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Leadership Conversations @ The Kitchen Table
Ep. 77: Phil Jose, Deputy Chief (ret.) - Curiosity
01:58:16
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- [00:02]
A
The reality is that the ones who are not curious, it's going to be tough. But if, if, if you are listening to this, you know, wait a minute. I'm not demonstrating enough curiosity. Okay, start looking it up, man. There's. Go to the American Psychological association and read about curiosity. Find books about curiosity. Find books about how to ask good questions. And, and start creating a mindset that says, okay, I need to. I. Whatever it is, I need to know more about it. If you start doing that, you can definitely change your mindset. The First Responder Liaison Network is proud to present to you the Kitchen Table podcast. Join us as we explore leadership from perspectives around the globe. From firefighters to fire Chiefs, civilians to CEOs, our conversations have one simple goal. Build more leaders.
- [01:14]
B
Good afternoon and thanks for tuning in to the Kitchen Table. Before we begin today's episode, we want to take a moment to dedicate not only today's show, but the Kitchen Table Podcast to a friend, mentor, and leader, Deputy Fire Chief Bill Mack. Bill co founded this podcast three years ago. He impacted countless lives in the fire service and beyond, shaping us through his wisdom, humility, and example. Bill often reminded us to live a life of significance, not success. His legacy is one of service, leadership, and a genuine care for others. Bill also embodied the belief that true leaders plant trees that they will never sit in the shade of. His influence will continue to grow and inspire long after his time with us. This episode and podcast is for you, Billy. Thank you and I love you, brother. On the show today, we welcome Deputy Chief Phil Jost, and the leadership topic is curiosity. Phil Jost is a retired deputy chief from the Seattle Fire Department. He is an author of books, articles, and videos. He hosts a YouTube channel on the art of reading smoke. He also teaches the art of reading smoke and tactical decision making across the country and internationally. Good afternoon, Chief. How are you?
- [02:34]
A
I'm good, Berlin. How are you?
- [02:36]
B
I'm doing well. So first and foremost, thanks for being a guest today here. Chief, you were leadership challenge, as I mentioned off the off recording here by a few people, most recently one of them with Rob Fisher, who obviously you know very well. So it is a pleasure to have you on as we're going to unpack this concept, if you will, on something that we haven't talked much about here on this podcast yet is curiosity. So I'm very ecstatic to start, you know, diving into what that means to you, Chief, and how it relates to leadership. But before we begin, would you mind sharing a little bit about Bill? Jokes, you know, maybe career Hobbies, family, and maybe what you're doing now.
- [03:11]
A
Yeah, So I did 30. I did. I enjoyed 30 years with the Seattle Fire Department. I want, don't want it to sound like I was in prison. I did 30 years. No, no, I, I enjoyed every minute of that for sure. And then before that, I was a volunteer and a resident. I lived in a fire station for three years, basically full time while I was going to school and prior to being married and stuff, I'm. My wife and I have been married 35 years, have two kids, one grandkid. That's. We just relocated from the southeast Idaho to. We're actually over in Kitsap county and that's where my daughter and my grandson live. We spent a lot of time with them and we travel a fair amount. We. I'm an avid pickleball player. I love snowboarding, stand up paddleboarding. That's kind of our, our mainstay. I do teach still. So most of your audience, I think, would probably know who Dave Dodson is. And he created the Art of Reading Smoke and taught it a long, long time. I certainly took it from him a bunch of times. He wanted to be done teaching on the road. And as I approached retirement, he asked me if I would take over teaching that curriculum. So I'm teaching that and then I have a tactical decision making curriculum which is, is and has been a big passion of mine for a long time as a result of getting promoted to lieutenant and not really, at least at the time, there was no academy or anything like that. So you really just were sort of on your own. And so I started to get again to how to make decisions, decision making theory. And then that translated over to decision making training because I've just always been a trainer. My mom was a teacher. I was teaching swimming lessons when I was like 16, 17 years old. So I've always sort of had that bug. And so once I got super interested in decision making, it was really just a natural extension to start. Not just not didn't start teaching decision making right away. Started just experimenting with how to, how to get people to talk about how they're making decisions, why they're making decisions and those sorts of things. That led me kind of to our topic, which is curiosity, but also helped me develop a pretty broad skill set in designing and delivering tactical decision making scenarios that result in professional collegial introspection and team building and things like that that at least I, I think are very valuable. And the organizations I've had the opportunity to work with seem to find A valuable too. I, I, I typically go someplace for, for reading, smoke and then they go, hey, how about this decision making thing? And then they bring me back for that and then they go, hey, can you come do that again? So, um, it's a lot of fun. Keeps me engaged. I've got projects working in that respect. For example, myself and a guy named Ted Nee, who's a retired deputy chief, I believe, out of Albuquerque. He and I are developing some, some scenarios for fireengineering.com there's a couple that are up on the website already and there's more in the hopper there. I would consider the current ones to be beta versions. They're still, I think they're still good training for the individual person who goes through. They'll get better as we figure out how to provide some feedback or some mentoring as part of that process. But a lot of these things are especially something like that ends up being a lot more complicated than I would have thought on the logistics side of the house. The scenario design and that stuff is something that both Ted and I are pretty experienced at. But translating that to sort of a random participant operating by themselves through the Internet is, it's been challenging, but I know we're going to get there. Those scenarios are out there, they get better with each iteration and hopefully eventually there'll be a whole library of those for people to access. And if you don't have, if you don't have, can't afford, don't have access to taxable trading, they would be a, you know, essentially a free tool online that people could use to develop their own tactical skills. I can't guarantee they'll get a lot better, but I would be hard pressed to say they wouldn't get at least a little better by doing some practice.
- [07:49]
B
What is that? So what's that called? So the listeners can eventually find that.
