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Fire command and leadership conversations for B Shifters and beyond (all shifts welcome)!
B Shifter
The Fire Department Mission Statement
The Silverbacks are in the studio this week talking about The Fire Department Mission Statement.
This episode features Nick Brunacini, Terry Garrison, Pat Dale, and John Vance.
We trade long, forgettable mission statements for simple words that drive decisions: be safe, be nice, be accountable. Stories from the field show how clarity anchors culture, justifies resources, and holds leaders and crews to the same standard.
• why short missions beat wordy statements
• aligning SOPs, training and gear with be safe
• defining be nice for crews and customers
• accountability as care for people and system
• staffing, survivability and telling hard truths up the chain
• the work as a non‑political north star
• risk management plans that everyone knows and uses
• training as continuous, not one and done
• enforcing values from probationer to chief
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This episode was recorded at the Alan V. Brunacini Command Training Center in Phoenix on October 27, 2025.
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Welcome to the B Shifter Podcast. We've got John Vance here along with Nick Bernassini, Terry Garrison, Pat Dale, the Silverbacks back in the house. How are you guys doing today?
SPEAKER_04:So good. You described us. Silverbacks. We're glad to be in any house.
SPEAKER_05:Yes. Oh yeah. Old. I'm grunning.
SPEAKER_03:I'm silvering up. Well, full of wisdom.
SPEAKER_05:Full of wisdom. That's what we're all about here today. Yeah. Right? Half okay. If you say so, experience. We've got it, we've got to rope them in. So we'll give you a little bit of experience too.
SPEAKER_04:You gotta have experience, right? My grandkid the other day went out for him and his buddies went out for the basketball, eighth grade basketball team. They went, they had, they were gonna cut for the first time. It's the first time they were actually people are gonna make the team and people weren't. Okay. So uh my grandson comes over, God bless him. I said, Buddy, you've been practicing? No. I said, Well, let's go back and at least shoot a couple baskets before you try out him practicing all year. And uh he didn't make the team. And him and his buddies that are hang out with him didn't make the team. These other kids live and breathe basketball.
SPEAKER_03:They play basketball all the time.
SPEAKER_04:So the other day I said to him, I said, So, buddy, you didn't make the team. He goes, Nah, he wasn't too upset about it. I said, So uh with every situation like that, there's a lesson. I said, What do you think your lesson is in that? I don't know. I said, Well, let me help you. The lesson is if you want something, you gotta practice. Yeah, you gotta go out and you gotta do it and you gotta try hard. I said you didn't make the team because you you didn't practice. So you weren't good as the other guys that practice. It has nothing to do with your size or your strength or how fast you run or nothing. You didn't practice. So that's wisdom, right? Back to the wisdom pieces what did you learn from doing something that didn't work out very well? And I think that's what we get our best lessons from in life is when you try something, it's like, oh, that didn't work. And then you stick that that lesson sticks with you.
SPEAKER_00:So my grandson got a little wisdom over pa over the week. And then Pa says, let's let me teach you how to TP the coach's house.
SPEAKER_04:That's yeah, exactly. But it was kind of an end lesson.
SPEAKER_03:So him and his two buddies got let's feel we're gonna bet this parlay here for basketball.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. This is ripped from the headlines.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_04:Don't play any of that on the on the podcast, but that's just a story. Okay.
SPEAKER_03:I don't think that's right. The problem is yeah, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I don't know if that's there's nothing off the record when the the thing starts bouncing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:So anyway, next year he'll either, you know, practice or not.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I think there's yeah, if you want to play basketball, you would think you would practice it.
SPEAKER_04:He just thought he was he was gonna those the guys are gonna just show up and just do it.
SPEAKER_03:You know, we uh uh we had similar experiences with high school athletics. Okay. Yeah, we were we were on the team, and we just weren't serious enough about it for the coaches. So we ended up being off the team, and there was yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:You were asked to give your uniform back or yeah, it would just it it didn't work out well. They were gonna do punishment, and you're okay, you're gonna have to do this, and there there was some violence with the team, and we just nah, we're we're yeah, and we're not gonna be made examples of it. You don't told stories probably pretty interesting. Yeah, it was. They had to use alternative jerseys for the next few games because all the jerseys disappeared. Yeah, yeah, it was a thing. You never know where these are gonna go. You know, there's a lot of shit you can learn in high school.
SPEAKER_05:Truly. I I truly believe that your high school's just from stories was a lot like porkies for some reason. I I probably get the the porkies vibe off that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Uh-huh. Well, and really, it's my experience that we never really get out of high school. No, we don't. What is this? And you're like, well, no, that's just what it is, is we don't mature much past that point.
SPEAKER_00:I think you're right.
SPEAKER_03:It seems like grade school, but we're taller. Yeah, exactly. Got more lunch money to be taken away at some point. Yeah.
unknown:I just can't.
SPEAKER_03:Well, and then like you get lucky. Because like wisdom. There's people that I went to high school with that were like stars, A shift stars. We're like, okay, you've peaked. They they truly did peak in high school. And then, like, you get on the fire department together and they don't understand that there's been a leveling. And then pretty soon they don't understand why they're looking up at you some days, and you think, well, it's because I set your shit on fire and now we're going to put it out. This is so just like the interpersonal dynamics of being part of a dysfunctional family occupationally, uh, like they keep reminding you, I guess, of the good things in life.
SPEAKER_05:College athletes that were stars at one time, hard to coach once they're in a fire department. Oh, I'm bad. I've ran I've ran into a few of those situations where I've had to like troubleshoot, and it's like, oh yeah, that this person was a huge whatever, whatever athlete in college, and and that fell apart, and they're no longer at that stature, but they expect that same treatment on the fire department.
SPEAKER_04:You know what's interesting is beyond that, we've had some professional athletes that have been hired, some baseball players and a football player, and they actually go the other way. They're pretty thankful to be in the fire service. They made it to the big league. We had one guy who played for the Minnesota Vikings. It was Callahan, Mitch, Mitch Callahan. He paid he made it on. You're looking at me. Do you remember he did that?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, he was he was a star football player at ASU. And then he did, he had a very short career.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, but but he was he was he did great in the fire department. Then we had a couple baseball pitchers, and one of them was insane before he got hired. But I'm thinking Al Worth. I'm using names now, but Al Worth, he's a good, he was a trainer.
SPEAKER_03:There was some there were some professional football players, and you didn't know they were they never told anybody. That's right. And then it was like, yeah, I played football for a few years, not in long enough to get a pension, but they were that level where they were. Remember, we had what were they the Rough Riders or the football team? Yeah, yeah. We had a like a semi-pro football team in the Phoenix Fire Department.
SPEAKER_04:It started with the cops and then the fire to fire.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, the cops and firefighters got together and they had this team. And there were like players on that team that had played professional football. And you thought, you know, that the the they're not good enough to play in the pros anymore, but still they were highly competitive. Sandagan. And I remember there I knew a lot of the players, and so we were going back and forth, and they played like six games a year, and then they played the Super Bowl. And I remember the Phoenix team and the New York team were buddies. I remember and it was highly competitive. And there's there's you can't, there's stories you just can't tell that happened that were just too good. But there was a little period of time where I was scheduled to announce at the games. I was gonna be the color guy and do and and they were trying, and everybody thought that's it never, yeah, it never hooked up, and there was always smarter people involved that thought, and they said, No, we're gonna we're gonna get intoxicated at the game, and then you can commentate. Like I had all these ideas about like writing fictional stories. They said, we want you to wire these into like commentating these games with and we and like we were gonna attack the our friends on the team, and it was gonna be a lot of fun. And the and like you said, smarter people that were like cooler heads. And they had like Ken Lynch or some guy who was a professional announcer that would announce the games, and they'd video the whole thing was just stupid silliness. You're like, okay, let it go. Come on, buddy.
