B Shifter

The Silverbacks On Performance Management

• Across The Street Productions • Season 5 • Episode 53

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The Silverbacks are back, talking about performance management as an essential tool for fire service leaders.

This episode features Nick Brunacini, Terry Garrison, and John Vance.

We lay out a practical performance improvement model that keeps looping through SOPs, training, field application, monitoring, and revision so the work gets better every time. We also get blunt about what breaks the system: outdated policies, ego-driven resistance to change, weak critiques, and leaders who stop training. 
• circular performance improvement model tied to service delivery 
• why outdated SOPs create operational risk and legal exposure 
• keeping SOPs simple, task-focused, and grounded in real standards 
• making shared SOPs work across automatic aid departments 
• change resistance driven by ownership and ego, and how leadership pushes through  
• what makes an after-action review honest, consistent, and useful 
• critique pitfalls like pet peeves, grandstanding, and excluding firefighters 
• why leaders must keep training and prove competence at strategic levels 
• decision-making truth: no perfect choices, only best upside with least downside 

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Welcome And Phoenix Check In

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the B Shifter Podcast. Today in the studio, we have Nick Brunasini and Terry Garrison. The Silverbacks are here to talk about uh Silverback leadership. How are you guys doing today?

SPEAKER_01

Muy bien. All right. We are doing so well today. We're here at the AVBCTC in Phoenix, Arizona, and you just finished up with the trainer class, and it was awesome.

SPEAKER_00

I feel like a school teacher on the last day of school in this late spring because I'm not coming back here until after summer's done. Well, you're welcome to come back. Well, I'm welcome to come back. We we've got other classes on the road and stuff, so I I felt like I was cleaning out my cubicle for the summer today.

SPEAKER_01

If you come back, bring your sunscreen. Yeah. Yeah, that's the problem.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Yeah. Nobody wants to be here in June, July, August.

SPEAKER_01

So things are going good. But this morning, it was like in the 80s, the low 80s on the patio. So it was nice.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So that's how we're doing. We're we're getting ready for summer. Everybody's starting to hunker down. We'll all be getting our summer haircuts pretty soon. And it's all going to be good.

SPEAKER_03

We fixed an AC unit yesterday.

SPEAKER_00

You guys with you guys are with summer are like the Minnesotans are with winter. Yeah. Yeah. So escapes, right? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Just stay out of

The Performance Improvement Loop

SPEAKER_01

it.

SPEAKER_00

So today we're going to talk about performance improvement. And it's a topic we've touched on before, but but we want to talk about the model that we use to improve our operations. And we also want to talk about sometimes when that goes wrong.

SPEAKER_01

And the reason we want to talk about that, you asked where we're at with our silverback leadership program, and we're working through the sections and getting ready to release those. But one of the sections is specifically performance management. And it and so we're going to talk a little bit about what we've learned with that, and then share some of what Brunicini had written down in his books and in his notes. And we'll hopefully pull some of that out too. And then kind of what we've learned over the years and what we saw.

SPEAKER_00

So starting off, what what is the model? What is a performance improvement model and and how how does it work with us?

SPEAKER_01

So it's it's beautiful because every it's it's no different in any organization, whether you're a firefighter, police offer, librarian, or whatever, is what you're trying to do is you're trying to hopefully as a leader is improve the service that you deliver, right? And deliver in the in the most effective, do I say effective, efficient way. But really, if you focus on the work, we're trying to get better at the work every time we do it. So this model is a recurring circular model that you had never has an ending. It just kind of keeps looping around itself. And it starts with, and I'll just go through the model real quick and name each real quick and name each section, and then we'll come back and talk about however you want to talk about it. But it's better for me just to kind of so it's you kind of establish that those SOPs and the rules and regulations for your organization, and then you train to those SOPs or rules and regulations. Then those that training that you just went through, you apply what you learn there as you're delivering the work out in the field. And then as you deliver that work, you you're monitoring the performance of the employees that are performing the work. And then what you do is you revise where necessary. So you have to watch what they're doing, and then you revise where necessary, or you say, Yeah, this works well, we should keep doing this, or that doesn't work really well. Let's revise this. And then it goes right back into the system again. And the critique is part of that process of revising that we're going to talk about today. But it's a circular process that continues to kind of flow around

SOPs That Fail In Court

SPEAKER_01

and around.

SPEAKER_00

We didn't talk about this in our pre-show, but I I think focusing on the SOPs for a moment is important because we're talking to guys this week that were in class and they have SOPs that their department doesn't follow, they're outdated, they're in a book. But if something happens and and somebody wants to do some discovery on why did the fire department do it this way and not the way either they were trained or what their policy says, if you've got an outdated SOP on the books that you expect your people to maybe follow or not follow, or it's one of those SOPs people ignore, you've got to revise that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, they say that attorneys ask when something goes bad, somebody gets hurt, whether it's an employee or or somebody in the street, they ask two questions do you have an SOP and were you following it? And then they look for those SOPs. Now, I'll tell you that when we were going through the the CTC process after the Brett Tarver incident, we were making a lot of changes, and our SOPs were behind. We were always creating change and then trying to get the SOPs to catch up with that. So I understand that there's organization. We don't beat them up too bad for having outdated SOPs, but there should be some sort of organizational process. And I know it depends on the size of the department, but most departments will assign a person or a section or an area. So you're responsible to always monitor our SOPs and make sure they're up to date. So, you know, if if you have a SOP that is outdated by three or four years, that's too long. If you have an SOP that's outdated by a few months and you're working on it, then you can kind of, I guess in a court, in a court, you can say, yeah, we're in the process of validating these or actually getting these implemented in the system. But yeah, you you need to do whatever it takes to try to keep your SOPs up with exactly how you're performing that work. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00

And do you guys have any tips on keeping the SOP simple? Because some SOPs read like an NFPA standard. You know, or it looks like legislation and not a practical tool to do the work. So do you guys have any questions?

SPEAKER_01

Well, before we go, I gotta just gotta tell you there you said that and may I giggle a little bit, and Nick, I'm jumping in here a lot before you get a chance, but I maybe I had more coffee in you this morning. But it's funny because uh we were just received an SOP about a year ago on, and it was a what was that, a seven to nine page SOP on how to salute.

unknown

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_01

I'm I you can't make this up. Somebody worked on this SOP. Of course, it had diagrams and pictures and when and where and how. That's ridiculous. Come on now. So you're right, SOPs need to be simple and they need to focus on the work. And if they're if they're task-based, task level, then it ought to reflect the task level. If it's you can just fly up your own arse if you just if like you say, they gotta be simple, it's gotta make sense.