- [07:54]
A
Yeah, so they're called tactical decision games. You'll fire find them on fireengineering.com Like I said, there's two that are out there now. The third one should be within the next week or so. Oh, wow. Eventually we'll get on an active schedule. Right. So it'll be like every, every other Wednesday or every Wednesday or whatever that is that'll eventually become solidified. Nice. And so you. So a tactical decision game. It's an online version of a tactical decision game. And a tactical decision game is essentially not essentially. I adopted it, adapted it from a Marine Corps, retired Marine Corps gentleman. His name is John Schmidt and he wrote tactical decision games for a Magazine called the Marine Corps Gazette, which gets published monthly. They started publishing these things and then they put them out there. Marines could write into the Gazette their solutions to the problem, and then they would publish those the next, next month. It's not just the solution, it's. It's outlining why, why your solution is good, what are the strengths of your solution, how did you come to it, what you're thinking about the mission or the rules of engagement or whatever. So you just take that and essentially there's a fair amount of. There's some expertise that goes into the creation, but it's essentially taking an individual or say a group of company officers, dispatching them to an incident, giving them the companies and the address and all the things. You're trying to give them the information. You don't want to give them all the information because there's always some uncertainty. Right. But you want to try to give them the information that they have they would normally have. And then you put them in a decision point for, for company officers that would be arriving at an event first in, have them give their size up, assign their company, make their next two company assignments on the radio so they can practice that transferring, you know, tactical thinking into verbal orders. And then you would you put that, essentially you take that plan and put it on a whiteboard is really a very efficient way to do this. Low cost, highly repeatable. Anyway, you put it on the whiteboard, you know, you just draw little rectangles for engines, trucks, and draw a building and, you know, take a blue line and, and that's where the hose line goes. And then you're essentially from there, you're into the topic that we've been talking about today from the facilitator's perspective is your. You want to get to the why they did these things, what were they thinking? What was important to them? What, what are their three, you know, what are their three most important. Like in the, in, if you're doing chief officers, it's the, the questions actually just change a little bit. The scenarios don't even have to change very much. But, you know, for. At the company officer level, you're asking what size hand line? Why are you putting that size hand line in that place? What are the expected challenges that you're going to have? And the key there that I missed is that you have one individual. So you tell all the individuals to create their plan, and then you just pick one individual and have them do the thing, talk on the radio, do that thing. And then you put their plan essentially you put the plan on the board, you write it up on the whiteboard, and then everybody discusses that plan, they analyze it for strengths and weaknesses. How will you know it's working? What will it sound like on the radio? Right. You sort of just go through this process of asking open ended questions, trying to leverage one answer into another question. Or when you have it really working well, the participants start asking each other questions. And then when that discussion starts to sort of top out and fall off the backside, you just pick another student and have them start right from the very beginning. And inevitably you're going to get a different plan, at least some variation. And so it's through that process that it's not really about whether any individual decision is right wrong. What it is about is understanding the thinking behind the decisions, how people are making those decisions, what are the critical factors that they're seeing in the building or the fire behavior. I mean, you can use it for all sorts of things. And I could probably talk about that particular topic for the whole hour, but it really feeds into this idea that the person doing that, the person leading that session, if we're talking about leadership, their base perspective has to be curiosity and not judgment. Yes.
- [12:54]
B
Oh, and we're going to talk a lot about that. That's, that's great. One thing I want to ask on that is for the technical decision making games on fire engineering is, are they, are there answers to the scenarios or is there feedback? Or is this simply a scenario base? You have your group of individuals and then you, you know, perform the simulation together and do the Q and A and you know, and have that discussion. Or is there feedback from the game itself that tells you you should have done this, should have done this. This was ideal. This was not ideal.
- [13:25]
A
Yeah. So right now there's no feedback mechanism. And so I would offer that. So you can do it individually or you could do it with the team. Right. So you click your way through. You see, you see the, you know, you know, engine one, engine one, engine two and ladder three are coming you. Before you even enter the sim, you, you pick whether you're an agency that has two people on a company, three people on a company, or four people on a company company. And that's going to change the tactics that you have just by the nature of how much work you can get done with four instead of three or two. Right. Anyway, so it changes the direction that the scenario goes based on the staffing that's available. Anyway, so you answer the questions and you could answer them as a group. But you essentially type in. You're going to type in your radio report. You're going to type in, got it? And it tells you to do it. Like when you give orders to the other companies, the prompt in there says, type it in as if you were talking on the radio.
- [14:32]
B
Okay.
- [14:33]
A
So we're trying to process. Yes. In person. Of course, we could actually have you just say it on the radio. Right. Have a block of water, even just simulate that you're talking on the radio. And there is a whole skill set of transferring your tactical decision into a concise, accurate order that's easily understood. And more important than easily understood is not misunderstood.
- [15:06]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
- [15:07]
A
Right. Like in a session, somebody. If somebody gives an order and I go, oh, that's interesting. It doesn't seem very clear to me. Yeah. I'll just take another participant. Say, okay, you're the. So you. Somebody says, Engine 2, do X, Y, Z. You know, do XYZ. Okay. And then Engine 2 answers, okay, do XYZ. Now what I'll do, especially if it's from the same agency, is I'll just ask another officer. Say, okay, you're the officer on engine two. Based on that order, tell me what you're going to do.
- [15:38]
B
Okay.
- [15:39]
A
Right. And we walk through. You know, love it. The. The. The tactical task. Right. We just went from strategic to tactical. Now we're going from task, task. And what are you actually going to do? And then. Okay, now back to the first person. Is that what you wanted them to do? Yeah.
- [15:54]
B
Okay. I like this. I like this because.
- [15:58]
A
Because it may be. I mean, it may be the end very often is, if not exactly. Right. It's. It's close enough to be effective, which is really all we need. We need it.
- [16:08]
B
Yes.
- [16:08]
A
Close enough to be effective. Right. We. Perfection is not. Firefighting is not perfection. Right. We're not finished. Carpenters working. Right. With miter cuts to the 64th of an inch. Right. We're a thumb and a sledgehammer and smash it, right?
- [16:23]
B
Yes, yes.
- [16:24]
A
But there's. There are times when it's, you know, like, it's pretty clear that what person B decided to do was not what person A intended.
- [16:34]
B
Exactly.
- [16:36]
A
Exactly. And so that. That would demonstrate, especially if you're within an organization, that would demonstrate that we don't have a common understanding of our language. I mean, it could be just the individual made a, you know, was inexperienced at giving radio comps. That's one choice. Yep. Another choice is that we don't have a common language. We think we have a common language. But we don't. Right. So all of these are not things we're going to fix in the scenario itself. Right. But there are ways that we can. Okay, okay, here's a training opportunity.
- [17:09]
B
Yes.
- [17:10]
A
Here's. Here's something that we can work on either within our battalion or within our company or even department wide to say, let's get our language so that when I say A, you hear A and you do A.
- [17:28]
B
Yes.
- [17:28]
A
And. And we don't have any variability. And I. And then I can say A as shortly as possible. Right. Clear, concise. Now there's some thinking out there. It's a whole different way of thinking about borders on the fire ground is to, is to make them thorough. And I'm just not, I'm not of that mindset. I want them to be. I think brevity is essential and I think it's a skill set that could be developed and that with appropriate training and focus on that training and some willingness to adapt the language of our fire ground, the, the best order is of course, no order. Right. Still, that's. That comes from. I'll steal that from Elon Musk. Right. When he's building cards. He says the best part is no part. Right. So that's where SOGs come in. But they're not perfect. And SOGs are rife with trouble. If you get beyond the first couple of assignments, the, the further you get into any individual plan, the further. The, the more deviations there are and the further their deviation from the. From what's written becomes. Yes, agreed.
