that evaluation of the critical fire ground factors. And if anybody's looking for, you know, one stop shop, simple thing about you know, risk management. Risk management is just one part of the system, right, as Chris said.
Speaker 1So I mean, if you're not evaluating critical fire ground factors, don't worry about the risk management plan, because, and if you're going to do, whatever you normally do when you show up, hell, don't even bother with size up right, because you're just going to do what you normally do. Now, we think it's dumb right, but that don't even bother with size up right, because you're just going to do what you normally do. We think it's dumb right, but you can't pick and choose pieces of the system to use. I'm going to use this, but I'm not going to use that. It doesn't work, it just doesn't.
Evaluating Risk Throughout Incidents
Speaker 3Yeah. So I want to circle back to another. Well, there's several. So if you go to any of our podcasts of live audio, we have several cases of working fires where, going through the process, using the strategic decision-making model, pushing it, you know, the critical fire ground factors, pushing into the risk management plan, what's our incident action plan? What's the strategy, all of those things you know.
Speaker 3Another one that we had was, you know, apartment building and incident commanders like no, we're, we're going defensive, and it was a Cobb County fire, and the, the division boss, is like I got some space that I can get an all clear, that I still need to get an all clear in before we change strategies.
Speaker 3I think we're okay and I think that that level of having that division boss forward and that trust in their relationship piece and the trust and that they were all trained in the same way, in the same system, they're thinking more alike and that division boss was in a forward position to be, you know, a little bit closer to the action of what was going on. The incident commander trusted that but said OK, as soon as you get it all clear, we're changing strategies and we can jump way back to a fire that happened in Phoenix 25 years ago, maybe now the Cobblestone Fire, where you know that video can still be found and we can probably we can share that on this that everybody can watch that and I think that fire was well. There was many, many fires in that complex, but I think the after action on that was it was maybe 25 years ago or 20 years ago, I'm not, it was it was.
Speaker 1Yeah, pains me to say that, yes, but I think it was at least 20 years ago.
Speaker 3Yeah, 20 years ago. So reported people trapped, you know pretty significant amount of fire and the communications then because of the system and people being on the same page and the training that was taking place, and the decision-making that happened was, yeah, we're going to be in the offensive strategy, we're working to get all clears. They were clearly thinking about the critical factors ongoing. There's communications on the fire ground that was, as you listen to it, it's like okay, as soon as they have all clears, they're going to change strategies. And the incident commander says that John Nettles, right, that was the guy. Yeah.
Speaker 1John. John was a yeah.
Speaker 3The incident commander said John, as soon as you get an all-clear of that apartment, we're changing strategies. And that was the beauty of having a system where you forecast and being able to systematically change strategies based off of critical factors, your risk management plan, all those parts and pieces. So there's plenty of examples out there of how it goes. But if somebody's looking again for that one-stop job, a little risk management piece of well, what is risk management? Well, it's about the initial part of it's about 40 hours of online, followed by 24 hours of in-person training, followed by thousands of hours of in-the-field experience and so on. To build that out, you know in the field experience and so on. To build that out Like there's no flip a switch and all of a sudden you understand risk management.
Speaker 1I'd like to talk, just go back a little bit, just to risk in general and the fire ground, right, and so if we truly think about the work that we do and we've got a decent understanding, as IC see is, you know whatever level of I see we are right that we should fully recognize there are two. There are only two things we should be taking risk for on the fire ground. That is, for savable lives or savable property. That is the only two things. If our decisions are being made outside of those two points like I'm making risk management decisions because of how I feel, or I'm making risk management decisions because it's fun, decisions based on political positions that my organization has taken you know about fire ground activity and you know we're not going to be pussies and you know all the other rhetoric that you know you hear that ain't risk management. That's showing up saying we're going to do whatever it is, we're going to do how we normally do it, I don't care what the conditions are, and then when something bad happens to us, we're going to act surprised Like there's no way we could have predicted this, actually this bad event happening to us and one of our firefighters, or our firefighters and community members. So, man, I have a pretty big problem with that perspective. The other thing that is interesting about risk is how it changes based on your organizational position, and so when I've been teaching company officers this subject with folks who want to be company officers or our company officers we start talking about perspective. And you know, working as firefighters well, as a department, when we're training our firefighters in the beginning, we spend a significant amount of time early in their career creating firefighters who are comfortable working in dangerous positions. That's a really important thing that we actually do and we need to focus on. And then there's this tipping point and it's a little bit different for every individual, but there's this tipping point of when now I'm going to stop training you to be okay working in dangerous conditions and now I'm going to have to continually remind you what we do is actually dangerous Right. Now I'm going to have to continually remind you what we do is actually dangerous Right. And because we lose that idea of wow, we've done this so many times and we've done this so many times successfully, or what we feel is successfully, is that I don't have to actually pay attention, I don't actually have to be conscious of the risk I'm taking or the operations that we're conducting on the fire ground taking or the operations that we're conducting on the fire ground.