SPEAKER_03

Well, it see the SOP's gotta be based on something. So it supports the work you do, and then training people to do the work. But you know, okay, what gives you the juice and the authority to write these SOPs? What's it all based on? So if if you look at like the service we deliver, like in the EMS world, the SOPs are pretty much they come from outside the fire department. The the the emergency health care industry produces and maintains the standards of care for emergency medicine, right? Yeah. So they're the ones that group is responsible for establishing what paramedics and EMTs do, and then the fire department trains around that. So, in a lot of cases, like what I work for the government, is we did all that EMS training through the college system to maintain your certifications. So if you push that over to the fire side, all of our SOPs really kind of, well, not kind of, or legally created as an element of standards, pretty much, in local legislation. So, like when we took the ambulance service over, you had to get permission from the Arizona Department of Health Services through through an ambulance certificate of need to operate an emergency ambulance company. So to do that, you had to demonstrate your ability to deliver that service. So that becomes where the SOPs all get crafted on. And then what happens is you guys said it earlier, is you're held accountable to performing those SOPs created around those standards. So, as an example here, the one thing everybody in the fire service has been talking about here the last little while is this lawsuit that just got settled out of Illinois for $31 million off of firefighter line of duty death. And what they were what that trial did is it went back to NFPA standards. So that allowed it to clear the hurdle of like immunity to local government to do to take the wrong action and have a negative outcome. See, in the past, when you'd sue for that, you couldn't clear that bar. As they said, no, the fire department's got to be able to make these mistakes. It's part of delivering emergency services to the community. Well, in this case, this the lawyer was able to demonstrate no, this is incompetence. This is egregious what the fire department did not do to protect these workers doing what they did. Both preventative and then in the actual application of that labor. Is it was very negligent in these areas. So and they this isn't complicated. Is the jury didn't meet for two hours. They didn't meet for for from 10 to 12. We're done, we're finished. They come back with the the biggest award ever because it was simple. So there's an example of where that got screwed up. So and then so that's where all the SOPs kind of get their grounding and their juice from, the the power of what they do. And then, like, and there's a variety of sources for that. So you got Ocean some places, you got the NFPA in others. The thing in Painesville, Indiana, where the the the shutting the sprinkler system off had a delirious impact on that incident. Well, that's where the ATF came in. So now you've got law enforcement people. Well, that's when ATF gets involved, that changed that investigation drastically because it named everybody individually in it. So once you're named in one kind of the one in that type of an investigation, that freezes your credit. You can't get a mortgage, you can't get a loan for a car, you can't do anything legally because that's like a lien on your name. Is your part of this thing that the D the DOJ is basically looking at? ATF is a criminal, they do criminal indictments. They don't do civil stuff. So when they look at something, it's to put you in jail on the back end. Seeing in Canada, we deal a lot with Canada, a lot of blue card in Canada. Canada has laws that hold the fire department and fire department officers responsible for the decisions they make at the emergency scene. So, or like just simply like task level. I'm driving an emergency response vehicle. That applies in this country too. If you go through an intersection and you break the law and kill somebody, you are liable for that. The fire department's liable. So that's where all of these SOPs are coming from and merging around us. So in a fire department, there's a lot of different places that have to maintain those where you use that performance management model. So Terry talked about the command training center. When after one of the things in the recovery process out of Southwest supermarkets, is we went, we changed some SOPs, like major SOPs on how we did things, like tactical, strategic SOPs. They had a huge, we changed those more than anything else in the thing, to be honest. We didn't change a whole lot with task-level SOPs in the way we train people after Southwest supermarkets. Because we when we follow those, if we had been following them there, it would have done what it was supposed to. So we start breaking those SOPs because other stuff is broken. So now I have to outperform whatever's causing these SOPs to blow up. Well, when that happens, you're all on your own. And that's what happened in the Southwest supermarkets. Until we figured out how a strategic or a tactical level really operated, until you put a tactical level in place, the strategic level was done. So until you got control of the attack position that we were the two that were being used, that's when the command team could start impacting what was going on. But by then it's too late. See, and if you push that down further, like when I was going through the academy and they're training you, we're doing hose lays. We did, I don't know, we would hook up to the hydrant when during that phase of our training academy, a minimum of like 20 times a day, you're doing a forward supply line hose lay. Boom, boom, boom. And we're using all the apparatus from the Phoenix Fire Department. Now there's some recruit trucks, but there's a lot of trucks coming in of their first line, like regular engine 21, engine 15 comes down. Yeah, you're gonna go down and companies like that. Oh, I get to go down and help train recruits. You know, it was kind of engaging. You got to, it was almost like you were vampires getting to suck the youth out of the young again.

SPEAKER_04

We'll show them.

SPEAKER_03

But we were professionals, the best people at task level drills were the most recently graduated recruit class. They really were. I mean, they would outperform 20-year firefighters because they're younger, first of all. And they've been doing, well, you do 20 hose lays a day. Nobody in the field's doing that. They're not laying hose 20 days. You're lucky if you're doing it a couple times a month, really. So we had an issue, and it was a new apparatus design, and they were putting lids on top of the hose beds, covers, diamond plate covers. And you know, they put a piano hinge on one side, piano hinge on another side, split it in the middle, and then you could boom. And so it kept the hose cleaner. One of the issues was is as the hose is fading out, couplings would catch the lip of that. Well, when it did, it would pull the supply line taunt, and then you it would just pull the humid valve right out of your hands. Well, if you were in the wrong position, is that valve comes around? You got a 90-pound chunk of aluminum that is now being drugged about 25 miles an hour by a fire truck. Well, it's gonna kill you if it hits you. So that became a thing. And I mean, everything stopped, and they said, nope, we're we're doing this. We figured out what happened. They said, we got to take these lids off. And so that became a thing because though that truck, it was a first-line piece of equipment. It was a uh I remember like a 78 Mac, and they put the this this like these cellar door hose covers on it.

SPEAKER_01

They were pretty.

SPEAKER_03

Well, it looked great and it kept the hose clean. And you could walk on them. Yeah, you could.

SPEAKER_01

You weren't, you know, all kept the sun off the hose.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, exactly. But you couldn't do it because it was too dangerous. It created a very hazardous situation with now. There was a way to do it where it wouldn't catch, but you know, it was just easier to take it off. Well, there's an instance where like the recruit training captains go in and tell their boss, who then walks across the street to resource and says, Hey, this is what's happening. So now you got deputy chiefs out there looking at this, and now we're doing hose lays. Well, that changed a couple things. It was the design of those hose bed covers. They were just removed them. That was the simplest thing. But then we changed the the SOP for taking a hydrant for the plug person and saying, no, when you wrap the plug, this is the way you hold it and you put it in front of you. And so if anything catches it, because we'd have cars drive over while you're trying to hook up, and then they would take it. So it's just a hazard. It's an inherent hazard when you're holding on to a piece of hose that's tethered to a moving vehicle. So we tweak that. So if it came out of your hands, it wouldn't hurt you, and then nobody, you know, so and then everybody else in the crew, if somebody's taking a hydrant, you stay out of the line of fire of the thing. So there's an example. So the performance management model within about less than a week outlawed hose bed covers. So there's a the leadership of a fire department where, okay, this happened with a couple recruit training officers observing this isn't working, and then it got pushed all the way through to the fire chief. We're like, no, we're gonna take those off or if we need to keep them. They said, and somebody said, Why the hell are we putting hose bed covers over synthetic hose? And it was what you said, uh JV. It was so you could walk across the thing. And they said, Well, it's safer when you're laying a line not to have it. So we're just gonna take them off. There's not a big risk walking. We haven't had an issue with that, really, maybe twist at an angle or something.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, exactly. And in the Midwest, we had those to keep the snow out. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

That's it. So so and your your question about process and how do you kind of what'd you say, simple process for SOPs? I think something like that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, where it doesn't read so much like legislation.