- [18:53]
B
Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give it a shot once we, when we log off here. And is this some of it available right now?
- [18:59]
A
Yeah, there's two scenarios. There is two scenarios.
- [19:01]
B
Got it.
- [19:01]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [19:02]
B
Okay.
- [19:02]
A
And the third one. The third one should be coming, I'm hoping by next Wednesday.
- [19:07]
B
Awesome.
- [19:08]
A
Again, that's. I don't control the logistics of that. Yeah, yeah, but we'll eventually get on a regular calendar schedule that says, you know, the next one will come, you know, on this date or it'll drop on that date or whatever. And I'm assuming with fire engineering at some point once we. But there's no feedback mechanism.
- [19:27]
B
Right, right, right.
- [19:28]
A
That was the question. And I don't, don't think I thoroughly answered that, but.
- [19:31]
B
Nope, I understand what you mean.
- [19:32]
A
I think there's value to the training.
- [19:34]
B
There is.
- [19:34]
A
Very. Even if you just self reflect afterwards. Yes. Self reflection is always the first step to change is understanding what you're doing, how you're doing it, why you're doing it now. Feedback and mentoring and having somebody to assist with that or a group is definitely better. It's proven more effective. But self reflection does add value.
- [19:59]
B
Absolutely. And there's going to be plenty of self reflection, I'm certain, obviously, in these tactical decision decision games. But also if, you know, at the crew level, you invite some of the battalion together. And so I'm going to check this out. Back on shift tomorrow, I'm going to check some of this out. I'm going to have others sit in the room with me. We're going to go through some of this and we're going to, we're going to start the conversation. So it's great. I'm excited and thank you for the additional resource there, Chief.
- [20:22]
A
When we're done, I'll send you an exercise.
- [20:23]
B
Please, please do, please do. And I will be here. I've got most of the morning off, so this is going to be. And we started 30 minutes early, so I have plenty of time. So going further into this, before we get into curiosity, this, this goes right into kind of what you're talking about. As we talk about decision making, everybody talk about curiosities. We talk about just kind of, kind of learning and teaching and all the above. I want to go talk about this, this course that you teach. We mentioned the Art of Reading Smoke, and we also mentioned the tactical decision making, the two courses that you teach. But what we didn't talk about was the instructional craftsmanship, the building your expertise and ability at the front of the room. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, Chief, this is a course that has to do with teaching your instructors or ensuring that your instructors are, are, have the ability or have you are equipped to become good instructors at the front of the room. Because, as you know, I'm sure just as just well as I, even more so that the effectiveness of the instructor is one of the most important things.
- [21:24]
A
Right.
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B
A lot of people will say, you know, if a new recruit, a firefighter or someone's not learning it, it's on them. But there's an element of, is the instructor even efficient or effective? So can you talk about this instructional, instructional craftsmanship course, what it is? Because I'm intrigued.
- [21:43]
A
Yeah. So it's, and I do teach it occasionally. There's not, there's not the, the, the broad market for it because it's designed for instructors. Right. So it's, it's designed to. Typically when I teach it, there's like, there's states that have a Semiannual instructor development conference. Right. So if you're a firefighter or instructor one, instructor two in that state and you be continuing at hours, you know, four hours every two years or some version of that, then this would be the type of thing where they, their conference, I go there and teach the session. And so it's about becoming a better instructor. And it does focus a lot on the topic of curiosity and building questions into your delivery style. And so most training, and not just most fire service training but most training in school starting very, very early is lecture based. Right. I'm, I'm, if I'm the teacher, I'm the knowledge giver, you're the knowledge recipient. And some of that is changing a little bit. But it, it's the most common method is the lecture method and the least effective method is the lecture method. And so there has been some moves to start to sort of flip that classroom around and have people do work and then come into the room. And this is particularly an online, online training, online courses and development at college stuff where when we get, when we come to the room, what we're going to talk about is the ideas that are encased in the chapter or whatever we're studying right now. We're going to, we're going to give our opinions about the ideas, we're going to ponder on the ideas. We're going to have essentially a guided discussion about the idea itself. And I think that is a practice that like I've demonstrated that we're going to, we do that, I do that in the tactical decision games. So it's essentially how to, how to use that same process in virtually anything that you teach. There's opportunity for you to ask questions and there's sort of a key factor here. A lot of instructors will say, oh, I ask a lot of questions, yeah, but they, they ask a lot of rhetorical questions. And so what you have to learn is that there's questioning strategies. You know, the most simple version being ask an open ended question. Not a yes or no question, right? Not a question that has a definitive answer. But you have to understand there's a process. So a student, right, so when a student hears a question, there's a process that their mind goes through before they indicate that they're ready to make, to give an answer. So they have to listen to your question, they have to decode it and then understand it in their own language. Then they have to balance it against their knowledge base, formulate an answer, they self test the answer just to make sure that they that they think it's correct before they start talking, or at least you hope they do, right? Then they evaluate the room and the psychological safety. Do, even if they have what they think is a good answer, are they willing to indicate that they're going to put, put themselves out there? Right. You have to be vulnerable when you do that. You expose yourself to the group. Then they indicate that they're, then that's when they indicate that they're going, that they're willing to answer the question. And so that process takes seconds, even for simple questions. But if you get into, if you ask a complicated question, right, or not even the question be simple, but the answer is going to be complicated, or it stretches the limits of knowledge that the person has readily at hand. So if it's something new that they're learning or it's a new, newer idea that they're just coming to terms with, then it just takes them longer to sort of get their arms around it, pull it in tight, you know, arrange it, make sure it's right, and then be willing to offer it to the group. And so most instructors are very uncomfortable with wait time. And wait time is essential to allow that process to occur. And so you're talking about minimum two seconds. And an instructor really should be willing to wait. You start getting to 8, 10 seconds, then what you have to do as an instructor is realize that there's two possibilities. One is that you didn't ask a very good question, right? So people don't, they can't formulate a good answer that they're willing to offer to the group or occasionally. And this doesn't happen very often, but I do occasionally run into fire department cultures when I'm teaching that have, there's. Nobody's going to talk, nobody's going to talk. And those, those groups, typically it takes me like the last one that I had like that I had four hour sessions. By the middle of hour three, I had them talking. But when I first started to try to get them to engage, it just was silence. I mean, dead, dead silence in the room, right? It's like, and I'm pretty good at asking questions, but even I, the first thing I think is like that, how did I phrase that question? And that's what I'm. If nobody's answering within a few seconds, I start processing. How do I, how do I ask that question in a different way to elicit an answer? Because I'm not, I don't have to think about what they're, I don't have to listen actively to an answer because there, there is no answer coming. Yeah, right. So I can start to re, either reformulate the question or go, okay, I'm going to have to move on in. I'm going to have to move on to something else and come at this engagement because you're, what you're seeking is engagement with material. And so I'm going to have to build. I have to build the. I can't just lever a bridge. I don't, there's not a bridge there that I can just pull a lever and comes down and we all start talking. This particular group doesn't even have a bridge. So I have to build a bridge, then I have to lay it across, then I have to lead them across. And then eventually we'll get over there to where we're having, you know, we're having active engagement. We have questions being asked and answered. We have all those sorts of things. But usually it's not the culture of the agency that's sort of an outlier, it's the ability of the instructor to begin with questions that generate that sort of thinking and engagement early. Because if you, if the first 10 questions that you ask as an instructor, you immediately provide the answer, you are guaranteeing that your students are not going to answer any of your questions the rest of the time that you're in there. Because you've already shown them that you're not asking them real questions, you're just asking them rhetorical questions. You don't expect them to answer it, so why should they expect to answer it? So this is this.