SPEAKER_04:There was a nicest guy in in the planet who is a re former professional football player for the Cardinals in the Glendale Fire Department. Okay, and I never knew that for about six years I was working there because he didn't he didn't brag about most about it. And one day somebody said, Well, you know, he's really and he showed up on the field for one of their one of their games over there, but just the most humble guy. So it works out okay.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. Well, there's a fire chief in Minnesota, Chip Low Miller, and I think he was, I think he's got a national championship ring from the Colts. He was their kicker.
SPEAKER_04:Wow.
SPEAKER_05:And and he never talks about it. Like people have told me, but it's like, yeah, Chip Low Miller was a kicker for the Redskins and the Colts and and had a had a real professional career and then went into the fire service after that.
SPEAKER_03:Crazy. Yeah. Well, today's topic, guys. Wow, let's win to today's topic. Yeah, 15 minutes into our hour-long podcast.
SPEAKER_05:It's kind of how we do it. Uh, we want to talk about mission statements today. And not and then and before you hit forward on this, um, not the boring part, but the real applicable part of mission statements, what mission statements really should do as far as informing the culture of our department, why it matters, maybe mission statements that aren't so effective. And I thought a good starting off point would be, and and you guys just did it in your class in in Cincinnati where you handed out the cards that had the mission statement from Bruno on there. Prevent harm. Well, I'm not saying this in the right order. Prevent harm, survive, be nice. That's the right order. That is the right order. That's it, man. Pretty simple. That's a simple one. So let's let's talk about simple mission statements and why it's a good thing.
SPEAKER_04:Oh, you go right ahead.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_04:I touched stack sorry.
SPEAKER_05:So quit touching each other.
SPEAKER_04:Go ahead. I feel like I jump into front of everything. So I'm gonna let Pat go.
SPEAKER_00:It's a great topic. And what comes to mind to me immediately is all of the organizations I was with did not have a simple mission statement. And so because it wasn't simple, no one knew what it was. No one in the organization from top to bottom, they didn't know what it was. It's a really long paragraph, though. Longer than a paragraph. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that I can think of.
SPEAKER_03:It's got parts of the Constitution in it almost.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and then that's it. And it always becomes the chief's mission statement. And that that is just so ineffective. So much so that in one department we didn't have a strategic plan. So I wanted to lead with a strategic plan right out of the gate after I was offered the the permanent position to be there. So I hired a consultant to help to develop a strategic plan. And I asked him I want to get to the point here, so I don't want to spend time in the planning going over a mission's mission, vision, and values. I just didn't want to do that because my experience had been we were going to spend half of our time just wordsmithing a a mission statement that was gonna be too long and recopied the last one and no one would know what it is. That was my experience. It's the opposite of a simple mission statement that everybody can make sense of. That's what comes to mind, the opposite of it is ineffective, too long. Nobody has understands it or has buy-in with that type of mission statement.
SPEAKER_05:And really, ideally, the mission statement's going to drive what what everyone does on the team. It should. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:So what'd you come up with? What would where'd you guys end with?
SPEAKER_00:So in that one, you know, I I ran the in a different department, I ran the process again with a consultant, and we did go through the mission statement development. And I had as many hands on the knife as I could get in the develop development, a big group and a in the organization. And it still was longer than you know, I didn't want to, I purposely didn't want to be too involved so that it didn't become the chief's mission statement. And surprisingly to me, it still ended up being not just based on the length, but it got so worried that I think it lost you know some of its value in the process, even though I had a lot of all people represented in all, you know, um areas of the department. It was still not something that you could ask a member later, what is our mission statement? And and they could tell you simply that, you know, in a simple way that it had meaning.
SPEAKER_04:So I was fortunate because coming from Phoenix after 30 years and having that simple mission statement, when I went out, it's like I'm gonna have a simple mission statement because I'm kind of simple-minded, right? And so in Oceanside, it was great because they they didn't have a they had one of those long ones, and we had a long one in Phoenix when I got hired.
SPEAKER_02:Remember to provide the highest level of life and property through the I pledge allegiance to the mission statements for which I'm about to get paid.
SPEAKER_04:We had a smaller group, there's about 185 firefighters, something like that. So we were able to really meet and talk about it. We came up with something similar to Bruno's, but it was be safe, be nice, and be accountable. And so and we even outlined that. So what is being what does being safe look like? And it matchs all of our SOPs. If you can point to an SOP, whether you use the blue card incident command system or whether you use safe driving practices or whatever that is, and say that aligns under be safe. And when somebody violates one of those, you can say, hey, you didn't you didn't meet our mission statement of being safe. And then the be nice part was how you treat each other internally and how you treat the custom customer externally. And that aligned with our our visions and values also. So, and then the last part is be accountable for your and the accountable accountability part was always the part that we seemed to struggle with. That's why we came up with that accountability model, is that um being accountable for your equipment. So being accountable kind of meant be a good steward of your equipment, of your fire station, of your apparatus. And then being accountable means self-accountability first, and then if you make a mistake, hold, you know, hold yourself accountable. If you make a mistake, take responsibility for that and try to do better. That worked out really well so well in Oceanside that when I went to Houston, which was a large system, obviously, is I said, hey, this is what I use, and this is I think would be a would would make sense if you guys want to adopt it. So you don't want it to be a fire chief pushing everything down, but they've they heard it, they reasoned with it, it made sense. We got a committee together, it was labor, it was management, it was members throughout the com throughout the entire entire fire department, and they adopted it and they adopted the same thing hook, line, and sinker. And uh when and in Glendale, the same thing. I mean, I was on a roll, so I it was five and a half years or so in Houston, and then when I went to Glendale, they didn't have a mission statement either. And I said, hey, this worked really well. What do you guys say? Well, they really latched on to it, and we kept that for the six and a half, seven years I was there. It was it was nice for me that each place adopted that, and and there wasn't really much resistance. But if there would have been resistance, it's like if it would have been, okay, so what do you want to replace that with? The be nice part was took in in Houston was that was that was language that they weren't real familiar with. Now they were nice people and they weren't you know incredibly mean spirited or anything, but the the be nice statement, some of them had to be, okay, so what does be nice mean? So we and we have it in our silverback leadership program, is patience, consideration, unity. Those are, and there's one more, and I can't remember right.
SPEAKER_03:Acceptance or tolerance. That's it. Yeah, we it was tolerance, and then they changed it to accept it. So you just have to tolerate people, you had to accept them. Well, my I tell them. Well, wait on what if we don't accept them? We just have to tolerate them.
SPEAKER_04:I tell my people I've been married 30 years, my wife tolerates me, but she didn't quite accept me yet. But um, so they had probably and so we adopted that, and it it was so we did coins, uh, everybody was doing challenge coins, and it was really easy to place on a challenge coin. It was really easy to market that. And I would even, when I would get up and talk in front of any group that, whether it was a city council or citizens group or the firefighters, I would use those those three values, and I would talk about them every time, kind of like you, what you say, John, so well about using that and marketing it and something that everybody understands. When I fired people, because I had to fire people, it would, it, it was based on one of those areas not being performed, you maybe even one or two of them at the same time. Like you weren't nice or to this degree, or you weren't safe. Brunissini used to say I will I would uh fire a guy to save his life. And I had to do that if you're so inept at being a firefighter that you can't be a firefighter. You're gonna cause injury to yourself and some other people. But and then the self-accountability is if you're not learning when somebody takes you in and tries to improve your performance, then you can actually get out of line with that.