SPEAKER_01

So here's the deal: you you focus on the work and you focus on safety. So you focus on like this SOP that we're developing. What are we trying to accomplish here? How does it impact the work? How does it impact the workers as far as safety and the ability to do the job? And then to do that, you need to get input from the workers, right? So there are some organizations that they have some chief assigned to SOPs and they'll go out there and they'll write these SOPs without getting input from the people actually doing the work. So we would say that a simple thing to do right up front is whenever you're gonna change an SOP, talk to the people who are gonna have to do that. Because you're gonna, it's gonna save you a lot of skin

Simple SOPs And Shared Standards

SPEAKER_01

knees. And the other thing, too, is if you think about it, Nick, and you could jump back in here, but because we focused on the work, and and back then we probably had 26 different fire departments or agencies that were working off our one SOP. We called our SOP Volume 2. And everybody worked off the same volume, it was about that thick, and the entire all the all the automatic aid partners worked off that. So you didn't have the Glendale Fire Department having their own SOP or this fire department over there, that fire department. They all operated off the same SOP because that was the SOP that was developed that would provide a safe, effective service to the customer. And that was the most important piece is everybody has to kind of not kind of, everybody has to understand and everybody has to be able to use that same SOP.

SPEAKER_00

How how would you guys go about getting the other fire departments to sign off on changing an SOP that was going to affect their operations? And the reason I ask, it's hard to get fire chiefs to agree on what side of the uh passport are we gonna put the velcro. Yeah. Just even the simplest thing. So how did you accomplish that?

SPEAKER_01

In any kind of organizational structure, and the organizational structure here with the automatic gauge system, there has to be one person who's in charge. There has to be a lead dog who's gonna pull the sled, and everybody else has to follow. So we had Brunicini as the lead dog, right? And other people got on board and they didn't like, they didn't always agree with everything up front, and we would listen to them, and if they had a better idea, then that would get that would get changed or revised in the SOP. But in I in any system, somebody has to say, hey, uh we we need to have somebody who's gonna make the final decision. And if you're gonna operate with us, if we're gonna come to your city and and you and use automatic aid and get on get on that fire ground with you, then we need to be operating in the same SOP. You can't have more and that's happening right now. There's some cities that have different SOPs out there, and they're trying to work together. And we saw that over our career where there's one company that does some sort of ventilation that another city wouldn't do, one city do one, and another city do another. And it's like, well, in our city we do this, and all that needs to work get worked out in advance. Because all you're gonna do, and you got like you say, you got fire chiefs who won't agree to it because they get kind of caught up in whatever it is they're getting caught up with. Usually it's ego. And really, it's not fair because the workers are the ones that. Have to do the work. That's where it needs to be fair and equal and everybody on the same page. That's why I think blue card is so effective. The last thing about I'll say about SOPs is that not everything can be an SOP. That is why the decision making model is so critical. Is that you if you can develop a model on how to make decisions on the fire ground, and you don't have to have every little SOP worked out. It's like these are the decisions that we're gonna here's what we want to accomplish. Well, it's that whole we got standard conditions, we're gonna apply standard actions, we're hoping for a standard outcome. You have to use a decision-making model. So I think once we implemented the decision-making model, some of those SOPs can go away. And by the way, if you have an SOP that doesn't make sense, it is better to just eliminate it and not have it. Like, no, we don't have an SOP on that. Boom, get rid of that SOP.

Leading Change Across Departments

SPEAKER_03

Here, let me give you an example the of using an operations manual. So volume two comes out of this early deal of going from mutual to automatic aid. So if we're all going to work together seamlessly, we're gonna do it automatically, and we're all gonna do it off this set this sheet of music. So the three major fire departments involved in that in the late 70s all agreed to that. So what that did is that became a binding contract. Well, and then if as you continue to follow the the juice that drove that whole agreement, it was the dispatch center where we dispatch from. And so nothing's changed since the late 70s to today, is you manage deployment systems through the dispatch center. That's where the call for help comes in, and that's where the resources are dispatched. So one of the SOPs, a group of SOPs that we had in our volume was for rapid intervention. And that came out from the early 80s to 2000s, right? So we have this 25-year SOP that we've built and revised and improved using the performance management model. Recovery process out of Southwest supermarkets was this don't work. We got to change some stuff. Is when you have an outcome where one of us dies at the scene, that's a that is a failure of the system. That's the way we looked at it and why we changed it. Now, a lot of places the leadership says that's the price of doing business. You know, some of us are gonna die. We figure out rapid intervention isn't rapid all the stuff we've been doing with on deck and everything else. So the SOPs get changed. Well, first of all, when we were doing this, you the fire department didn't stop, is you're still doing promotional exams and everything else. All the stuff you were doing before you killed the guy, you're doing after you killed the guy. That's it, 100%. So what we said is once we figured out we got to do strategic and tactical level patches and fixes here and then train on it. So that's where we built the CTC, and where we could really manage the refinement of SOPs in a much more practical manner by connecting it back to the work. So that's what we did is we said this didn't work, this does, this does. So you end up with the health order and kind of the natural flow of how the incident goes, based on assigning people uh all in a single IAP. We cart that out, and then we had, we just didn't know how much juice we had as the shift commanders who were responsible for maintaining that volume out of the command training center. So once we were all comfortable, we went to our bosses and said, Hey, we're going from IRIC and RIC to on deck. That's how we're gonna do this. We're gonna maintain tactical reserves, we're gonna use the help order, we're gonna do tactical supervision with response chiefs. And this is what this looks like now. Talked about it. And now we had done at least a year and a half of very intensive drills. Hundreds of drills with thousands of firefighters. So we weren't just making shit up. This was tried and true, and it was public, so people could come in and access and see, and the other cities are going through all this. So we see the the the fallacy of what rapid intervention is, and we said, no, this is this is a better way to do this. Well, some of those chiefs from the other systems weren't ready for that. And they said, We who who said you could do this? So, well, they told us to fix it. We fixed it. This is what our fix looks like. You guys have been coming to training, we've been talking about this. Well, we're not comfortable with that yet. We like this old way. No, the old way a year and a half ago, it stuck it straight up our ass. We're not doing this anymore, pal. It doesn't work. It's not effective, it's not good service delivery, and it kills us. So uh-uh. Well, I was a deputy chief, basically. You were a deputy chief, and now you got the ops chief and fire chief from four cities saying we're not doing it. And said, Come to the next thing. We're gonna do this in Phoenix. You come to the next training session for the for the other automatic aid cities. They came and the fire chief was there. You said it, one guy who's in charge now, and he explained the process. He was very patient. He never raised his voice, he never bit his finger, never it was highly civil. And and he finally said, This just works better. And every one of them said, Yeah, we probably think it does. We're we just we're just so uncomfortable with making a change like this. He says, Yeah, I appreciate that. He says, but we're we're done. He says, I'm not killing anybody else. It ain't okay to kill firefighters. And the old system, that's what happened. We ain't doing it anymore. And if you don't like this, there's mechanisms for you not to have to deal with it.

SPEAKER_01

So I'm gonna surprise our listeners by saying there's probably people in their system, like there was in our system, who resist change because the ownership that they have on whatever was created before. Yes. And when and we talked about it, I think yesterday or day before when I was here, we started talking about effective leaders, the most effective leaders are the ones who make decisions based on how it supports the members, not how it impacts their personal ego, right? When you start making decisions about, well, what's that do for them, not what's that do for me, you're a much better leader. And we had people like you'll know there are people tied to a certain task for whatever reason. There's people tied to a certain tool for whatever reason. And and everybody just kind of has to leave, and I know it's easier to say than do, but everybody has to leave their ego at the door, and you got to do what the fire chief said. And what he said is so simple. I remember him saying he said, it works. Well, and it works.