Speaker 1The other change in perspective is, as we promote, we are very okay taking risk for ourselves on the fire ground. We tend to be right as individuals. That should change as we promote into supervisory roles. Because as we promote into these supervisory roles, now what do we become responsible for? We become responsible for the work us and our company as a company officer, the work my company and myself do, right. But now I'm also responsible for their safety and welfare, and their safety and welfare may actually be hinged on the decisions that I make as an IC or just as a company officer working on the fire ground. So now I have organizational, defined, documented responsibility for other people and as I move up in the organization and the system, as I become maybe a chief officer, now I'm responsible for for multiple companies and I'm going to be managing multiple companies in the hazard zone. I am responsible for their performance and I'm responsible for their welfare and I have got to be able to balance those two.
Speaker 1The only way I know how to do that successfully is having a system and a process to actually be able to do that. I am obviously biased towards a blue card system, right, but it gives me the tools to be able to measure and initiate effective work and it gives me tools and a system to manage the safety and welfare of the firefighters doing it. Risk management is a critical element to that. If I'm a task level firefighter and I'm trying to apply, risk management is a critical element to that. If I'm a task level firefighter and I'm trying to apply risk management or I have an opinion about the overall strategic risk management we're taking, at that incident, as me as an individual firefighter, it's out of whack, it's disjointed and I don't know and understand and perceive.
Organizational Responsibility and Risk
Speaker 1I didn't know and understand the different perspectives working in the fire ground until I actually took those roles and responsibilities on and. But once you get that, you can't, you can't, unlearn it. Once you know, you know and once you know you have that responsibility, you can't shed that responsibility. You can't shed that responsibility. So, having a process, I never wanted to be on the fire ground where something bad happened to myself or one of the companies or somebody or individuals that I was in, and around it a lot and I saw those consequences. That's heavy stuff, man, and we need to do a better job of preparing ICs, to think about it and know it and understand the responsibility and give them a system that actually does that. And I know that's crazy talk, but I really don't see a better way around it, or nobody's presented a better way to the fire service, in my opinion, about being able to do that.
Speaker 3Just to talk a little bit about risk management when it comes to don't expect the fire ground to operate well and do well with a risk management plan if you're not doing well with risk management before the bell rings. And you know we hear a lot of people talk about and we talk about and you know Gordon Graham talks about the risk management when it comes to apparatus operators Chris, we talked about a little bit this last week you know, if your operators are driving like assholes to the scene and you let that happen, don't be surprised when firemen do things that you don't expect or wouldn't think that they would do. And if you're not wearing seatbelts, what does that look like? And if I don't, you know I wear all my turnout gear properly when it really matters, and I wear my mask when it really matters. And I, you know whatever it is. I wear my mask when it really matters and I, you know whatever it is. I bring the thermal imaging camera whenever. And it's like all of those things are all part of the mindset when it comes to risk management. I mean, we're doing risk management every day, right, like we, we made a kind of started with it, but we, we made a decision that we were going to walk over here from the hotel. Well, you were doing a little risk management there, like, yeah, let's walk over there, like what's the worst thing going to happen? You behind the wheel of your own car, it's risk management. You're going to cross the street. It's risk management. It's all risk management. Right, it does not have to be complicated. But most risk management we have in our life comes from experience and I think you can line that right up with the critical factors thing when you arrive to the incident and it just clicked in my brain, I wanted to say it earlier.
Speaker 3All of this has to start with risk management on the fire ground, has to start with what is your real capability? You have to understand that. So, evaluation of critical factors, and you can tie into there. What's the deployment look like, how many people do you have? But that matters. So standard actions Right, a fire department that is arriving with four people on an apparatus can do more than a fire department arriving with two people on an apparatus.