- [28:59]
B
No, complete, this is, this is fascinating to me. So really I have a two part question here. One's a question, one's really a thought. The question is, does this course, this instructional craftsmanship course, building out your, your expertise and ability at the front of the room, teach these concepts? And now here's the thought. Because you talked about psychological safety, talk about vulnerability, we do lecture, right? Inherently, you know, firefighters are teachers, right? Firefighters become mentors. You know, we're not professional teachers, right. We didn't go to school to be teachers. But at some point in our careers, especially if you climb the ranks, you find yourself in rooms where you're instructing, whether you're starting at academy teaching, the crew level teaching, you know, company level trainings, battalion level trainings, whatever. But some of these things that you're talking about, like asking open ended questions, not asking rhetorical questions. You talked about active engagement. We aren't taught that, right. Like when we're in the fire academy, we're not taught, you know, how to be instructors. We're there to learn. We're learners. At that point, when you become a company officer or even becoming a training officer, we're not necessarily going through the course of instructional craftsmanship or we're not going through a development course to make sure we are being trained to become effective instructors, even though we know for the next two to three or four years, however long an assignment is, we're not getting taught to become good instructors. So I guess the question is, this course that you teach, I believe it's. It should be like a requirement. We'll say, I know we could talk about instructor one, instructor two, on the relevancy or the. Not so much. But it is a curriculum. It's providing some resource to new instructors in the fire service. But how are we going. How do we get here, Chief? Obviously you. You go around and teach this, but let's say at the Seattle Fire Department, for example, did you. Was this teaching your. Your instructors, your upcoming instructors, these philosophies and these methods? Was this a part of it? If so, how did you do it? And if not, how do we get fire departments to prioritize instructional development to our instructors?
- [31:01]
A
So, yes, on the Seattle Fire Department, it was long, low, the long road. And that's not uncommon in large organizations. Small organizations can have the same troubles, but large organizations, by their nature, Light speed changes take five years. Resisted changes take decades. Now that can change depending on the leadership, but you know, that's. It's. Or if you can change the culture. So we were successful. And not just me, but other people too. But I definitely. I definitely was there and part of it. And so we, what we. We started to just do incident debriefs, but not at incidents, but at training exercises. Started creating some questions, started asking the questions, you know, like really starting from scratch of figuring out what question, you know, reading about what questioning strategies are, what makes good questions. I mean, I've got. I got probably like, I got my. My libraries right over there. Yeah. And I probably have. I've been at least a dozen books in there about questioning strategies and how to ask why and what's your questioning strategies work.
- [32:27]
B
What's the best one? What's the best book out of those?
- [32:29]
A
I would. I would say probably the most useful one is Tell. Telling's not training.
- [32:37]
B
I think telling that training. There you go.
- [32:38]
A
Telling is not training or very, very close to that. That. That would probably on Google. That would probably get you close enough to that budget. And I certainly Believe in the value of just like you. We talked about feedback on the tactics. Like let's say that you wanted to start doing a questions based approach. Right. And let me just back up one more step. There are, there are times when it's not appropriate teaching somebody to put up a ladder. Not appropriate. Right. Teach somebody stretch a hose. Not appropriate. Now that doesn't mean that if one of your students is having trouble that you don't have responsibility to understand. Maybe the way you did the demo was not right. Maybe they were in the wrong position. Like even teaching knots. Like, like when the first time I started teaching dots when I was recruiting instructor, it's like, oh, I have to learn how to tie knots left handed. Like, like who? Like, nobody ever said, hey, before you become an instructor, learn to tie a square knot left handed and right handed or bowling right. Because you're showing it. And it's like, you know, a left handed, like somebody who's a rigid left hand thinker is going to struggle to watch what you do and then be able to replicate it. And you're going to struggle when they're doing it to be able to identify how they're doing it wrong so that you can offer proper correction. That's just a very like. And you have to accept the responsibility. Like you talked about, you have to accept this responsibility that, you know, I've taught, I taught recruit school. I was recruit school captain, I was a deputy chief of recruit school. And I've seen a lot of instructors come and go through the Seattle recruit school. Right. Lots of really excellent instructors, names like Aaron Fields and Matt Lewon, stuff that I'm sure that you know and that your audience knows. Like those, those I learned a ton. Like, I love watching Aaron teach because I just learned so much. Not just about how hose moves, but how to teach. Yes. He's just such a great instructor, you know, and I watch people to learn how to instruct. But I've also had instructors both that were my peers and that were working for me when I was a deputy chief that whoever the mindset, like, look, man, I'm going to show you and I'm going to give you an opportunity to practice and you either do it or don't do it. And that's not on me. Yep. And that's just not, that's not a philosophy that I can accept or tolerate. Right. You know, it's, it's difficult to weed out in the moment just because, you know, you have somebody who's assigned to be an Instructor for this 16 half week recruit academy, and they may or may not have done it voluntarily and all those sorts of things. Right. So there's these, these pressures, people who are having difficulties, you know, I could, I can move them from group to group in order to try to get them matched up with somebody who is more in tune to their responsibility as an instructor and move to the other group, people who are rapidly rapid developers of skills. Right. So we can, you know, mitigate the damage, but you can't necessarily prevent it from occurring. Right. And so, but there are times when it's appropriate, times when it's not to do this. Where, where I, where I do think it's valuable for, even at the recruit level is you have a fire, you have a fire behavior lecture, you do a burn to learn. Now you're doing fire attack. And so, no, but this is, it's.