SPEAKER_03

He was the one that got it. It was his system we were changing, it wasn't their system. The people coming in saying we're not going to change this system. You're like, and you're looking at them and thinking to yourself, you have nothing to do with the development of any of these SOPs. You're sitting over there doing whatever it is you do 40 miles away, and and now you we're changing our SOPs.

SPEAKER_01

We invented this. Uh we, Nick, we had the same thing happening within our system. People didn't want to change for whatever reason.

SPEAKER_03

Let's use lightweight residential tile roofs. So now it's not outside, it's inside. So it's the ladder guys inside. Say, no, we need to get back on these roofs. And you're like, no, we don't. There is no good outcome that comes from that. You're not ventilating the building, you're just up there beating on a 5'8 inch of OSB on two by four gusset plate held together, trusses with a thousand pounds every 10 square feet of tile on top of it. And then you got vaults underneath. There's no like eight-foot ceilings with a plenum above. It doesn't look anything like that. And so you're having these like extremely detailed work-level conversations with people, and they're the the the the task-level worker. No, you know, change me that way. And you're like, no, it doesn't work, it's ineffective, man. Just crush it. Put water on it, it'll go away, and then you can do this and this. You can exercise all those little demons you want in other ways.

SPEAKER_01

Here's a here's a quote that I I had to steal somewhere when I heard it. I don't know where I get these from, but regarding that, I am sure I can make you understand, but it's gonna require a few words from me and a little patience from you. Yes. And sometimes that's all it takes, is like, hey, just listen to this for a minute.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, but then it don't give five. What's the one that goes just beyond that? Yeah, I can explain it to you, but I can't make you understand.

SPEAKER_01

So, Bike, when you get to that point, then you need to have that you need to have the 400-pound gorilla saying, this is the way we're gonna do it.

SPEAKER_00

I remember Chief Bernicini saying, You can lead a horse to water.

SPEAKER_03

Well, he says people tell you you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. And he says, Well, yeah, you can. If your friends hold its head down underwater and your other friends suck on its ass, it's gonna drink. Yeah, yeah. That's that's what I was getting at. Yeah, I love that quote. Yeah. Well, it's it's the golden rule. The guy with the gold makes all the rules. So he was the I mean, that's kind of why it worked. But see, they would listen to him too. They say, okay, you're the guy, uh, you know.

SPEAKER_01

But but here's the deal. So you can do all that as as a leader and a fire chief or an ops chief. You gotta be get all on the same page, you gotta get input from the workers, you got to focus on the work itself and how it's gonna impact the customer. But the one time you don't do that, uh, and you fly up your own arse, you will lose all your credibility and you got to start all over. That's why the the process is so good, because we would say, hey guys, here we're you're gonna use it for and I did this in in, I was fortunate enough to do that in Oceanside, where I said, here's the process we're gonna use, and I use it in Houston too, just thinking about it. Here's the process we're gonna use, here's where we are on this topic. We're just now starting this topic, we're looking at setting expectations, developing the SOPs. This is where we are. And then on another project, you may say, Hey, we're we're past, we've already established SOPs, you guys need to get on board with it, right? Now we're training in it, and you guys need to support the training. You're the leaders, you need to do that. And then you just follow that around. Okay, now you guys are the the working bosses and the walking bosses. This is the performance you got to monitor because this is the expectations that we set, this is the training that we did, and now you guys, if you don't follow through here, we're we're not gonna be successful, and you just kind of follow that around.

SPEAKER_03

Well, and you have to have all three levels in effect all the time. What did like from eight in the morning to eight in the morning to eight in the morning to eight in the morning? So, like you use the process in the very beginning to form your SOPs, and then you use the process on the back end to revise and validate your SOPs. Well, in the middle is where you're actually applying the service. Well, if you don't have the right people manage in the strategic and tactical levels, you lose something there. So in the actual execution of the service delivery.

SPEAKER_01

We had specialized pieces of the court. What do you leave there? Hold on to that just one second, unless you're because you just said you just explained the fire ground and the incident command system and yeah, that's why you use that, and you use the same thing in the organization.

SPEAKER_03

That's what the strategic the presence at the incident scene does.

SPEAKER_01

So it's funny how people, and I'll let you get back, but it's funny how there's organizations that they they want to use this this three levels on the fire ground, but they don't use it organizationally. They just shut out some oh well. The fire captains aren't there, they don't you just tell them what to do. No, you got to use all three of those levels, they gotta be in line.

Foam Truck Lesson On Risk

SPEAKER_01

Go ahead. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_03

We're a foam truck. I was a huge d uh advocate of class A foam in any variety. I love class A foam.

SPEAKER_01

You liked it on your beer.

SPEAKER_03

I liked it everywhere. I bathed in it. Yeah, truly. All it is is Dawn dishwashing detergent. So we had a rig uh uh uh that would move a lot of compressed class A foam. Yeah, you could do it, it had like a 70, 90 foot boom, about a two-inch pipe, and and you could do an extreme amount of firefighting with that thing. We respond to a call one night, it's like two, three in the morning, and it's like a a four or five-acre lot, and it's covered in tires, and it's a pyramid of them, and it's probably about 20 feet high at its top, and the tires got to take up at least an acre of land. And so you got a shitload of tires, and it's burning right in the top. It looks like a birthday cake. You know, oh Jesus. Beautiful smoke. Oh, in the past, it would have been two days, and you would have had to make a mud bog. And now this is them in the middle of neighborhoods. I mean, the the so there's residential stuff that's being impacted by this. The first due captain had worked on that foam truck. And so he he was the engineer, and now he's moved up as a captain. He's on a captain's list. He gets there, and then Battalion 5 got there. It was Dave White. He was the BC. And then I got there right behind as a shift commander. Well, the captain on the engine has special called for this foam unit, and he's not doing anything, it's just burning. And it's it because it's in the middle, it's kind of has to burn down to spread. And so it's kind of, but it's it's it's you can see it from a long ways off. And it's making the battalion chief who's in command crazy. He says, We got to start putting water on. I said, just listen to Jorge. Wait for the foam truck, okay? Just go get in your back seat and lay down where you can't see it if it's making you nuts. That foam truck showed up, and so now we've got like two or three, and I told him, No, cancel the the alarm. And they called, he called, he was getting raised at level two. So stop it right now. But wait, bye-bye. I said, stop it. Jorge gets foam 44 there, they set it up. I'm not lying. 12 minutes. I timed it on my computer and the truck. When they started putting the product on the fire out of that piece of apparatus, 12 minutes later. Fire control, and I'm talking fire control. There was no more smoke, it was out. Dave White wanted to marry Jorge after that. I had no idea. And you thought, well, that's because he's specialized. He's like a paramedic, except with phone, is what it is. So, and really when you look back, because we had a very progressive group of people that would buy us stuff like that, and we could use it all. So you would use that truck in places, and it would cut your your overhaul time by like 80%, and both in time and personnel. So now you're not exposing a hundred firefighters to tire smoke. You got eight of them that were exposed. And the environmental impact. You're reducing your risk. So now what you're really is now you're almost getting up out of the strategic level into the executive level of protecting your community as effectively as it can be protected. See, that's and a lot of times the quickest, easiest way to do that runs counter to us because we need to take risks to validate our ego. So you're like, no, I'm not uh I risk nothing at this. I risk the boom of a of a 75-foot foam squirter. That's it. I nobody we moved them around, so we minimized our exposure. And we had a better outcome. It's just that we didn't get a big cancer lump that we could name, and yeah, it's so that's kind of it. I mean, sometimes we're not our own best advocates through the thing. And really that's where leadership comes in. Like you look at some of the blue card departments that have had huge success managing their incident operations today, and it's it's that's kind of what keeps you moving forward, or the woosters of the world that say, no, we've got some issues here, and we're gonna do this. And when you talk to those people later on, they say, well, not only did it make it safer for the workers, but what happened is the incidents just went better. It is we got fire control quicker, we got the all clear quicker. It took fewer companies, less time to do this because we we actually managed ourselves in a way to to to uh achieve that outcome.