SPEAKER_00:Terry, I like what you what you said and what you did was the explanation, the deep explanation with everybody on simple one-liners, but there was but what I saw from outside of Phoenix, of course, there was a lot of places that tried to just take what Phoenix was doing and use well. So I saw that happen and there's just no explanation with it, and those statements don't have any meaning then. No. And in fact, people want to well, necessarily they kind of fill in the gaps of of their not understanding with what that means to them. And now you're you're you're not uniting your organization, they're just making things up to fill in the gaps. So the your point of what you said, the the explanation of what that means. What is prevent harm? What does that mean? There needs to be a it's a simple two words, but but there's a lot that that means.
SPEAKER_04:Well, and it's even more than just the explanation, because you're right, on the front end, you need to be able to explain it. But then if you're a fire chief who says be nice is important, and then you act like an asshole, yeah, and it doesn't filter down, or you allow your middle managers or executive officers or even your supervisors to act like knuckleheads and not hold them accountable, you've lost it. Or you let you allow a company to be mean to a customer. So you gotta reinforce that at all times. And yeah, it you can't it honestly, it starts from the top. Like that old saying that you know the fish stinks from the head down, it's gotta start at the top and then work its way down. It's and every day you're gonna have as a fire chief, I guarantee it, every day you're gonna have an opportunity to live that mission statement or you're gonna or not.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, that's so true. And from the top down. I coming in from the outside, and people knew I was a be nice guy. Yeah. So when there was a need to to do something with, I think I've talked about this in the previous one of the the top ranking chiefs was clearly one of the biggest problems in the organization. So, what's this be nice guy gonna do? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05:That and you have to the accountability part of I think more than any of it, I've the biggest pushback I ever got was from be nice. I didn't get I didn't get pushback from safety and be effective. Because ours was be safe, be effective, be nice. And being effective means knowing your job and training and all of that.
SPEAKER_04:What was yours again? I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_05:Be be safe, be nice, be effective.
SPEAKER_04:Effective. I like that. Yeah, it's good.
SPEAKER_05:And and but be nice is I mean, and not a lot of the membership, but I would get guys like, why do I have to be nice? Like you'd have to sit down and talk to somebody about why they should be nice.
SPEAKER_04:No, I I had one Nick heard this story, but I had one assistant chief. Uh he wasn't an assistant chief, he was a response chief in one organization. He said he wasn't gonna be nice. He's and my assistant chief, his boss came to me and said, Hey, this chief's been here for 35 years, and he said he's not gonna be nice. I said, Really? Yeah, well, have him come to my office on it when's he work again? He said he works tomorrow, as a matter of fact. I said, Well, have him come to my office. And we had a conversation about be what being nice was, and he said, I don't like the word be nice. And I said, Okay, so you're not gonna be nice? He goes, No, I don't like the word and I'm not gonna be nice. I said, Okay, well, then next shift, you're gonna, you're no longer gonna be a response chief. You're gonna have a chair outside my office right here. And that's where you're gonna re that's where you're gonna sit. I said, because I can't, if you're not gonna, because we all as an organization, the union, it wasn't the fire chief, it was the union management, all levels of the organization agreed that this is our mission statement. So this is about a month into it when we got to where it was processed out, and you don't agree with all of us, and you're gonna move forward in a way that you're not gonna support an adopted mission statement. You're gonna come and you're gonna sit outside my office, and we'll figure out how we can make you be nice. He goes home. I've told the story before, and I end up really liking the guy, by the way. He goes home and tells his wife, you know, how you go when your fire chief or your boss gets on you, and you walk out and you go home and you try to get support from your loved ones, your wife, your buddies, your lawyers off duty, your your internet groups. So he came back in Monday and he was gonna sit in that chair. I mean, I was I was pretty I they confuse niceness with weakness. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Well, the other thing is he's out there and he's just beating your balls off about it. It's like, uh, who's that who does this guy think he's just cheap noise is all he's doing.
SPEAKER_04:And it's not a and and it's not good for the organization. No, nobody wants to.
SPEAKER_03:Well, and then you got he c he shows up and they're like, okay, well, we're gonna wind this one up. And then he, I mean, that's you got to deal with his fallout for the next little while.
SPEAKER_04:By the end of that shift, I had people calling my guy, calling my assistant chief, said, Did he actually tell him this? Did the fire chief actually it's about, you know, he was a mean guy. So he go, he comes back on Monday or the next shift, I don't remember when it was, and he goes, Hey chief, can I talk to you? And I go, Yeah, come on in. I mean, I'm not gonna be mean to you. I got positional power. I don't have to be mean. I'm the fire chief and you're not. So why be mean to you? And he says, I just got to tell you, he goes, I was wrong. I go, what do you mean? He goes, I went home and I told my wife, you know, trying to get her support that what you said. And she goes, you know what? She goes, and getting me chills when I talk about this because it's remarkable. Is my wife says, you know what? You are, you're mean. You're grumpy old man. You know, you know what your grandkids call you? She, what? Grandpa Grumpy. Oh, and they don't even want to come to our house. He goes, Chief, I never knew I was like this.
SPEAKER_03:So anyway, he I saw now he's ready to commit suicide. Oh no, so he's gone from you're an asshole to oh, what have I done with my life?
SPEAKER_04:So what happened was because he didn't want to be mean. This was something that happened. No, he loves his grandchildren. He wants to see him. People evolve into this mean-spirited person by hating one person at a time. Now you're on my list, you know, like that movie The Out of Towners with Jack Lemon a long time ago. You're on my list. And they would have a list of people he hate. Well, I said, okay, well, let's let's spend some time talking about that. And he said, you know what I'd like to do, Chief? He goes, I would like to, and this was when we had our accountability manual. He goes, I'd like to write an addition to the manual where people that they call them the old heads and the newer hired people, how you can bridge that gap with Be Nice. I said, You do? He goes, Yeah. So I thought he's gonna throw something together in a week and go back out to fill. He worked on that for months, and it was it was pretty awesome. And then I would hear things about him as a chief, you know, chief so-and-so. He actually walked into the station the other day and asked the Buddha, how's things going? How's your family? I mean, I didn't do this. I have not his wife did it. Yeah, all you do is is, you know, you will people will sometimes expect the lowest level of responsibility you'll give them, or the lowest level of what it what is that? Minimum standards. What will I put up with? What will I do? Yeah. And I didn't realize that I was doing this for him, but he did more for me by telling me that you know we ought to be nice to each other because he recognized that right away. I mean, why wouldn't you want to be and and somebody said Bruno? When I asked Bruno about, I was talking to him about this at lunch one day, and he goes, Well, ask him, go, Do you do you want to be mean?
SPEAKER_05:I think there's people that probably do want to be mean to certain people, but well, I think there's guys too, people who believe being nice is a sign of weakness. Yeah, they think there's a weakness to it. And and that's not really the intent at all. In fact, there's a lot of strength behind it, right?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, you it's it's hard to be nice, and I I would tell Nick, it's a when you're nice to to one person, you say I'm gonna be nice, you gotta be nice to everybody. And there's some people that I did not want to be nice to, but you you gotta be nice to them, and if they hold do something wrong, you hold them accountable. But there's some people I'd like to not necessarily be nice to. But once you say you're gonna be nice, you need to be nice across the board. You can't pick and choose and have your own team and divide and all that.