- [36:12]
B
Fascinating because I was a training officer twice, two different times in my career, but I remember and I didn't even know this at the time. I reflected on this as we talked about reflection. I reflected on this later on in my career that when I became a training officer, it wasn't due to my, my abilities to teach.
- [36:31]
A
Right.
- [36:31]
B
I interviewed for the position. I interviewed well, based on maybe my previous experience, maybe based on who else I was interviewing up against, whatever it may be. But it had little to none to do with my ability to become a good instructor, my ability to lecture well, my ability to ensure that I engage my audience, whatever, none of that. But the question is, and what I'm always fascinated about is are we going to get there one day to where we'll just say training officer. It doesn't have to be training officers because company officers, as you know, chief, are training officers also. Right. We're responsible for the training of ourselves, our crews, sometimes other crews, if you're, especially if you're a senior officer, the battalion, like we are responsible for training every day, but nowhere along the lines in our development and our careers did we ensure that we are effective at instruction. And I only, you know, see the day where instructional development is requirements. We'll say, I know requirements, a tough word in the fire service, but, you know, we, we need to be good, effective instructors. And I love the quote that you said about, he said, oh, telling is not training. I know John Wooden had. The quote from his book is like, you didn't teach anything as an instructor unless your students learned. And it's such a good philosophy because we're not up here. The, the, the audience is. The priority is them learning. The priority isn't the instructor teaching, but sometimes we kind of either get that backwards or we just don't. We don't comprehend that. It's like, if you don't get it, we're moving on. Sorry. And it's like, well, if half the group didn't get it, maybe we should stay right where we're at and continue until a group gets it. So I guess it's a rhetorical question, because it's not even a question, it's just a thought because like I said, I just want to start off with this and I want to find out, are you teaching this instructional craftsmanship course up here in the Pacific Northwest anytime soon?
- [38:11]
A
That's right.
- [38:12]
B
Jump right to it.
- [38:13]
A
No, no, like I said, it's. It's typically, it's at conferences and things like that where there's enough instructors. Right. So there's an agency or a group or whatever that has enough instructors that they're interested in becoming better instructors. And so there's a few things there that are push and pull. Right. If we wanted to influence the organization, in my mind, the stronger way long term is to just create a culture where learning and teaching is valued across the organization and it becomes an organizational norm to be able to be introspective and to help transfer ideas and to do that in a way that's both professional and effective. And whether that, whether you're working with colleagues at the same level, whether you're transferring information up or transferring information down, and I'm talking about the rank of up and down. Right. Or it can be the skill level too. Right. The goal of the organization is to develop a learning and teaching culture because individually people have it and people seek it out and to different levels. I mean, I know a lot of people who were you who wanted to be and are great instructors at manipulative skills, but have no interest in teaching in a classroom or classroom activity and then vice versa. And so it's, you don't have to establish a broad brush, but there are plenty of people, and this is unfortunate, who, who look to get opportunities to be the trainer because it's overtime, because it's advantageous for promotion, because it's, it's. There's some other incentive that isn't student related. Yes, right. And you're never going to eliminate that. I mean, you know, within any individual organization. But what, what you can do is make it so that the organization as a group, the organization recognizes what's happening. And either, you know, because of their learning, mentoring, teaching culture, they're able to get this person to understand that, like, hey, that that's not an effective way to behave here and that's not going to result in promotion here and that's not going to result in opportunity here. But that's difficult across an organization. And the bigger the organization is, the easier it is to, you know, be outside of that, outside of those expectations without having to pay the price. There are plenty of organizations where all of those opportunities are determined primarily based on seniority. Right. And not competence. And so those, but those are all fire service challenges and those are all challenges that agencies have in other places. You know, influencing the organization long term would be the most effective way outside of that, other than pursuing this as an individual goal or with a cadre of like minded professionals who are invested in themselves and each other to become better instructors, to develop, develop better curriculum, to more accurately transfer knowledge from the classroom to the fire ground or from the training ground to the fire ground or from the classroom to the training ground to the fire ground. Right there. You know, these are skill sets and the more you develop them, the better you get. Right? That's one. And you know, you get enough experience, you start having blind spots that somebody has to point out to you like, like the process really never ending. But if you're, if you want to pursue it, I think you definitely can pursue it as an individual. And if you can find a group of like minded people, which I was lucky enough to have experience in the past and experience now. Right. I mean I, when I have these projects like the one I'm working with, fire engineering, I mean I, I'm working with a guy, deputy chief from Albuquerque. He's probably the leading, the world's leading expert in creating simulations with Fire Studio. He and I see very clearly the vision direction we want to go. We, you know, we divided the labor and we're relying on experts who know how to use the Internet, like how to write in WordPress and use AI to create prompts and do some of those things. Now I'm learning some of those things. I'm learning tools to use AI for. And I think at least my take would be if you're not using some of those tools right now, you're falling behind.
- [43:03]
B
You're behind. Yep, I agree.
- [43:05]
A
Particularly, you know, so back it up. Right. To, to sort of encapsulate it, like, yeah, as an individual, you can get better. You can get better. You can get better by understanding and identifying your weaknesses, finding a group of people that help you work on those, creating opportunities to practice, to get feedback, both direct feedback and self reflection and make it better next time. But all the way back in the beginning, when someone takes their instructor one, there should be no. I mean, I wrote instructor one book, right. There should be no. Let's not confuse what you can learn from the book with what you're going to learn by being in front of the class. Yes. That the, the book and the standard, and I'm really familiar with the standard, it should be focused on getting you the minimum amount of competence you need to step foot in front of a training group the first time and then you will start to learn how to be a teacher. Like you can have all the theory. I mean, that's why even, even professional teaching organizations that bring in people who have bachelor's and master's degrees in education do not take them from being a student in a classroom and stick them being the teacher in a classroom without a feedback mentoring process. Because no matter, you can have, you know, eight years of theory in the classroom, but you're going to learn some lessons when you start applying it.
- [44:43]
B
Yes, yes.
- [44:44]
A
And those lessons are incredibly valuable, necessary and. Yeah. And Absolutely. And the mistakes, like you're, you're gonna make plenty of mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. Like, like, you know, and there's, there's tools and tricks to get out of those things. But you first, first you gotta start making mistakes.