SPEAKER_01

Right? Yeah. That's SOPs. That's SOPs. That's how critical SOPs are. And then when you start developing those SOPs based on the work and the customer, then you start creating a culture, organizational culture. They got a lineup, and I we won't go into too much of that. But if when you get that right, you create an organizational culture where you say, Yeah, we're gonna do not what's best for us, but we're gonna do what's best for us serving the customer. And I think that's what Bruno really, at the end of the day, that's when when you talk about him acknowledging Mrs. Smith and then moving forward with that, that's when our culture became we are here to serve the customer and do the best we can.

SPEAKER_03

Well, and the way you implement that in the fire department is you train. And you just train, yeah. See, and they say, well, we're only gonna do this training and this training, and we don't need to do it anymore. I think, no, you got to do all your training, and you don't do a whole bunch all at once. You do you get trained up and then you do a little bit on an ongoing basis to maintain those skills. That's what that looks like. So that's what drives change, is the work and the SOPs. And all of those SOPs at the scene of an incident, they all have to align and connect into something that's real. It like you say, JV, when we started this, is a lot of fire department. People hate writing SOPs. It sucks. It's a pain in the ass. Well, thankfully, there's a ton of SOPs right now. You can download all your operational SOPs off blue card.com right now, and then you got something to start with. And even if for the the haters out there, well, then just change it to whatever it is you want. Go away. You can if you can use a word processor, then you can change the SOPs how to to your whatever you want it to look like.

SPEAKER_00

So with the SOPs, then we train, we we train on it, then we apply it, and then we go through a revision, which is a critique.

How To Run A Real Critique

SPEAKER_00

How do how do we best apply that critique? And what are some pitfalls and some critiques that you've seen that haven't worked out so well?

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So, you know, it's kind of like those those those areas that we talk about with an incident commander is that, you know, being honest, treating everybody the same, not to have favoritism. We talked a little, we'll talk a little bit about that. But to be on first thing you got to do in a critique is you got to get everybody around. Wherever that is, you could do a tailboard critique. We did a lot of those. You could do them on, you could do them regarding fire incidents, you could do them regarding automobile accidents, you could do them regarding serious CMS calls where you need to improve on. Whatever that is, just you need to pull them everybody together, and then somebody has to lead the critique. There has to be somebody in charge of that critique, and that person has to be honest because a lot of times one of the things that need to be improved in that critique is the person running the incident wasn't very helpful to some of the people on the incident scene, right? So they got to be open for honest criticism too, right? Objective criticism. And then you go through a process of a critique where you're honest and you actually talk about the work being done. And I remember being on critiques for man, that that fire sucked. We all sucked. We like everybody had a stub toe on this fire. Everybody did something, and it just seems like thank God we got through this, and oh nobody got hurt, is what I'm thinking in my mind. But there's things to learn. But when he's when the critiquer said exactly what I was thinking, well, we got through this, nobody got hurt, let's go home. It's like, no, there's so much opportunity now to add for everybody to talk about what they did and where they were and what they did wrong, or what they can improve on, or what you did that caused me problems, what I did to cause you problems, whatever that is, but you got to be honest and you gotta open everybody has to open themselves up on a critique. And if you don't do it on one critique, the next critique, you can't capture that. That's it's gotta be. Consistent with your after action reviews. And we actually have a process for that, right? In Blue Card, if you're if you're struggling with how to do an after action review, then we have a we have a process for that and some support material for that. But it has to be the other thing I've seen in critiques is that, and I'm just kind of as I'm thinking these up, I'm saying them out loud, is that there's some critiquers, the leader of that has a pet peeve. Whatever that pet peeve is, on every critique, they're gonna throw that pet peeve out there, and once they hit their pet peeve, they're gonna ignore everything else that should have been done that you can learn from. And when you do that, that you're you're you're not doing an effective critique. That's why having a process for a critique works so well. These are the areas I need to cover in a critique. Here's how I do the critique, here's how to include people in the process.

SPEAKER_03

So the process of doing a critique is the same process that you use to develop the incident action plan. It's that simple. So you're using the work, right? I show up, I size up, I process that through risk management, that gives me my strategy, and then I use those critical factors to figure out the best, quickest way to complete the tactical priorities. That's the critique. That's the same thing. So after the incident's over, the same system we use to figure out how to run that incident, we use to do the critique. It's pretty simple. So going back to the tire fire, it's like, okay, here's my critical factors. Well, for Dave White, it's like every tire fire I've ever been to was two days long and involved a mud bog. And we were all filthy. It was horrible. I had a headache for five days. There's all that. You're like, no, we don't have to do that anymore. The phone put the fire out. It's a zero, Dave. It was a zero value fire when it was negative value. It cost a million dollars to haul those tires somewhere. And so it's a negative thing right now to begin with. Well, you know, we had to search and rescue. No, you don't. It's a tire fire, you moron. It's outside in a lot. There's no babies living in the tires. So it also keeps us honest if you use the same system. It eliminates your deal with the pet peeve guy or the guy who's the professional. That's the one I learned to want to choke to death. Is the latter guy who thought he was a general contractor and an architect all in the same thing. And he wasn't. On his days off, he played in a mariachi band. He didn't know the first thing about construction, but he's talking about it in the critique so he can impress everybody else with his empty, vacuous knowledge and nothing. And you're like, no, man. Last week we watched you take the ladder and swing it into the cab of the truck. You're not a smart man. Quit telling us what to do. So that's you talked the other day about a system where the battalion chief does not train with any of their companies. They refuse to train. So what it is is they're like in hospice or whatever that BC does all day, but they're not experts in in the strategic or tactical level of what they're supposed to manage. So that's the ranking officer should should facilitate the critique, right? So that would be the BC. Well, this guy is the dumbest person at the scene. Now, you just did a trainer where the biggest issue was the senior, it was all senior chiefs with with 20 years or more on, right? That that were deputy chief or above in their department. And then the other people in the class were young firefighters at a local fire department to kind of fill out to help simulate. And the best ICs were the young firefighters. And all the older guys said that and noticed that it made them a little uncomfortable. Like, how did they get to be so good? And you're like, well, they just trained them. That's what they do. So it's see, and on the fire side, if you're a chief, there's not a lot of chiefs that go out and get extra training. I got promoted, and my most of my training, 90% of what I learned was in the training academy 20 years ago. So at least half of that information's out of date today. So now you're a 50% student and you haven't done anything other than just like executive level gossip over the last 10 or 15 years. So there's really so that becomes the issue. Is the people running the fire department there should be the managing the service delivery piece of it. So that's kind that's the best thing that happened out of our recovery process.

SPEAKER_01

You know, the after-action review critique process is a training session.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, it really is.

SPEAKER_01

That's a training session.

SPEAKER_03

Well, it invalidates best practices.