SPEAKER_05:So and while we're on be nice, let's talk about having that kind of culture and and having that part of your mission statement. What is the effect that it has on your department as a whole?
SPEAKER_04:Nick, you know, I I believe that it's it's when you when you select a mission statement that people can identify with, and and the good news is if they don't identify with, if they don't agree with it, if it's simple, then those people will hopefully show up and you can have a conversation with them, right? Because not everybody's gonna agree with everything you do. But I think what it does is it it sets the bar. We're gonna be nice to people. And I I've I've heard of guys saying, Hey Chief, we weren't very nice the other day. I said, What happened? Well, you may get a call on this, and they knew exactly what they did. To me, that was the most amazing. It's like really, and sure enough, I get a call, and the complaint was never about the treatment, it was about the behavior.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, those guys were the attitude. The attitude.
SPEAKER_04:They did a good job, but they made them feel.
SPEAKER_00:You know, and it's and I think it's back to the conversation again about it. There's one, and we're we're thinking of this as inside the department, how we're treating each other, be nice. Right. Well, that's gonna translate out to our um customers also. It's the same thing. You you support the workers, be nice, respectful, accepting to the workers, and that's gonna translate back to what's I had council members ask me in Houston.
SPEAKER_04:We had you know 16 council members. That's a big sixteen council members and a and a mayor, but the mayor controls the agenda for the council. So the mayor has all the power. It's not like a city manager type system where the city council kind of has equal power. Yeah. But I had council members, because I would put it at the top of every form that we have. We would say, be safe, be nice, be accountable, and they would ask me what that means, and I thought, oh, this is awesome.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for asking that.
SPEAKER_04:But there was some, there was times when they would say, What does this mean? Well, let's talk about be safe. You know that the ladders we're we're trying to order? That supports our be safe. You know, this is this is how we can be safe by having appropriate equipment, or the training money that I'm asking for, that aligns with be safe or another fire company in this area south of Phoenix where the guy complains. What a great opportunity to say, no, that's we want safe responses for firefighters so we can deliver that service. So to me, it was and I it was all Bruno that I took that idea and I thought, and I I mean it's plagiarism, right? I copied and pretty much I use different words just because I like these words and he had those words, but and to this day, a few of those departments still use that terminology. They had new fire chiefs come in, and fire chiefs like to change one fire department. They went back to a longer tight message. But the underlying message you'll hear guys say is that messy. So it it's something that sticks. So having something that sticks is nice.
SPEAKER_05:Didn't you have problems, Pat, with a board member that didn't like be nice or didn't like the It wasn't be nice?
SPEAKER_00:I I had Very visibly said that we put our members first.
SPEAKER_05:Oh, that's right.
SPEAKER_00:And well, I don't like this members first. Because I was, you know, I actually put it up on the walls. And I always, again, back to the it took explanation. I said it's it's about service delivery. It's about customer service. And I believe, Mr. Board president, that the best way to achieve high-level customer service is that we treat our members well and support 'em. And and that's what it means. Well, I don't like this.
SPEAKER_04:So did you ever ask him what what he didn't like about it?
SPEAKER_00:Well, he said, Do you do you say that in front of people? Because I was going out to the animal clubs again and you know, talking to everybody about a levy. And he said, Do you you say that in front of citizens? That you put it up in the station, citizens can come in here? Yeah, the citizens own the fire station, they can come in here. Well, they're gonna see that. I said, Well, of course they're gonna see that. And it takes you know a simple explanation to to bring them to the point where it's about service to you, citizens that are in here.
SPEAKER_04:Well, I don't like it. So who did he want first?
SPEAKER_00:The citizens.
SPEAKER_04:And what's the best thing you can do for the citizens?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, treat your support and treat your members well.
SPEAKER_04:Save them when they're dying or their house is on fire.
SPEAKER_00:You know what he he had to get it, he just didn't want to be nice to me. And then it led to, you know, he wanted to remind me who I worked for. And I I know I've told this before, and I said, I'm crystal clear who I work for. And I'm here to work for the firefighters. And he didn't like that at all either.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. You know, I I f inherently it's a a a risky job. There's risks that come with every job, and I I don't think we're undermining that with either saying members first or survive, but there's a lot of things that go into that health and safety, like pre-response, the way you're gonna treat yourself, you know, uh healthy-wise. You know, let let's kind of juxtapose what you're talking about with members first with the the survive part of the the the mission statement and and what does that mean and and and how far cascading is survive.
SPEAKER_04:If you think about the be nice, the be safe, and the be accountable, that's all something that you do for somebody, right? So I'm gonna be nice to you, I'm gonna be safe while I'm doing it, and I'm gonna be accountable while I'm doing it also. So these are I saw them as kind of like action words, action phrases that's treating the customer. So for I could always bring it back to well, this is these are action that we want to use for the customer because the customer is like Bruno would say, that's the center. That's we rotate around those customers, we revolve around the customer service delivery. So these are actions. It's I don't know. I I didn't get a lot of pushback once you once you of course there was probably pushback further down the line, and the fire chief doesn't hear all the pushback. I get that, I understand that. But you'd be surprised the people that are against something are not afraid to kind of speak out. You got because you got the group that gets get behind something, you got the group that's really neutral, and then the group, you got the groups that are just like absolutely against it. Well, this this chief was absolutely against being ice. That came out, so I got to that was an aberrant position there because everybody else thought, yeah, why wouldn't we be nice to each other and be nice to the customer? So you I liked having that mission statement because then you can identify the outliers. And without a mission statement and without a direction in which you're moving, how do you identify the outliers? Because you haven't you haven't established those expectations we talk about.
SPEAKER_00:So John, you asked about the survive part, right? And you know, as a sitting in the seat of a fire chief, I would say in in meetings like officers' meetings, I can think about this coming up, and you know, in not so many words, sitting in that seat. I was asking our members to put themselves at risk by they're going to go put themselves between like a fire that's that could harm our citizens, the fire and the citizens. So they put insert themselves to keep the citizens safe. My role is that in that leadership position is to make sure that they survive that. Now, in a couple of organizations that I was in, they were severely understaffed. You know, an ambulance on a fire truck, two people. So my role was to say, if I'm going to ask you, in not so many words, to put yourself at risk by protecting our citizens, then then we need to I need to lead this effort to increase staffing, which is supporting the members so that they can deliver the service. And I think frankly, my predecessors before me, it was just too hard to try to increase staffing because that takes funding, and now you gotta ask people to raise their taxes. And most systems I'm familiar with, it takes tax to support the fire department. So that survive part starts from the top, and you have to, if you're gonna say it, you have to walk the talk from that very top leadership position by supporting the members. And a lot of times that that in my experience was about addressing the staffing, inadequate staffing.