- [45:05]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
- [45:06]
A
You gotta make mistakes and go, oh, now I have to. I mean it wasn't that long ago that I had to, that I made egregious errors and I had to make the effort to seek the person out, get a hold of their contact information, call them on the phone and directly apologize. Right. And I've got 30 plus years working on this skill set. But at the moment I just was, I was, I just. Yeah, I didn't get it right. And I owed them. I owed them an apology. Right. Yeah. And it wasn't even something really that I did. Another person in the class misbehaved and I didn't handle it correctly until you've had that happen. I mean, I've had it happen. I mean, really egregious mistakes in all my years of teaching or egregious misbehavior five or six times and why I didn't recognize it this time and why did I didn't handle it this time? Because I have very little experience. Sure. I have five or six episodes to have learned and I just didn't learn effectively. Now the next time it happens, I, I bet I, I bet I get it much closer to right than the last time it happened.
- [46:23]
B
Exactly.
- [46:23]
A
Yeah. And those are, those are errors that, that a beginning instructor doesn't even see.
- [46:30]
B
Doesn't even see yet. Correct. Correct. And then. So yeah, and that's where that, you know, becoming an instructor again to just to piggyback back even further on it is learning to become an instructor is one thing, right? And then obviously applying you as an instructor because that continuous learning of instruction because say you go through, like you said, you know, a curriculum that teaches you how to teach, but you haven't applied anything yet. So there's another level of I'm still learning. And not until you've had that theory and lecture and you know, that formal education, not until you applied it, failed along the way, gained some experience and then years down the road after having applied all that theory are you then becoming, you know, an instructor. Because simply, I've always said just, just because you are a training officer doesn't mean you're a good instructor. Just because your instructor doesn't mean you're effective. Right? So there's these levels of being an effective instructor that, that we have to obtain because just being in the spot doesn't make you effective, more or less.
- [47:31]
A
Correct. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And especially if you don't, you have to internalize the duty that you have to your students. And your duty is to, is to effectively transfer whatever information is mandated or, or directed or however you receive that if your duty is to effectively transfer that to the student. You know, the, the worst case scenario, right. You know, and I've been through it, is to. Is to have to separate somebody from the service because the instructor was not very good. Right. It wasn't even students fault. Right. I mean they, you know, I mean that's, I mean in Seattle system, right. I mean the, this, the. It's. The 16 weeks keeps on moving. There is no holding it up, there is no stopping it from progressing. It just. And there's a certain degree that you need of one of the skill sets that I would offer that recruits in that system have to have is the ability to absorb information relatively quickly, adapt to the situation and move forward. And I think that is a skill set that serves the citizens well. Right. And if you're too slow picking things up, then you're probably not right. The right fit for the organization. And that's harsh, but I believe it's true. Now if we do the right job of filtering the people before they get to the academy, then we would not have separations. But it's hard, it's hard to filter people.
- [49:08]
B
It is hard to filter people. And then, and then also, just because I was the instructor and I always questioned my ability to instruct is it's kind of both. Because it is exactly what you're saying is having the individuals. Because to filter an individual at the hiring process, to be able to understand or comprehend that this individual can learn quickly, can adapt under pressure and perform under pressure, is obviously tough to filter in an interview process. But then also if we don't have an environment at the recruit academy, that's just one example of effective instructors. Like, it's almost like this. There's this two sided, which one is less effective, you know which one is. And it's both. Right. Because you do have to have both. And so if you have effect a very highly effective instructor cadre, we'll say, or curriculum that prepared your cadre to effectively teach and then you also have a great filtering process in your hiring process, then that would obviously be the ideal situation. But you know, what, what, what's first or what, what is, you know, which part of that equation is, is teetered one way or the other, you know.
- [50:08]
A
Yeah. And it's something that I think agencies underestimate. If you're hiring people and putting them through the, through an academy and not just, I mean there are plenty of places that they hire people who have already been through academies. There's very low expectations of their transition time and they're essentially, when they're hired, they're basically permanent members of the organization unless they do something egregious off shift. Right, but if you're hiring people and training, if you're hiring civilians and training them to be firefighters or a very closed version of that, I think organizations underestimate the cost if that person is not successful. And instead of taking the cost of having one or two or three people out of an academy of 30, if you're, if you have 10% failure rate, the cost of that is, is not actually just what it costs to get that recruit in the recruit school. It's the cost of overtime for that position from the end of that recruit school till the end of the next recruit school. Right, agreed. And so you start adding that up and you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars of the citizens money that we would probably be better off to go. Okay, wait a minute, could we spend another week or two getting these instructors prepared, making sure the curriculum's tight? Like, I mean you get the instructors into the academy an extra two weeks early. You're only talking about tens of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars. But because it's on the front end. Administrators often miss that or that the department culture is not in line with that. But when you start looking at the actual numbers, especially what, you know, I mean, I did budgets for the person recruit classes. I mean, I can't remember what our lock budget was, but we, you know, we have, you know, through the lock day, each recruit. I mean, I think it's for 40 recruits. I think it was 25 grand or something like that. Just to buy locks that we're going to destroy. Yeah, yeah, right. But it's necessary. Yes. And so if I, if I spend another 30 grand giving my instructors an extra week of preparation time and I keep one, instead of losing three recruits, I only lose two. Oh, my God. The return on. The return on investment is staggering when you actually know the numbers. And, and I'm not expecting lieutenants and captains to know the numbers that well. Right. I mean, that's, I'm just telling you from like you put a book, you put a budget together for a full recruit class of 40 people over 16 weeks, including all the overtime for live fire training and all the logistics and, and I mean, yeah, you know, I probably have it somewhere, but the, the amount of saw money. Right. The amount of saw money you spend in. In ladder week is outrageous. Yeah.
- [53:08]
B
And so the moral of the story. The moral of the story is paying up front for instructional or instructor development will pay back dividends more than any of us could have ever imagined. Because we're not thinking about that. Right. Lieutenants and captains like myself stuff. We're not thinking about that budget number, but we do need to recognize that instructor development is, is extremely important.
- [53:30]
A
As always, it's invest in the people. Right. If you invest in the people, their return is going to be there. Yes. And we're just more comfortable invested in stuff.
- [53:41]
B
Yes, agreed. So let's move forward, Chief, because I love this part, because this. So this trans. Transitions right into the next piece because I think the curiosity piece plays a role in everything we're talking about.
- [53:53]
A
Right.
- [53:53]
B
Being curious as an instructor.