SPEAKER_01

It continues to cook those in. And those the another issue I have with some critiques is not everybody's included. You get the if you have a problem with somebody when they really messed up, take them to the side, and I've seen you do this, and you talk to them over here, and you say, Hey, you did this really bad. I'm gonna mention this in a critique, but I'm not gonna beat you up, but you're gonna just this is gonna be mentioned that this happened. And you don't you don't use it as an opportunity to whip people, but you also don't use it as an opportunity to ignore people. And I've seen critiques where okay, we're gonna get all the captains here. The firefighters go pick up the hose. No, firefighters need to learn. You don't want a firefighter who promotes the captain, it's the first time he looks up from the from his yeah, you want everybody. Yeah, it's everybody.

SPEAKER_03

You deliver good service as a crew.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and it's a it's a wonderful training session. If I was the chief of a department today, I would have on my promotional exam, a f a battalion chief candidate would have to run a critique or an after action report review process.

SPEAKER_00

I think that's an excellent idea because that's that's the ultimate in in trying to uh leadership, training ability, communication ability, job knowledge.

SPEAKER_01

Well, all of that comes, you need to have all those.

SPEAKER_03

It's part of the training. It's the back end of the training circle or whatever we want to call that.

Training Gaps And Promotion Reality

SPEAKER_03

I heard a story the other day. This fire department's been doing blue card for two or three years now, and they're doing promotional exams. So they send all their officers to the promotional exam, you know, that want to promote, and then they go through a tactical, you know, some kind of exercise. Well, in this particular system, is the fire department doesn't deliver the tests, the city HR department does. So they sit down with the fire department staff, they say, okay, here's the right answers. This is what this looks like. You know, so people are doing size ups and things. It's a blue card fire department. So, you know, it's all kind of blue cardy stuff, but which is really pretty much applicable to the whole fire service. Well, but fight the same fire, really. The director of the HR department calls the fire chief a the day, two days after this process is started. It says, Hey man, I think we got a serious issue. What's that? He says, I think all your guys are cheating. He says, What are you talking about? He says, Of course I do. They're all answering the question the same way. He says, Nobody's getting the wrong answer. And he says, They know the test. They're they're they're cheating. And the fire chief started laughing. He says, No, they're all trained to know what the right answer is. He says, That's what this is. And so they have a little talk. The guy says, You're kidding me. He says, No, he says, I'll show you our training program. He says, This is what it produces. It's a discernible difference in the way we perform after you go through it than before. So now what we've done is we're knocking the edges off all these SOPs and seeing how they really fit. And then as we and this is the seasoned fire department. These are the best firefighters in the country, as far as just structural firefighting goes. Nobody's better than them that I'm aware of. They do that pretty well. And what and what they tell you, the the bosses, they say, no, we just go, they they said, we're just a little more deliberate in what we do. It isn't so emotional and it's more calculated. And they've like you'll listen, and I'm sure you played this fans, radio tapes before and radio tapes after, and there is absolutely no comparison. I mean, it's like somebody fix daddy, and we're we're going to have a happy household now in the thing. There's no more yelling and screaming and crying and gnashing of the teeth. It's just very matter of a fact. I mean, that's what you're looking for.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. It's success. And those critiques that uh is really the the review of it, uh, because it's not necessarily just a critique, because it's the analysis of whatever it is that you're doing. So that can come in different forms. We're talking about like tailboard critiques or a critique that we would do with a group of people, but it you guys analyzed the hose bed cover and figured out this isn't working. Let's revise it now and make it better.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Now, if some if they if nobody would have said anything, and that would have happened probably at a lot of training academies, they would have just left the things open. Killed somebody. Yeah. I mean, those things are, as Gordon Graham would say, that is an accident lying in waiting. Uh I mean, you have got an Easter egg. This uh it's not an Easter egg, it's a landmine. And somebody's gonna step on that thing, it's gonna kill them. I mean, it it's and see, the sad thing is, is after that happens and everybody comes together, is there's a number of people that say, well, we knew that. Uh I mean, we took ours off. So now it's just that the fire department is so disconnected in the thing because in a lot of cases, you do not have strategic and tactical presence 24-7. I mean, it's just so a lot of things just fall out and go away. You know, you don't, you're not able to capture them.

SPEAKER_00

Anything else on critique and reviewing?

SPEAKER_01

I think we got it. And I think Nick's story regarding the just to complete the circle of the performance management. So his story on the tire and using the phone, that gets kicked into the revise process. So then that goes in, that's a revising of how you fight those kind of fires.

SPEAKER_03

That's a senior advisor level thing. Yeah. It's to understand, to have an expertise in the hazards that the task levels facing.

SPEAKER_01

So then that gets bumped right back into the circle, and an SOP gets created, and then it just suspends.

SPEAKER_03

Well, Terry, that's how that truck even came into being. Is before what we had is we had telescorts, American LaFrance telesquirts. So we had a 50-foot squirt on top of a regular 1500 GPM pumper. And that was the first truck that we put foam through. And we thought this is we can use this to do these zero-value dump fires that we get. Yeah, Phoenix, Arizona, big place. Well, hell, it ran over like a 9,000 square mile first due area. And so this foam truck would end up 30, 40 miles from Phoenix routinely in other places in the automatic aid system. A trash compractor.

SPEAKER_01

What is a trash really drive around? A trash truck. Yeah. Uh-huh. They call them.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Dump the load and it took no well, hell, it was so effective. We put compressed air foams on all the pumpers. We had 50 pumpers with compressed air foam systems on them one time. I mean, it was just, it was a little, it was the opposite of a pet peeve for us. It was a deal that we thought this works so much better in these different situations. But even like training the workforce to use that, we screwed up. And so there were a lot of people resistance to use it because it was a technical process to get foam out the end of a nozzle. And you're like, if you went, if you didn't go through the sequence correctly, if you weren't flowing water first, you weren't going to get foam ever. Yeah, you're going to get slugs. And you thought, yeah, uh, yeah, no, you don't put air through the line first and then foam and then water. It's water and then foam, then air. So there was a sequence.

SPEAKER_01

So the process is what's

Change Models Beat Outside Consultants

SPEAKER_01

important. So when I arrived in in Houston, the system is when I arrived in Houston, the first thing that I wanted to do was was to describe the process that I was going to use for change, right? That we were going to use for change. Because I was sent there as an outside guy to create some sort of change. Yeah. And it's like, okay, so I'm we're going to identify where we need to improve. I'm not just going to change it to change it, but we're going to identify the areas that need improvement, and we're going to use this process. So one of my very first memos and training sessions that the entire department got was this is the account, we use the accountability model. It's the same thing, it's just stated a different way. And we're going to use this model to create change. And within the first six or seven months, everybody pretty much, whether they liked it or not, they understood that there was going to be a model and a process of change. So then when we were started to create that change, it's like, where are you? Where are you on the model for that right there? Well, Chief, we uh we're setting expectations still. We're getting people. Okay, where are you at over there? Well, we're training on this area. And it it you can use that model. And it's very helpful to have a process and a system. So those fire chiefs out there are leaders that are just like, man, I can't. How do you change this? You know, everybody, you got these people coming in from out of town and they're change experts. Well, they don't help you.

SPEAKER_03

And they're not change experts either. They're out-of-town consultants.