SPEAKER_04:So everybody has a boss, right? So a fire chief has a boss. Sometimes it's a council, sometimes a city manager, sometimes it's a large city mayor. And you want to make your boss happy. I mean, I've always wanted to make my bosses happy. And it's difficult to have conversations with your boss where you're supporting your members in a way that you're not going to get sideways with your boss. But you got to have those conversations, and you got to figure out the best way to do that. You can't get me mad and slam your fist down and do that kind of stuff. But if you look and you it starts with the membership, it starts with that mission statement. You get everybody behind you, you get labor on your team. You can have those hard conversations with them without being disrespectful. It's like, I I don't agree with what you're telling me. We need more resources over here. And they're gonna get mad regardless. You know, you guys had conversations with people, these difficult kinds they're people are gonna get mad. They're gonna decide whether they're gonna get mad or not. So if you're gonna get mad, get mad. It's not helpful for you, but I'm gonna continue to have, and I and we did, continue to have those conversations about resources, unsafe fire stations, not enough staffing, inappropriate. Oh, God, there was one fire station in the last city I worked. That you could you could taste the lubricant in the air when you walked on the fire station. And from the day I got there, I started arguing about that. And all the city manager and the staff and everybody went and looked at that station and had the same response. Yeah, we need to replace that station. And it only got replaced after I left. And so for six years I was saying you need to replace this station. And they finally replaced it. And so they're probably gonna have some people that are gonna get sick, long-term illnesses from breathing that, and then they're gonna be responsible for that. But you've got to have those con and they got, I know he got tired of me hearing it because every time we met, he would talk about we need to reduce staff into three person. I would say, no, we need to keep it a four, and we need a new fire station over there. That's kind of the way it went back and forth, right? That's the song, and that's the way the conversation went every time.
SPEAKER_05:But but it gives you cover because if it's part of your mission statement that you're actually going to communicate in this way, it it's like I'm just living up to the the promise that we made each other on how we're going to operate this fire department. And I'm being honest with you that this is not a say fire station or uh, you know, the the uh fire chief up in Michigan, where they had the Latter-day Saints church shooting and fire about a month or so ago. That that's that department staffs with two on one piece of apparatus. That's all you're getting. And and the chief came out and said, Yeah, we're not staffed for this. You know what they did to that chief? Fired him. Yeah, he's suspended right now. I mean, he's on admin leave. Yeah. Because he told the truth. Because he told the truth.
SPEAKER_03:Well, hopefully he told that before. Yeah, sorry, Nick. Yeah, I mean, the the you see it everywhere. See, the beauty of a mission statement is it defines and describes the work you do, the reason your organization exists in the first place. Why are we all here? We why did you join the fire department? Well, it's to go on calls because that's all we do. We go on calls, we provide emergency services to the citizens. So it's pretty simple. When you say prevent harm, that's what our job is, essentially, through the service delivery that we do. It's it's to reduce the harm on the community. Either the individuals that make up the community and the community as a whole, right? So that's it. Well, that's the beauty of a fire department, is it's the most apolitical organization that exists in the world today. Is when you pick the phone up and call 911, we're rolling on your emergency services problem, whatever that is. We don't ask what you what's your favorite, how do you identify? What are your pronouns? What nationality? What anything. We don't ask any of that because we don't give a shit. It's like, what's your problem? And okay, you're having a heart attack, we're gonna roll, we're gonna get there four to six minutes is our goal, yada, yada, yada. So we context everything based on that response. Yeah. So everything that you guys represented as fire chiefs was so we could we could deliver service to the community. So inside the organization, if somebody doesn't want to do that, they're not on the fire department anymore. They they they shouldn't work there. That you you're not suited for this job. But whatever reason, well, no, I that the I have these political leanings, and I just don't think that we should be doing this for the community. Well, that's good. Then you should go to work for the police department or somebody that doesn't do what we do. Because with us delivering service, if you don't agree with this, then you're not gonna do your job, right? That's what it is. You listen to any athlete, your star athlete, the greatest athletes that ever lived. They're interviewing them after they won the game. What was the key? Well, we all showed up and did our job. If we all show up and do our job and what we said we're gonna do, and the the the in our role for this team, then we will win every time. That's what winning looks like for us. So the teams that do that the best win. I mean, that's that's the way it is. So that's very powerful, both to your bosses. It's like you said, no, this is what we do. It is in in this city we're sitting in, is there's places in this city if you call 911, it's going to take more than nine minutes to get you a fire truck. That's not emergency services. So I don't know how the fire chief goes and defends that to the their bosses. Because really, they're they're the people you report to, they're not your bosses. I think that's the problem. It's no, that person's my boss. No, they're not. They're your direct connect above you organizationally. But the mayor doesn't know as much as the fire chief about running a fire department. They shouldn't. That's like those should be the fire chief's deal. It's no, I uh I'm a head coach in the NFL. I understand how this works. That's what the the that's the fire chief. Well, if you go to city manager, they say no, we only want one or two people staffed on these things. Well, that ain't a fire department. We're not we don't run a fire department. We run an aid agency, maybe, but we're not emergency responders anymore. Yeah. So well, like you'll get that from your own people. Well, I don't think we should be going on the the this kind of call. It doesn't meet my level of whatever. And you think, well, you shouldn't be here anymore. You need to go to work for a different place that meets your level. That's not us.
SPEAKER_04:So, Nick, the flip side of all this, too, is so we talked about that mission statement. You live or die as a fire chief based on how you act out that mission statement. So the fire chiefs that I see getting in a jam is that because that mission statement's from the bottom all the way to the top, past you all the way up to the city. Yeah. And when our firefighters do something incredibly mean or incredibly stupid or incredibly unsafe against our mission, then the city you will lose all your respect if you don't hold that member. I've been in a city manager's office. Uh, that guy did one of your firefighters did this, this, and this. You're right. I'm gonna hold him accountable. If you don't hold those people accountable, yeah, I mean, and I'm not talking, you got to process for that, right? We always talk about once it gets into the disciplinary, the performance management piece, it's in a process that usually involves HR, the union, all this other stuff. But you got to process that and the fire chiefs to get sideways with their bosses, because my boss always knew I was gonna argue about staffing and the fire station. But if I would have ever not walked a walk or talk to talk or whatever on one of the members that got sideways and I didn't hold my membership council, hold my membership accountable, he would have gone, aha, gotcha. You said you're gonna they're supposed to be nice. This firefighter slug somebody on a gurney and you didn't do anything about it. So you gotta play that all the way through.
SPEAKER_00:And you know that is being nice. When you hold the person that was mean accountable, that's being nice. Being nice to the system. To the system. And really to that person. I I actually had one time in in disciplinary that the it he needed he screwed up and knew it, but he actually said that to me. Thanks for holding me accountable. He said that.
SPEAKER_05:That's well, one of these surveys that just came out, because they're they're right now is arguably probably the toughest time to be a leader in the fire service. I mean, and and we hear it all across the board. Just and and and it's workers. It really doesn't have everything to do with the fire service, it really has to do with the workers.
SPEAKER_03:The worst problems are always on the inside. Yeah. Is we used to say nobody can screw the fire department up but us. It's gonna happen internally. In fact, when our fire chief retired, they were making a bunch of wholesale changes. And I remember sitting in a meeting and they said, okay, now he's gone, we're gonna change the mission statement. And they sat there for like an hour and a half shrieking at each other over the mission statement. And at the end of the day, and you know who it was? It was the goddamn union of all people. It said, just leave it alone as it is, it's fine. You can't change it because this one's just too simple and too accurate. And you're like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys will find something else you want to stick up your ass here next week. So yeah, yeah, don't don't don't don't be sad. You'll find some somebody else to eat later on.
SPEAKER_04:What were you gonna say about I agree with all that. What were you gonna say about the workers?