Speaker 3Right, four people on an apparatus can do more than a fire department arriving with two people on an apparatus. Right, and organizations have to deal with what they have to deal with. But my risk management plan, if my deployment is different than Chris's, is going to look a little bit different because, yeah, I can evaluate the problem but my incident action plan cannot match because I can't do that work. And we can go all the way back to. Something Vinnie Dunn has said hundreds of times now is if you don't have the people to do the work, then maybe you can't be in that strategy. So, yeah, this could be a many part series, I think, on risk management it's almost like we could do a workshop. Yeah, we should. Critical thinking, decision making, yeah it's crazy.
Speaker 2Well, and part of that you know you go through a lot of scenarios and then end it with a real good case study that FSRI did. But in that you know we're talking about. This is what the fire presents on the alpha side, and it looks like fire's blowing out of every orifice. I'm going to say I'm risking nothing to save nothing and I'm going to be in the defensive strategy, but then we find survivable space on the 360. So let's talk about not being married to a plan once you get that new information.
Speaker 1So number one, if you don't have a system and a process that it has built in reevaluation, make changes when you have changing conditions. And what you're talking about, jv, is, I know and expect my company officers when they arrive that somebody is getting a 360. I hope it's that initial arriving company officer. But if they're unable to complete it for whatever reason, they're going to get the rest of that information through assignments or through utilizing other means. And within that 360, I'm going to use that re-evaluation or that evaluation of the additional sides or the additional information to say, okay, what's changed now? And if the conditions and the critical factors have actually changed because of my size up, then I'm going to revaluate my risk management or reevaluate my strategy.
Speaker 1Very simple, and in the case that you just spoke about it, no, if I'm in the defensive strategy and now I find searchable space or I find the ability to search areas and maybe actually control the fire from an interior or a position inside the hazard zone, then I need to take that that's the right thing to do.
Speaker 1So I'm going to adjust it through standard communication on the fire ground to ensure that everybody knows what our strategy is and what the incident action plan is and then I'm going to start deploying companies based on that incident action plan. So the system has to be nimble. The vast majority of time we change in the system through evaluation is from offensive to defensive. I get that that's pretty common, but there are plenty of instances where man it shows bad from the maybe the, the alpha and the delta side, but the Bravo and Charlie paint a very different picture. So we should ree, reevaluate and reengage in the right way, based on a system and process and well-communicated make sure people know what it is that we're doing. So that reevaluation, part of the strategic decision-making, is a critical part of our overall success critical part of our overall success.
Speaker 2And you say that the strategy is a critical step in this. Because that's really our next stop and the strategy really needs to be determined from the onset. So we say it on the onset, but if we do a 360 on our follow-up report, we can come back and change things, right, oh absolutely so.
Speaker 1that's based on the recognition and Bruno's quote of the vast majority of line of duty deaths come from firefighters working in offensive positions during defensive fire conditions right, so we need to know and understand what the conditions are.
Speaker 1We need to know and understand, based on those conditions and risk management, what position I'm going to be to be working for on the fire, on the fire ground. Am I going to be inside the hazard zone or outside the hazard zone? And so if I reevaluate whether it's because of a 360, or shoot, just flowing, simply flowing water on the structure and starting to knock the fire down can drastically change those conditions, that I, if I think it's appropriate, I think it's appropriate and it's based on critical factors, and maybe the most important critical factor here is life safety. If I can do something to impact life safety there, then I should change my tactic and change my strategy to be able to match those conditions and execute that. So it's not. You don't have to stick with whatever you said in the beginning. I want our initial incident commanders to be good at making their first call, but there are absolutely times when they're going to be presented with different information where making a change is completely appropriate.
Speaker 2Anything else on that, Josh?
Strategy Changes and Reevaluation
Speaker 3That's just the value of having a system that is never-ending. It's that arrow that's in the process that we're constantly going through that and I just want to add that you know we should start the process and it shouldn't be a secret. I mean our firefighters to chief response officers should be on the same page when it comes to the system and understanding decision-making. And I think, as Eric Phillips says very well, when we get firefighters and company officers to understand the system, it helps the strategic IC that much more, because they know what to say and how to say it.
Speaker 3They're all talking the same language when it comes to the critical factors like what do I need to report here, what should I not report here? Factors like what? What do I need to report here? What, what should I not report here? And um, you know there's, there's red flag, things you know that are out there, that that cause us to change action. But it doesn't have to be, you know, extreme, you know, from one end to the one side to the other it's. It just might affect our incident action plan and not necessarily our strategy, like where we're going to deploy companies or how many more companies we need at an incident. So to me it all comes back to the system. You can't take one part of it and have a working machine at the end. That's never going to work. You're missing too many parts and pieces.