SPEAKER_01

They're from more than 25 miles away. 25 miles away, and they got they used to have a briefcase, now they got a phone with, you know. But it's like, no, you need to have a process that your people can learn and your people can use, and it's reproducible, and it's effective, and it's easily understandable. And these some of these, I just remember people talking about change, and it's like, well, where are you from? Did you ever well I don't want to insult anybody, but they weren't from the largest departments, and they're talking to very large departments on how to create change. Well, what they did is they they took a class, a university level class, and their thesis was on organizational change. So now they became the expert. Well, that's ridiculous. The people within the system need to be the experts on their own change process.

SPEAKER_03

Well, like line of duty deaths, like NIASH would do reports. And then there was any number of consultants that would do this is how you implement these changes that came out of this report for your fire department. And you see some of these organizations that would offer these things up, and they're like, Well, you need to rebuild all your fire stations. And you're like, that had absolutely nothing to do with the incident where this firefighter died.

SPEAKER_01

That's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. They were hit by a fire, another fire apparatus. What's fire state at the scene of an incident that has nothing to do with the sleeping quarters or the kitchen or their station? Yeah. Well, you know, this and a lot of times what it is is the way consultants work, the people that actually use them the most, is they find a consultant that's going to write what they want. So that's exactly what they want. Yeah, they sit down with them and say, here's what you're gonna find. How much does that cost me? And the consultant most consultants will say, I'll do that for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Okay, hired.

SPEAKER_01

And I was in one system where the consultant wrote it, and then the the uh jurisdiction said we don't like it. We pay them, but we're never showing this.

SPEAKER_00

Well, they do that a lot. Yes.

SPEAKER_01

But here's the deal. You know, that old deal at profit, you're never a profit in your hometown.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Well, the great thing about having a process is you don't need a profit, right? You need a process that everybody can understand. And then you'll have people within the system that own each part of the process. Like the leadership team owns the process overall, and then the training people own that process. You can assign the SOP people, but you can start delegating that out different parts of the process.

SPEAKER_03

But we're seeing I think the accountability you talk about is a huge thing. And that is when you look at fire departments and processes, you got like a separate safety division, separate training division, separate operation division. Well, they all build process walls to keep the other side out and to try to control it.

SPEAKER_01

Like a real the executives of the fire department need to Yeah, but I'm talking about the uh owning it, but everybody needs to be involved with it, right, Nick? And and in our performance management model that we're gonna bring out the session, it actually talks about the three levels of bosses. And those three le but it's not fair. It's not fair to the fire captain or the firefighters at Station 52 when you got an ops chief not talking to a training chief, and these guys are trying to figure it out.

SPEAKER_03

Hey, it's even worse when you have battalion chiefs, they don't even have to go to training. We don't have to do anything, we're chiefs now. Like we got promoted, and we somehow have like yeah, it's ridiculous. And you talk to these people, you're like, it doesn't matter what you do. Yeah, you it is it you like the if the task level doesn't solve the problem the first five minutes, you're host.

SPEAKER_00

I mean because the chief's showing up and just screwing things up. No, exactly 1988 tactics.

SPEAKER_03

Put it out before the chiefs. Yeah, well, and then they're listening. If they're not training and getting their information there, they're getting it off of Facebook or social media. And that's a bunch of losers and clowns. That that's who populate those sites. Is it you're not getting the training director from your department? Hi, my name's uh for or no, allday.69.com. Well, no, you're you you uh uh uh I don't go there anymore. So yeah, so yeah I quit drinking.

SPEAKER_01

Use it find a process you like. These are a couple processes that we're gonna offer you. You heard one of them. The other one is the accountability model to set expectations, train to those expectations, monitor performance, hold people accountable, good and bad, and then get back in the system and start it all over. It's an excellent model.

SPEAKER_00

I've uh used it to run fire departments and it and it works. Absolutely works. And and you know, you were talking about pet peeves. You also can't have preconceived notions and and just trying to push your agenda through using this process either. You have to come in as a leader with kind of a blank slate, and and you might have you might have some monopolists. But let this confirm it instead of coming in and trying to influence it.

SPEAKER_03

See, and and the group of us talk about this like it's a pure process, and it is, it's a very good process. But in my in our fire department, we had we were broken up by labor management team, so operations had the operations committee. Well, I was the shift commander in that, and so you're sitting on that committee, running a fire one night, it's up north, and it's a defensive fire. And it's like, no, man, and this is over. And I had some inferior ladder trucks, reserve ladders that like the 100-foot tillered area with the clip-on nozzle, and I got platform towers sitting there with dual guns, doing nothing, and you got these two little pissy streams, busted it up, moved the ladders out, put them in, did the new ones, and about half an hour later, we're finished. The captain on the junk ladder, it was an old reserve truck that they were in. Their regular ladder was being serviced or whatever was wrong with it. He took issue with that. He says, That's our fire, and you moved me out of the way and moved another non-first due ladder into my place. And I'm like, No, I moved a more functional piece of apparatus in so we would be done here sooner. And I released you from the scene. That was my fire. Well, this guy happened to be a ranking union guy. So he puts it into the deployment committee process and says, we can't do this anymore, where the chief comes in and rearranges the tactics. And I'm like, okay. So it turned in, I turned it the work on him. I said, Your ladder, and I went through, this is the reserve, and here's its specs and capabilities. I said, the one I replaced it with are these. And so we started like looking at ladders and tested them, like you should have been. And they found out that like half the ladders we had were were were broken. They took them out of service. We were out of ladder trucks for a little while. Well, I remember that. Yeah. And so, like, so I sit down with the guy who brought us all together and they put us in a committee together. And I said, Okay, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna do flow tests off the ladders, and this is how we're gonna do it. We're gonna go to the academy, we're gonna get each model. And he said, Yeah, okay, that's great. So we do it. You know, who never showed up to any of it was the guy that put us there. So he comes like six months later, and now we're given the final report, and he wants to change it because it didn't come out to his satisfaction. And and they're like, nah, we're done. You know, and then kind of the union guy in the thing said, no, we're finished. And he kind of had to put him on a leash and take him out of the room.

SPEAKER_00

And he was he thought you don't get to bully your way into this. I mean, there was there was a process.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, and he started it, and it was like he was pissed off that okay, now I'm not getting what I want out of it. So people are you trying to manipulate the thing, and that that wasn't the only example of that. That was that went on on every issue you had. So if you did, that's why the work was so good. So he they they couldn't, and that's what pissed them off. They're like, I'm not gonna win this. And off they go. You think, well, yeah, yeah, learn the work better, and you'll win the next one, maybe, or not even fight about it because it's uh we all are agreeing because we're all kind of in the same boat now.

SPEAKER_01

They want to dance with the date to brought you. Exactly. Yeah, I'm not giving this one up. No, dude, it's no good. She's she can't dance. No, uh uh. She got a club foot. You ain't dancing. You need to get a new dance partner. Yeah. Guys want to do Timeless Tactical Truth? More than you know, right.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, we wanted to do this 20 minutes ago, man.

SPEAKER_00

All

No Perfect Decisions On Scene

SPEAKER_00

right. There is no perfect fire ground decision. Every tactical action has an upside and a downside. Always pick the one with the best upside and the least worst downside. There are no pat sorry. Let me do that again. There are no perfect fire ground decisions. Every tactical action has an upside and a downside. Always pick the one with the best upside and the least worst downside. I've had last two classes talking about people who are overly analytical being ICs. And it's always been my experience if somebody's got that deep blue energy, as we call it, if you did the the uh spectrum chart or the um insight training or whatever they call it, uh those those deep blue people don't really do very well, especially in command training sometimes, because they want a black and white answer. They're not they're not looking for the best answer, they're looking for what is the absolutely right answer. And with what we do, oftentimes there isn't an absolutely right answer.