SPEAKER_05:Because I I was well, accountability. So one of the surveys that just came out was that is what firefighters want out of their bosses to is to hold people accountable because they they feel like the organizational degradation where you just keep doing worse and worse and worse is because you're letting people off the hook and you're not holding people accountable, whether it's minimum training standards or you know, performance standards on the fire, whatever it is, and and that that is is one of the things ruining the fire service. So I think right now, if you're looking for a magic pill, which there isn't any, but if you're looking for something that might be a problem within your organization, look at your accountability. And you've said it over and over, Terry. Accountability doesn't have to be a negative. It's not a negative, it is a positive for the overall organization.
SPEAKER_04:You know what that's funny? So I watched, I'm a Chicago Bear fan. Oh, and I watched uh Caleb Williams, a quarterback. And you see the Chicago Bears, and you see these teams go through this, and Nick, you you kind of reminded me of it, is that they're doing really well, and then it goes to crap. And then they do another bad play, and then another bad play, and then another bad play, and then they're you know 16 points behind and they're losing, and it seems to happen kind of fast. And Caleb Williams says, you know, in his interview the other day, and I won't say exactly as well as he did, but he says, you know, we see when that happens, and as a leader, I need to, that's when I need to get out in front of that and actually try to change the tr trajectory of where we're headed. You see that happen all the time. So they're the they're the leader on the field that has an opportunity to kind of move that forward. And uh you can see those in organizations. I've been in organizations or I've watched other organizations where you start seeing them do, well, we know, right? That's goofy, why'd you allow that? That's goofy, why'd you allow that? That's goofy. It's like a fire ground. It's like the the Swiss cheese lines up, and then you're gonna get somebody killed or run over by a fire engine or whatever, and you saw all those things that happen. Or you're gonna have that, oh yeah, so the ring camera picked up the firefighter saying this stupid stuff, and then the camera on the corner caught these guys treating them like this in the not quite super aggressive, but not nice as you go through, and then all of a sudden, boom, you got that big call where some firefighter or crew did something really bad, and now everybody's held and everybody else is held accountable accountable for it because your neighbors are like, Are you a firefighter? Yeah, I saw what you guys did the other day. You know what one guy does is we all get the crap on us. So as a leader, you can you need to watch for those, and that's yeah, but it flows both ways, man.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, you get all the fluff and the rest. And what so when somebody does something bad, you're gonna get that too.
SPEAKER_04:You need to you need to be held accountable. Yeah, and it you need to be able to do it.
SPEAKER_03:And but that was the good part of it, is most people have a very high opinion of the fire department because they should because they they don't uh judge and subjugate them. They say, I got this problem, we show up, we deal with the problem. So, and I think that's really kind of what you're looking for in the thing. And and we go on a lot of the same calls over and over, and it's easy to think, oh Jesus, not this again. But if you're when you're delivering the service, you just need to remember, you know, this is gonna be over in about 10 minutes. I'm gonna just I'm gonna be very nice and get through this with you, and and hopefully you'll you'll have a better understanding and be in a better position when we're all done. But you know, that yeah, well, good luck with that. But I mean, that's what you signed up to do. So, I mean, you're going on calls and doing the thing. Now, what most firefighters don't sign up to do is to be mandated to work every single day on their day off. So now we have real issues in the fire department that we can kind of deal with. We want staffing, but we don't want like one shift that has to work a prison sentence. Yeah you know, Roy Gomez, an engineer we worked with, wanted that. He said, We should it should be seven years and then you're done. You just work 24 hours a day for seven years and then you're done. You get your pension. You think, well, it'd be triple. It's yeah, we it'd be three times as much. And you just don't ever leave until you do, and then you don't work here anymore. And you're like, Well, sentence. Yeah, that's what they're going to now, it feels like, in a lot of places. A lot of places.
SPEAKER_04:That was a big problem when I left. Is that sustainable?
SPEAKER_03:That's one of the biggest issues in the service. Departments talking, we we we only get like a third of the people showing up to take the test. We don't have enough big big enough selection pool anymore.
SPEAKER_04:And here's what I couldn't figure out with that, and I don't think I ever did. So you have a sit you have a system, a city that I worked in who wouldn't hire enough firefighters to actually fill in for the firefighters when they take their benefits of sick leave and vacation. So other guys are forced to work those days, and then if they didn't work those days, they were disciplined for not doing that. That was bullshit. I'd never like that. It's like, hold on, you're gonna discipline a guy who is forced to work because you're not hot we're not hiring enough people to actually cover the people that are using their benefits. Right. That's a system problem. Now you're gonna so I was always against any kind of discipline when and and the union and I weren't uh always on agreement with this because they were trying to get guys to fill in. I said, Yeah, I think they should fill in, but you can't discipline them. Maybe you maybe you put them on a different list or something, but you can't actually take their money or you can't suspend them for not working. That makes no sense. I guarantee there's chiefs out there right now trying to figure that out. And I I don't think I totally figured it out, but if you can not discipline a guy for having to because hey, I'm going to my grandmother's bar mitzvah, whether you discipline me or not. I cannot work that day. Yeah, I'm not gonna be here. It's your problem that you didn't hire enough fire. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a that's a hard one for fire. That's the biggest problem.
SPEAKER_03:Well, see, the only and and see, the work is the gateway to all of it. It is you gotta process it all through the work. And so when you're sitting down talking to employees, the union, your boss, whoever that happens to be, okay, here's the work we do. Well, it our work is a four to six minute response time. Well, when it starts getting nine, ten, eleven minutes, what that that we don't know what you want to do, uh mayor, but we're not a fire department anymore. So you're yeah, fire diet.
SPEAKER_04:People mix in biology.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, that's what I would tell my board and the citizens, everybody I talked to, the same message. Our service is time-sensitive, yeah, highly technical, and resource-dependent, and staffing intensive. Yeah. And then we that's our reality. That's what I took the pledge to deliver service sitting in that seat, and we can't do it with the staffing we currently have. And I like you said it well, but you're not gonna figure out that Mando overtime problem because the the root cause of the problem is you don't have enough people. It's all about go hire, we have to hire more people.
SPEAKER_03:Well, in the city, well, we can't. We can't afford it. You thought, well, you're paying like 40% extra in overtime fees. At some point, that that's too expensive.
SPEAKER_04:You're mad at the guys that do you show up for overtime and make all the money? I mean, there's no exactly.
SPEAKER_03:You can't win in the thing.
SPEAKER_00:That's why you can't figure it out.
SPEAKER_04:You're mad at the guys that don't work and you're mad at the guys that do that make all the money. I remember that conversation with the people.
SPEAKER_03:What we did is we, as an organization, our leadership used the work as our front-facing image. And you it it it it added a layer of love and protection to the fire department because people had a high opinion of firefighters and what we do. They do today. It's still the highest-rated occupation that exists. The only ones that can screw it up is us. And it's when we don't do the work we say we're gonna do. And we we do we so and I think most fire departments do a good job. They show up and they and they they they want to do what's the right thing. I I think as a service, we're very lucky there. So but I think one of the problems in the world today is the polarization of politics that's going on. I think the work saves us from ourselves there. It's it's not political. It's no, this is what we do. This is what everybody should get. Every single human being in the community has the right to call 911 and expect a professional response. And we treat them all the same. Exactly. From the mayor to somebody who's who's I've said it before in these podcasts. We delivered service to the inmates at the psycho prison behind our fire station. And you probably shouldn't use those words, but that's what it was. They were criminally insane people that have done horrible, wretched shit to society, to other human beings. And we showed up and treated them just like anybody else and thought, you know, buddy, you be patient with us, and we'll be patient with you, and this will all go fine. That was kind of what it was.