Speaker 2Well, we could talk about this all day, as Chris said, and we've done podcasts on this before, but this was just a more in-depth conversation on it and it's one we should continue to have, because people don't understand it. Or it even gives tools to folks who are doing Blue Card and they're immersed in the system. Just more to talk about, more to really visit. This poster hung up in all of our fire stations the risk management model. There were five posters. That was one of them because we wanted everybody, when they're sitting around the coffee table and chatting about this building or that building, to talk about it. So everybody on the crew understands. And that's really the, if I say, magic. That's the secret of our system is that we can teach it and everybody understands what we're talking about and it's common throughout the department not just terminology, but also operating philosophy.
Speaker 2Well, can you guys feel the electricity? The buzz has definitely increased. Yes, and they turn the AC up a little bit too. I've felt a couple of cold blasts of air. Before we go, man the booth and we hope to see you here at FRI in Orlando. Do you guys want to do a Timeless Tactical Truth?
Speaker 1Always, I'm here for the Timeless Tactical Truth.
Speaker 2Timeless Tactical Truth from Alan Brunicini. This is from Volume 2. Volume 1, by the way, is going to be available very soon, in the next few few weeks, probably both at bshiftercom. We'll have it at the conference. So that has been a hard-to-get book. We've recreated it and it's going to be available at a low price. Perfect stocking stuffer and gift for anybody.
Speaker 3But you can get that at bshiftercom coming up and, john, you might as well just put out there the Solitaire card game is active, so I was going to bring that up, but I was afraid that that would overshadow the whole conversation about the conference and I didn't want to take away from that.
Speaker 1It is there Timeless Tactical Truths. Solitaire is live right.
Speaker 2That has been Nick's baby and Nick Brunicini made sure that we got it because we used to have have it. Now it's back. So if you want to go through all these timeless tactical truths, you don't have to buy the book, you don't have to buy the playing cards, both available at bshiftercom.
Speaker 2I know I'm sound like a shill but, but you can get it for free at bshiftercom, right on the top timeless tactical truth solitaire. So you can play it and go through all those and also, uh, whittle away time at the firehouse if you'd like. Well, this timeless tactical truth is from volume two, yet to be released, and bruno says what we learn from history is that we fail to learn from history yeah, we keep doing the same thing over and over and over again and expect different results, and I, I can't, I can't figure that out.
Speaker 3And then, um, you know, we, we read these things and it comes down to accidental success. Right, we, we, we maybe make something work, but we don't look at, you know, reviewing it. So, on that note, if you're at the conference, stop by and see us and we can talk about the after action reporting system, which may help you not repeat some of the things in history.
Speaker 2And those lessons we find even in large organizations with national events, something that everyone talks about. You talk to new firefighters from those departments sometime and you start talking we know about a line of duty, death or deaths that they had and the new people don't even know about it. Or, oh, I've seen the memorial but we haven't really talked about what changed since then. And that's why we're destined to repeat those same mistakes if we don't continue to revisit them. We haven't found new ways to kill firefighters. There's no new technology that's come out.
Speaker 2Now we could say lithium ion batteries or something like that poses a different threat, but it's still the same thing, right, and it's our ineffective size up, ineffective communication, lack of training on command systems, lack of training on communications and lack of SOPs that address all of that. That's the top five right there. And if we're not visiting that as an organization, and if you're a chief ops, chief, battalion chief captain, whoever you are leader in your organization if you're not revisiting those hard-learned lessons, you're setting yourself up to repeat it, and we see it happen all the time.
Speaker 1So it's universal. Um, like you said, the amount of surprise out there when something bad happens and we think, wow, this is the first time this has ever happened. No, if we actually look back, we can find a dozen or 15 or 20 times that something identically has occurred with the same negative outcome. But then I can give a very, very personal position on this, because I am retired from an organization that spent an incredible amount of time and effort to learn from a line of duty death and has absolutely forgotten the lessons that we learned there and are having a difficult time managing that process and that conversation about learning from mistakes, learning from challenges, learning from new things that are coming to the fire service and adapting the system to it. So, yeah, that's actually a heartbreaking one for me, but it's very real right. That's actually a heartbreaking one for me, but it's very real right.