- [53:54]
A
Right.
- [53:55]
B
Being curious as an administrator, who's in charge of budgeting, who's in charge of training. We'll say. So the, the topic of conversation today, in addition to everything we've already talked about, which is great, is curiosity. We can go in so many different directions. But regarding leadership, Chief, what about curiosity resonates with you and why it is the, the Topic of conversation today.
- [54:16]
A
I think for me, it sort of became the. I was, I've always been a curious person. I've always been somebody who, who asked why, and I think that's because my mom was a teacher. She was a counterintuitive thinker. She, you know, she went to college and got her degree to teach kindergarten when she was, when she was 46 and already had 12 children. Children, right. So, you know, so I like, I have a big family, right? It's 15 in my family. And so, you know, the, my family is rife with people who just like, are always questioning everything all the time. It's, it's just the, the format I was raised with, which frankly did not serve me well when I first started in the fire department. Right. But it has served me well since. And so, but it really came to sort of clarity for me when I began to think about how people make decisions and start to learn about that. And so you talk about the early 2000s and coming to the realization that the way people make decisions under time pressure, the recognition prime decision making strategy, or rpd, which is Gary Klein stuff. And if I'm saying Gary Klein, you don't know who's that. You better, you better produce some Reed man. You're here behind.
- [55:41]
B
Love this.
- [55:43]
A
So the process is, you see the situation, you're trying to pattern match to a situation you've already been in. And your mind's very, very good at that, right? So this is where people talk about the number of slides in your tray. And the more slides you have, the more accurate your match is, right? So when you see a situation you're, you're looking for, you go, okay, this is something I recognize. And then you have solutions and you, you pick a solution. And the key is when you, when you choose what to do. That process is called satisficing. You know, if, if we look at academic decision making, they would say, you know, generate three options, evaluate each option against a set criteria. Pick the best option, right? Like that's not how it works when you're under pressure. When you're under pressure, it's called satisfy things. So you think of a solution, you evaluate, you do a little sim, 10th of a second or whatever. You probably don't even know you're doing it. And you go, will it work? And if the answer to the will it work? Question is yes, then you implement the solution. You don't compare and contrast solutions. You don't generate alternative solutions. If the ant. If you run the SIM in your hand and you believe this is going to be a solution, this solution works, you implement it. And that's why we don't end up with ideal solutions under pressure, is because we, we pick the first solution that we think will work. Okay? Now, if we take that and understand it from the training perspective, the first thing to recognize is that every decision that somebody makes on the fire ground, under pressure, you know, at an emergency medical alarm or even anytime that they're under stress, but let's just leave it in the fire service realm. When they arrive at a. At a building, whatever decision they make, you have to accept, morally accept that at the time they made that decision, they thought it was the right decision. They believed it would work, they believed it was the correct decision, and it does not matter what the outcome is. Now, we can have bad outcomes and we can have bad decisions. All those things are true, and we have to deal with those things. But when we measure the person, we should understand that they thought it was right, they thought it would work, they were doing it in the best interest of the organization and the mission. Very seldom, and I've never seen it actually occur, but I, I would imagine that every once in a while you have somebody who's going to go, oh, yeah, if I do it this way, we'll end up on the news. Right? If I do it this way, we'll end up on the front page of the Seattle Times. Like, I'm sure that does happen, but I've just never run into it in looking at people's actual decisions. And, and so what is rife for people, what is the norm for people, is to think that there's some moral failing that that person has. They are wrong, they are bad, they don't. Right. It's morally judging the person instead of academically judging the quality of the decision and the outcome and figuring out, say, somebody made a decision that we go, oh, my God, that was a terrible decision. Right? Like, we wouldn't want to do that. Well, we'd have to look at what training experience do they have that led how did they get to that decision in the first place? And I would offer you, if you have a large organization and I take any lieutenant off the line and they made this decision, if I'm the administrator of that organization, if, if I can't pinpoint one or a few pieces of training that this person missed, that every single lieutenant in my organization has, then my expectation should be that given the same set of circumstances, every other lieutenant would make the same decision. Right. And that that stuff's Hard to. It's. It's hard to accept. Especially, like, if you. If you look at most after action reviews or after action reports, they're either. They'll either avoid that topic completely and just say what happened there. There's no analysis of decisions or quality or recommendations that. Right. Or they focus on the individual, that this is an individual error, this person screwed up, that sort of thing. Right. The. The curiosity has to come. Like, okay, how did they make this decision? What were they thinking about? How are they trained? What does their experience level say? These are all critical factors. If I took the exact same situation and I have. If every other lieutenant would make a different decision or if I would expect that they would make a different decision, I had to figure out how to make the leap from this one to the other. Right. And so you don't get there without first being curious about how. How this thing. How this occurred. Yeah. Right. And, you know, I. I've developed training scenarios that. We started training the whole organization on that. I was responsible as a lead. I was the curriculum developer and the lead instructor. And we started doing some tactical things. And within weeks, I could see it's starting to happen on the fire ground. And we taught that what we taught, what we. What we thought we were teaching them was not what we actually taught them. And what we actually taught them we did not want them to do. It was. It was wrong. Yeah. It was bad. Yeah. Right. And we start seeing it on the fireground, like this had to do with supplies, and all of a sudden, we started running out of water. And firegrounds. We. I mean, it happens occasionally, and it's. I think it's worth the risk. That's a whole separate discussion. But it was relatively uncommon in the Seattle Fire Department. And then within weeks, we're having multiple situations where we run out of water because of the. What we thought we were teaching them was not what we taught them. What they learned was not what we thought we were teaching them. We have to stop. We had to stop the training, and we had to figure out how that was happening. And then we had to start the training again and then bring. Everybody who we had already trained had to come back. Right. Wow. We had to prioritize them very, very high. And. Yep. Now, at some point in time in there, you know, I made mistakes, you know.
- [62:53]
B
Yeah, sure, sure.
- [62:54]
A
Wasn't because I was intending to have this outcome on the fireground. It wasn't because we were trying to. It was just. And the mistake was relatively simple, you know, taking an hour to Describe all of the ins and outs. Suffice them. Say, if you're, if you're, if you're just coming from the mindset that we're gonna, we're gonna. Look, man, we've been doing it this way for 20 years. Just do it the way I tell you and move on. It's just long run. You're just not gonna be effective as an individual. Right. You're not, you're already not effective as an instructor. And if we take that sort of thinking to the institutional level, we're gonna, we're gonna end up with big, big problems. Yeah. It's only through the, the, the, the, the serious study of how things are working, why they're working that way. What things can we do to just gently. Even if we have to turn. I mean, if you have to turn the whole ship, that's a whole different thing.