SPEAKER_01

I tell my grandson, I've told him this a hundred times now, is you know, he gets caught up in some decision. He's a high, he's a he's going into high school and he's trying to make good decisions. I said, buddy, make the best decision you can, because the last decision you made won't be the last decision you'll make. You make a decision with the information you have now, and you you do the best you can with it. And if it's wrong, then you can adjust. Or if it's slightly off, then you can adjust. And I think that's what that's talking about there. You know, that whole paralyz analysis. What is it?

SPEAKER_00

Analysis or paralysis by analysis.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that whole deal is just silly where people get caught up with that. And there are people that want a rule for every decision because they oh, I don't want to have to make that decision. Where's the you do there wasn't a rule for that? Those people drive me absolutely nuts. We use a little common sense. Uh I think that goes back to the the decision-making model is that standard conditions, standard outcome, or standard action, standard outcome. And within that is a standard decision before the standard action, right? You have to make we kind of left that you have the standard conditions, make a decision, and then you have a standard action, and then the standard outcome. And if it doesn't work, I think you just need to adjust. So that is funny because nothing's perfect. I I haven't seen any decision in life that's perfect, whether it's on the fire ground or in your nothing's perfect. There's uh there's always like there's levels of that.

SPEAKER_03

See, history is you get to rethink everything. So yeah, there's we respond to imperfect incident scenes. That's why they call us, is because something went wrong. So we show up to the scene where it's already out of control. Whether it's a medical call, a uh the uh the hazardous material release, a fire, whatever it is, is something went wrong, and so we show up to try to fix it. Well, like you say, uh within that strategic decision-making model, it's like the scientific method is okay, when I do this, this happens. Uh when I do this, that happens. So you got to figure out, see, and that's like having that's just becoming better in your job over time. You used to start as like an apprentice, and then you became a journeyman. A journeyman, and then you became an expert, then an artesian. So there was this artesian. Well, yeah, I mean, that's kind of what you did. And we were talking about buildings the other day and like rebuilding Notre Dame in France, the church that burned. Yeah. And and and just like stone, and and and those are dead trades. That doesn't exist anymore. You you you just the world's changed. There's not a big need for stone carvers today. Yeah, with AI. I mean, I don't know how AI carves stone, but that's out of the thing. Well, one of the best things about us is that they haven't refined the problems we go to anymore. They still suck, you know. I guess they put batteries in them. So that's the new thing, is you got to deal with batteries.

SPEAKER_01

Like you said, the building, all that has changed, but gravity's stayed the same. 100%. Yes, that's what you're trying to say.

SPEAKER_03

The human body, you still bleed to death. I mean, that's true.

SPEAKER_01

But you know, the the back end of that, if you read that one more time, then you have to think about okay, so what do I in my mind, and we don't want to go too deep here, but what am I making my original decision based on? Risk. Risk to life safety and risk to firefighters, right? And that's where that's the key missing from that statement. There is like my idea, my idea of the best decision is going to have the least amount of risk while I still accomplish in my job.

SPEAKER_03

That's why that's downside, upside. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Well, that's why you always say put the fire out. Yeah. That's the best thing you could do is put the fire out and you eliminate the hazard 99% of the time. Eliminate the hazard, you eliminate the risk. So that's kind of the back end of that to make that that I think about.

SPEAKER_03

You know, but there may be a few instances where you don't put the fire out. If it involves like flammable gases that are burning.

SPEAKER_01

Well, you put it out a different way or not. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00

You control it. The new thing Dan Madrukowski's going to talk to us about in the coming weeks is these car fires with lithium-ion batteries. He's saying let it burn. It's a defensive fire. It's a half hour. He says you let it burn for a half hour, or you're going to sit around for two or three hours with water, with contaminated water going into the sewer system and all the other problems. And it might rekindle once it's on the on the wrapper going to the yard. Exactly. So if we just but that's hard for us, right? No, not really. Well, I mean, not for you. It's me, but but for our industry. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Well, we want to penetrate it with something and squirt it. Well, we'll put it out now and we'll put foam in it and this and the other.

SPEAKER_01

No, it doesn't work. The last thing about that, so make sure we use this because I love it, is that so when we're talking about organizational decisions, what are your values? If you make decisions based on your values, if on a fire ground it's about risk, what are your values organizationally, right? So is your value to take care of your customer, to take care of your workers, right? To have your bosses treat your workers in a kind way. So when they go out and deliver the service, that's all the services they deliver, not just fire, but all the way through, they're going to be nice to the customer. So if you think about the upside down piece, you're thinking about okay, what are my values? And leaders that don't have strong values make decisions for other reasons. They make decisions because the city manager wants me to, or it's more popular to do this, or this is gonna cost me, or whatever. But if you have pretty strong value-based, hey, I'm gonna take care of the firefighters, I'm gonna take care of the customers. Every decision we make is gonna support firefire safety or customer service. That has always been my value. Stick with your value, make your decision, try to explain that to people the best you can who disagree with you. And when if they disagree with you, say, Well, that's my values. That's where I'm that's where I'm going. That's where I'm sticking with.

SPEAKER_03

Well, I think I don't know. I have been around for a while, but I'm guessing that all those cities that showed up like 20 years ago and said, We're not doing this on deck thing, are all doing this on deck thing. As they all wrap their heads around and thought, oh, this is a much better way to do this. Yeah. I do, you know, it's yeah. So I think I think best practices get instituted over a period of time. And and I think the majority likes them. Now, we said it earlier. If you work somewhere that you get to operate outside that fringe that may have a more impact on your ability to do that. Like lightweight roofs again and being a ladder person.

SPEAKER_01

But you know, that's you say it though. You said best practice. It is better for you as a boss and your organization to move to the best practice than it is to have a judge or a lawyer push you in that direction.

SPEAKER_03

Well, we started with the $31 million deal. Then you're like, No, that it and none of those people, when there's a bad outcome, and see this is another truth that happens always, is success has a thousand fathers while or failure is an orphan. So and you watch these critiques, they do of incidents that you would term as a failure, and it's all trying to justify what happened. I mean, there's the we uh there's some of those on YouTube that you can watch all day long that have been made here in the recent thing, and that that that is a feel-good critique. This is to help you recover from feeling bad. This has nothing to do with what actually happened at the scene. See, and as a leader of a fire department, it's like, no, we got to get ready for the next call. And and so if my next call is to that same incident, we're not gonna do it that way that caused the bad outcome. Yeah, maybe we're gonna listen to Shane Rae and we're gonna hook up and pump up for a little bit and see how what kind of effect that has. See, now I'm using best practices, and I'm gonna have the bet, they're the best practices because they have the best outcomes.

SPEAKER_02

And and we want to argue, no, I'm Chuck Norris, and I can I can shortcut your outcome, and I can have a better outcome, and I'm gonna have bigger balls than you ever did. I'm thinking, okay.

SPEAKER_03

You Chuck Norris'd it. Yeah, well, Chuck Norris is dead now. Right now, yeah. You know, and Liza Minelli's still alive. So who's stronger? Yeah, incredible. Yeah. And I'm yeah, exactly. All right.

Best Practices Before Lawyers

SPEAKER_00

That's a good place to leave it, guys. Thanks for uh listening to the V Shifter Podcast, Terry and Nick. Thanks for being here. We'll talk to you next time. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Bye bye.