Speaker 1And it takes time, effort, diligence to actually keep that information current and relevant to today for any organization, in any incident, but we keep the important things important and they get drowned out by a lot of other nonsensical stuff that I think a lot of fire service leaders are more safe, are more comfortable talking about today than the actual hard stuff. So, yeah, we're in 22 fire departments as blue card, as a system after a line of duty, death right. So if you know, if a group, if somebody has an effective system beforehand, you're not going to make a drastic change, you're going to fix the small elements that needed to be changed, but you're not going to do a drastic change. The vast majority of the times we're going into an organization, they really had no system, no incident command process beforehand and something bad happened and now they know, oh, now I need to do something different.
Speaker 3I think we in our industry jump to the line of duty death thing. But I think it's so important that we look at all of our responses and measure everything we do, like success doesn't mean somebody didn't get hurt or that we didn't burn the building down right. Like we really need to measure die.
Learning From History's Mistakes
Speaker 3But they lost their career, right, right, yeah, sure yeah but we them, we we need to measure what we do all the time on emergency response so that we can constantly be improving. And I say this almost every month at a podcast Well, some podcast. If it's an EMS incident, we will red pen the shit out of an EMS report and question somebody about what they did on the EMS run. But when it comes to the fireside, if nobody got hurt, killed and we didn't burn the building down, it's, as Eric Phillips says, high five, great job. And we're going to do the exact same thing next time, when there's always a lesson to be learned and a way that we can do it better, do you?
Speaker 2think we don't visit that because we're afraid to hurt somebody's feelings. You know, after everyone worked their butts off on the fire, you want to give them an attaboy and a pat on the back and oh, no one got hurt. You know, let's all go back home. Is it a feelings thing? I think it's hard, john.
Speaker 3I think that's the problem.
Speaker 1Accountability is hard, the two-way street of accountability. I'm compound ability, I'm accountable to you and making sure you have the things you need to do to be good at your job, and you need to be accountable, uh, to me in the system, to perform that way and to call that out is hard. And uh, uh, you looked at oh, I don't want to be a dick or I don't want them to not like me. Well, I actually. I care more about them living and having a healthy career more than I care about them liking me. Right, that's what mindset that you kind of have to get into. So, yeah, I interrupted, but yes, that is, it's hard. And we, man, we talk a good game on the hard stuff, right, but we have a hard time walking the walk on some of these really, really difficult things.
Speaker 3And we have to be able. If we're going to call it out, we have to be able to provide a solution, and that's another hard part for people, right, where you know, I think so many of the solutions are there. But if I'm your boss, john, and I call you out on something and you say, well, you didn't train me on that, or you didn't tell me that, or we don't have a policy on that, or that's not what we did, you know. You know, last week we had a fire and I did that and you didn't say nothing about it. That's the problem, right.
Speaker 3But I think that's where the beauty of having a system, right, a system that is connected to this, is what we do. This is how we do it. We're going to train you to do it. It's the continuous improvement model, right? I mean it all has to tie together and that we keep doing the same thing, because it's like, oh, that was a, it was a tragedy and yeah, okay, it was a tragedy, but it was preventable. And when we say that it was preventable and it's like, okay, well, how do you do that? And what does that look like? Uh, and a lot of times I think we bury our head in the sand and look the other way and say, well, that happened and it probably won't happen again. Or we play the blame game of it's somebody's fault or somebody uh, it's their personal problem, not our organizational problem.
Speaker 3and then, as chris has said a couple times on this podcast, it's personal and it's like don't make what you've been fighting with the city or administration or whoever about for the last year. The problem of why something happened and you know a perfect example of that is we've been fighting over pay, we've been fighting over new firehouses, we've been fighting over fire trucks and it's like well, you were, you were clearly offensive during defensive fire conditions and and uh, the this incident happened in the first 30 seconds of of arrival and it came back down to decision making and and lack of decision making. I don't care if you had 500 people responding, the outcome was going to be the same, right, so it just all pushes back to we have to be looking to how do we do better and really, if we're going to look at how do we do better, we have to measure that.
Speaker 1Yeah, and leaders are having a very difficult time with the self-reflection of fixing problems Because, as Bruno said, if you want to fix the service or fix the firefighters, you first need to fix the boss, and there's a leadership responsibility in a lot of these and they're unwilling or unable to take that on.
Speaker 2Great discussion, guys. We have to go staff our booth now, but we hopefully will see you at FRI. If you're here, stop by and say hi. I want to thank Josh Bloom and Chris Stewart for being on the podcast today and until next time. Thanks so much for listening to B-Shifter.