SPEAKER_04:So you you used a phrase there a second ago, and this will come full circle and hope hopefully it makes sense. You said firefighters want to do the right thing. Yeah. Wouldn't that be a great mission statement? Because that's what be safe, be nice, and be accountable is doing the right thing. So if you got a mission statement out there that supports firefighters wanting to do the right thing for the customer and for each other, boom. Yeah. That's a great mission statement. Is that these long to provide the highest level of life and property safety through the extension of fire prevention, fire suppression, EMS, and community services. I remember that from 1970.
SPEAKER_03:Whatever. Yeah, man, that's it. Well, then you add EMS and ambos to it, and can't well have made it like the three pages. Nothing is everybody's done that.
SPEAKER_05:Like organizations do that.
SPEAKER_04:Keep it simple. Uh the the newest guy on your job when he leaves the academy ought to some probably before he leaves the academy, ought to know what the mission statement is and what the fire chief values, what the union president values, and what everybody should value within that organization.
SPEAKER_03:Look at the calls that give us the most problems, where we get in trouble the most. They're the ones where there's not the right thing to do. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's the call where you show up and there's no right answer. It's like, okay, you've you've been uh mentally insane since the Second World War, and there's no way for me to fix that for you. So now I don't have something, I don't have a foundation to stand on. So you just depended on the creativity of the crew to somehow communicate with that person and get them to wherever they needed to go. Yep. We're watching the customer service, old customer service stuff on the computer here from a million years ago. AVB's talking about a deal in Australia where they rolled on a lunatic old veteran who had been writing propaganda on the walls of his house with his own poop. And kind of the customer service thing that they did with this old soldier. Oh boy. Where they like got him help and did what they needed and then came back and cleaned his house like a couple shifts later. Oh, excuse me. So it's those kind of calls where we roll, and there's like, well, there's nothing for me to do for you. I don't so and I think a lot of times it because there's there's not a standard course of action to do, is you can kind of, well, I want this and this and this, and you know, the patient has their view of the world and we have ours. And sometimes those things will conflict. And but I think that's kind of like where the silverbacks is like, no, we default to nice. And when we default to nice, is sometimes we just disengage with somebody we can't do anything for them and say, you know, we're sorry, but you know, here's a bottle of water, and and then have a nice day. There's there's nothing else for you.
SPEAKER_04:Yep. And what I want to do is read this because this came out the other day, and I found it 88-year-old man falls and fractures his hip while mow while mowing the EMTs who transported him to the hospital return to complete the job.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, awesome.
SPEAKER_04:If you can make that, and you said it better than anybody, Nick. If you can make the added value part regular, regular service.
SPEAKER_03:Being nice shouldn't be a thing we do that's extra. It's just the way we are.
SPEAKER_04:I don't have what city this is in or what township or whatever.
SPEAKER_03:It's any town of USA, man. It's awesome. That's the those are the fire we've said it before. It's the same ten people make up every single fire department. Same ten people made up the Phoenix Fire Department, and the leaders were just a little bit different, and that this is the way we're gonna manage this. So they took the same workforce and did what they did with it. I I think everybody at this table has done that somewhere else. So I I mean, that's kind of the what we're looking for in the thing. It's just to be a valuable resource for the community, uh to deliver service to the citizens when they need it, protect the infrastructure. And I mean, that's we're talking to a benefits person the other day for the company. And this gal started up and she says, you know, I don't know if you've heard of defined benefit pensions before. And I just bit my tongue. And she says, you know, they're the greatest thing in the world, and it was the best, and they just don't exist anymore. I'm like, Yeah, they do. And the fire and police departments still have them. Now, they've beat them up over the last 20 years because the way that's the way the economy works. And you know, you get if you have something good, you get blamed when everything blows up, and it's so anyway, you kind of think. Well no, it's all still there. All the juice is still there for a fire department. All the the b instruments, it's as good as you want to play 'em, is kind of that's where we that's where we went to camp. Was in that kind of a system that rewarded good work and good behavior, and we got compensated for it. So like we probably made at least 50% more.
SPEAKER_04:Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Than when when we retired from our career than when we started it. I mean, when you like calculate it and say, no, this is where you but you earned it. I mean, that's you negotiated it, it was a deal, and you built it over this time. And it would you become a like a remember when naming rights hit? They would name stadiums, then they give them money. Before we had Veterans Memorial Coliseum, it was the same place, it was identified as part of the community. And I think with naming rights, that's gone. Like America West Arena, that's what it was, and that's what it's always been to me. And it's been named something different seven times since then. Yeah, so it's a goddamn building downtown where they play basketball now. Yeah, and it's like the greed of the owners that you're like, no, you took the name away from the community because somebody gives you$10 million a year to put their shit on top. That's true. Now, what is it now? Mortgage. Yeah. The guy that bought the Suns owns the mortgage industry that screwed our pensions up in 2008.
SPEAKER_00:It's not footprint anymore.
SPEAKER_03:No, it's yeah, get a mortgage from me and I'll pay it to the Suns, and then we're gonna bet it all on DraftKings, and it's gonna turn into this thing. I think Terry's team's the only one with its original stadium name.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. Soldier Field? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, they're still Green Bay.
SPEAKER_03:But I think even Green Bay sells naming rights.
SPEAKER_05:Uh they still call it Lambeau. Oh, so it's Lambeau Field. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:But Soldier, what a name, Soldier Field. That in itself, man, that makes you want to just who's gonna mess with that? Yeah. Exactly. They're gonna move it, rename it.
SPEAKER_03:So that's you're gonna have Mike Dick in charge of it. Okay, yeah, look at ours. We got Bidwell and it's whatever insurance company. No, we never asked for any of that. It just showed up here. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:So anyway. Well, before we go, I I want to wrap this conversation up and let's let's just talk about for to to put a bow on it, why you should have a simple mission statement that's easily communicated and that also reinforces the values of the department.
SPEAKER_04:You just said it. That that was the answer.
SPEAKER_05:Okay.
SPEAKER_04:I mean, seriously, John, you said it better than we could say is you have to have a simple one that does exactly what you said. Reinforces the value of the organization and supports the work that's done.
SPEAKER_00:Everybody aligns with it. Yeah. Everybody is using the same words from the labor to the administration, your board, your council.
SPEAKER_03:That became our public thing. And it was like an advertising campaign. We're fast, we're well trained, and we're nice. Yeah. And then the admit and that aligned with our mission statement. Well, that came first, and then our mission statement got tweaked to match it. We're prevent harm, survive and be nice. It's your elevator pitch. Yeah. You gotta we prevent harm as an organization. Much of our work occurs in an IDLH atmosphere, or there's medical hazards that we face every day. So we have to be safe because that's part of the ongoing like occupational responsibility to the employer, to the employees. And then the last one, be nice. All right, before we go, Timeless Tactical Truth.
SPEAKER_05:How about the boy? Maybe that's something we can all agree on. Timeless Tactical Truth from Alan Bernassini. This one from the deck of cards, available at bshifter.com if you'd like to purchase them, or you can play our nice solitaire game with this on the back as well. This is the uh Jack of Clubs, and it says the risk management plan must be known and understood by every team member. This is good because it kind of ties in with the mission statement. Where, you know, people need to know the mission statement. They also need to know the risk management plan. How do we educate that?
SPEAKER_03:Training. You train your members. You train them in the academy as young firefighters, and then that training has to continue and support every level within the organization. Continuously, too. Yeah, it doesn't. So that's the problem with structural with the with the hazard zone stuff we do, especially for firefighting, it's tend to be one and done, is the way most fire departments look at it. None of the other training we do, we talked, I talk about this until the cows come home. Like EMS training. If the fire service had its brothers, most fire chiefs, and you you you let them vote and decide, they'd say, no, we've done enough EMS training throughout my career. It's all we do. We waste all this money on it, and I'm gonna stop it. And we're just we're just good enough right now for it. And then we would be like amputating people's limbs six months from now. I mean, that's just part that's where it would go. So we don't use that approach with anything other than hazard zone, IDLH hazard zone work. So you gotta keep it current to keep to keep the service where you're as effective as possible and you're doing it in a safe and uh controlled manner, let's say.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's like the simulations, blue card simulations. I I we're implementing them and we were had a group come in and they came in and said, We've already done that one. No, that's not the idea here. You we've done this one, and and then you know what, they do it, and they're not performing as well as they thought. Yeah, they had you had to bring their ability up to their confidence level with that. So that's the continuous well, and they think they go through it one time and that's it.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, I did this simulation three months ago, and and I and I did it, I'm aware of it. Well, no, you don't understand the full scope of training that we're doing here and everything that we're testing and trying to implement. Yeah, like people say, Well, do you have any Mayday simulations? That every one of them's a Mayday if you want it to be. So you have to exercise all the skill sets that's what they're for.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, not one and done. And that's where you emphasize your risk management model, your risk management plan right there.
SPEAKER_04:I can't really Yeah, and I believe that just like a the risk management plan and the mission statement, you gotta spend a lot of time on the front end describing what it is and why it's important. Because what we do is we jump to the words. We jump to offensive, defensive, risk a little, risk a lot, whatever. I'm talking strategy. I should go back to risk management. Yeah, it's all good. But we don't talk what is a risk management plan and what's it do for us on the fire ground? You spend a little bit of time talking about why is it important to have one single risk management plan operating on the fire ground, supported by the strategy that you just selected. Same thing with the mission statement. Why is a mission statement important? If if people don't understand why they're doing something sometimes, and sometimes we just assume we took we taught them now, they get it, they can pick uh risk a little, risk a lot.
SPEAKER_03:Here's something that falls right into that risk management. And this is something that if you start talking about it, you're gonna you're gonna start arguing with one another. Is when you look at the lethality of the products of combustion, and so let's say that you just have a simulation and the whole house is full of uh black smoke from a fire. Yeah, well, what is the survivability of that compartment now? And and and over time. So if you're a victim in there and you've been exposed to those conditions for more than 10 or 15 minutes, not survivable, you're dead, right? And when you die from the products of combustion, as a general rule, you will be dead for the rest of your until your body dissolves to nothing. You don't save somebody who the fire makes them clinically dead. They all the the there's that that's almost most doctors would tell you impossible to come back from, especially people that run burn centers. They said they they have very poor outcomes as a patient group. So you start having that conversation with well, where's our risk now? See, and that's where you start getting pushback. Well, no, we got to get there and get it all clear right now because that's just so lethal. And you're like, Well, so strategically, I look that that's a body recovery, that's not a search and rescue operation. So now that's how we're having those discussions. We're like, well, should we shouldn't even search that according to you? And you're like, well, yeah, we search, we search everything. You go in, you put the fire out, you control it, and then you ventilate, you search it. That's it's in fact you're searching from the point of entry to wherever you're putting water on the thing. You're searching the attack corridor. So But I think those are the kind of because you talk about prevent harm, survive and be nice. Well, what exactly who can we save? Who's savable? And what does that look like? And then you carry that over into like commercial buildings, like warehouses, and now we're doing wide area search, and you're like that's a myth that never was proven that you could it it's an impossibility. It's a made-up ridiculous thing. You can't you don't do search and rescue in a warehouse at three in the morning that you had to force entry into like it's a nursing home. Those are two different tactical animals. So it's those kind of conversations you're seeing. People say, Well, it's simple. No, it isn't. It's a complicated thing of how are we gonna actually do our business, especially structure fires, because there's no standardization of it. Now, the NFPA and the like the podcast you've been doing with Stuart and Josh with 1700. Well, now they're starting to get into that. It is okay, based on this phase of this fire, what can we truly expect to do here? So, yeah.
SPEAKER_05:I I would use the risk management plan to to operate every facet of the fire department. It just wasn't on calls.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Are we going to train in a way that hurts our members? No, absolutely not. That's a that there's no benefit to that, right? So there should be during the first half of our career, half of the fatalities were training. Yeah, well, they still every week we're we're reading, you know, a new one. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Well, that's realistic.
SPEAKER_05:Should backing fire apparatus into the firehouse be a high risk event? Well, it has been because we've ran over members, right? So what do we do to look at because there's not a lot of fruit in that, right? So I I think you use it to to operate every facet, not not just calls, but but how our operating philosophy is gonna be just much like the mission statement.
SPEAKER_03:Well, and being safe for us really, oh God, we have to be safe. Like that's gonna take 15 minutes extra and cost ten thousand dollars. No, it what you're doing is you're slowing down just enough, and when you do it safely, you're done quicker. And it's done one one and done.
SPEAKER_04:It's done correctly.
SPEAKER_05:Slow and smooth, and smooth is fast.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, that's but you need to explain that the way you described it. Fire chiefs need to explain that to their bosses. Yeah, uh-huh. Yes. There shouldn't be a city manager out there or a fire board that doesn't understand that we operate a risk management plan on the fire ground and we're gonna carry that all the way through all we do. And we don't do that enough. We talk about budgets and things like that with our bosses, but we should talk about more about this. Is the work. Nick always goes back to it. This is the work. This is the work, and this is the risk, and this is how we manage the risk.
SPEAKER_03:Well, you EMS. You have uh universal precautions now. Yeah, we didn't have that when we started our careers. That's part of the risk management thing. And you're like, no, we we don't want to get these diseases. Yeah, yeah. You have an EMS room. Well, now it's all disposable gear. We were talking about this the other day. Washing the EMS gear in the station bathroom, and you got body parts in it. You're like, well, do we take this to the hospital? Do I put it in the disposal? I what do I do, Captain? Dumping the suction unit in the city.
SPEAKER_04:Oh, the whole thing.
SPEAKER_05:Reusable bag valve masks. Remember those where you used to have the same mask? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Oh man, it's oh exactly. We went there.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Well, uh, like you get up in the morning after a busy shift and you still got blood on you. You think, which call did this come from? And you're like, uh, okay. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Now you strip down at the hospital and go back and scrubs. I mean, you wouldn't even wear your uniform back. Oh, that's a lot of smoke.
SPEAKER_00:Thankfully, we do.
SPEAKER_03:Well, after a fire. Oh, you'd smell like smoke for weeks.
SPEAKER_00:I'm getting a shower.
SPEAKER_05:I can't wash this off. Nothing better.
SPEAKER_03:Well, like Pat Dale tells a story like some young kid comes in and it smells like a fire. He says, Oh, cancer.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. I loved it.
SPEAKER_03:And that's when I knew there was a flip. Yeah, he knew I shouldn't be smelling that.
SPEAKER_05:My wife actually liked that smell of house fire.
SPEAKER_03:So I would make sure I went home after a smell it. No, Johnny, put on the hood again. See, we're getting back to the fire.
SPEAKER_05:I'm gonna need to go home. Terry Pat, thank you very much for uh being here on the B Shifter Podcast. Thank you for listening. And uh make sure to subscribe and tell your friends until next time. Thanks for listening to B Shifter.