- [63:53]
B
Right.
- [63:54]
A
If you have to change direction, that's a different thing. But if you're just trying to influence the ship a little bit over a long period of time. Yeah. How do you, how do you make that happen? And you don't do that without constantly asking yourself, what do we do? What am I doing wrong now? What am I doing right now? Yeah. What's the organization doing? How can we influence this behavior? Right. Like, like this. The, the source for the actual change is, is through being inquisitive about everything that's happening and how it's working out. Yeah. At least within your sphere of it influence.
- [64:31]
B
Well, you said something so key a minute ago, Chief, when you said when individuals make a decision, and we'll just use the lieutenant rank, because I think that's what you had mentioned is whenever the situation under pressure. Emergency scene, non emergency scene. But the decision that is made, we have to believe that that was the best decision that that individual thought of. Right. Not just some rational decision, just some decision just thrown out there. But in that moment, we have to believe, based on their training, based on their development, based on experience, that that was the best decision made at hand. And there will be mistakes that. That will be made. There will be some decisions after the fact that said, you know, I could have done XYZ instead. That's what, you know, after action reviews are. That's what feedback's all about, all that stuff. But as we talk about curiosity, it's, it, it takes a, it takes curiosity. As a leader, we'll say, let's say as a, as a boss, we'll use as the example to be able to say, like in our mind Like, I'm not sure why that individual made that decision. I would have made that decision. But if you remain curious. Right. It allows you to say, you know what? I think they made the decision based on what they thought was the best, and I had to give them the benefit of the doubt because otherwise, what we jump to the conclusion of, I guess, is. My point is, if we're not curious, going back to the theme of today, we will find ourselves assuming that individuals are just making poor decisions, they're not trained well enough. We find ourselves coaching and correctively counseling all the time. Right. Because the moral, the. The question I'm going to ask is, Chief, is can we train on curiosity?
- [66:04]
A
Right.
- [66:04]
B
Because if we don't believe that our individuals are making the best decisions in their situations, whatever that may be, throughout the day, 24 hour shifts, and we're not curious as leaders, but we need to be curious as leaders. How do we become cure. How do we become curious? How do you. But how did you build that? That trait will say, because we know curiosity is a very important trait in an effective leader, but if we don't have it, how do we get it?
- [66:31]
A
Yeah. So it's. It's a lot harder. If you ask an academic, and I. I've asked a lot of academics, actually. If you ask an academic how. How do you develop curiosity in people, the answer you will get, and I be interested for you to try this, sometimes the answer you'll get is people are naturally curious. And although that's true for things that they're interested in being curious about, and it's something that we actually systemically breed out of people, at least in this country, through the way we do school, you go look at. I can't remember the numbers exactly, but it's a rapidly decreasing curve of, of inquisition in kids. It goes up very, very fast. As soon as they start actually talking, they start asking why. If you've had kids, or like in my case, grandkids, they're asking why all the time. Yep. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why, why, why, why? Why? Right. By the time they reach junior high, they're not asking anybody anything ever. Right. Because school breeds that out of them. We breathe that out of them. We send messages all the time. The questions aren't valued. Your insight isn't important. And we don't think we're doing it. And I catch myself doing it now, even though I know that I shouldn't be doing it. Right. Yeah. Like, I have an awareness. I go, wait a minute. Okay, let me quit doing whatever I Thought was important. And I can do that now because I'm retired. Right. I don't have pressures of having to be on time and do this. Like, you know, I'm not, my mortgage is paid for. Like, I don't, I don't have all these pressures. And I still find myself like artificially elevating something to being more important than having people in my life ask me questions and being engaged in having the discussion, the answer with them. But we, we just systemically breed curiosity out of people. And so when, when we started, so we started, we started using a questions based approach in some training in the Sale fire department. We found it was effective. We met institutional resistance that was pretty active. And I mean formal institutional resistance. I don't mean individual actors. We got a thousand people. You're going to have some individual actors who are going to be bad actors. That's just the way it is. And you just need to, sometimes you just, I just, you know, you deliberately sideline them or ignore them and you just keep moving because you know, eventually, especially if they're senior to you, you know that they're going to be gone before you are. Right. And that's, I mean, I'm just trying to be realistic for you.
- [69:13]
B
Absolutely.
- [69:13]
A
But I'm talking about actual institutional resistance. Decision makers looking at the way we're doing things, being uncomfortable with it and trying to mandate that we would head a different direction. And this, this happened because we were doing debriefs, we were giving people firefighter rescue scenarios that, that success as defined by rescuing the firefighter was not guaranteed. It was not guaranteed. It was possible, but it was not guaranteed. And that was not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise was not to guarantee success in achieving an objective. The point of the exercise was to put people in very, very difficult decision making positions, put them under a lot of stress. And now it's perceived stress because it's a training environment. But if you haven't learned to safely inculcate stress into training, trust me, that's a skill you're gonna need. Absolutely right. So the point of the exercise was to put them in big, make them make really, really hard decisions under really stressful conditions and then sit down with a group afterwards and talk about those decisions. What were the pressures they were feeling? What were the, you know, the, the moral pressures they were feeling? What were the institutional pressures they were feeling? How did they make decisions? We have people who made decisions who put their crews in enough jeopardy that it's likely they would have died had it been a real incident, they probably, the entire crew probably would have died. Now I there. I'm sure there's people listening to this that will listen to this podcast and go, that's crazy. Okay. Don't do it. Right, right. We did mayday training. I can tell you when we were doing mayday training for chief officers, I applied as much pressure as I thought I could get away with.
- [71:22]
B
Yeah, sure.
- [71:23]
A
That wouldn't, that wouldn't create a puddling mass of a crying human being. Right, right, right. Understanding that I'm briefing them ahead of time, I'm telling them that they're going to experience this pressure. Like all. I'm doing it professionally, of course.
- [71:36]
B
Of course.
- [71:37]
A
But I'm applying the maximum amount of pressure I possibly can. Yeah, right. Why? Well, because it's gonna pale in comparison to the real pressure at the real mayday, at the real event. Right. As much as I can apply in training, it's gonna pale. Now, I've had chiefs who went through my training and come back to me after they have maydays. Go, oh, my God. Like, it was almost easy to handle that relative. Yeah, right. But, but it's, it's, it's about, but our training was about how those decisions get made and, and understanding the thinking behind making those decisions and trying to refine the decisions that people would make in those environments. So we knew what the, the, what the right cues were. Because once you can identify the cues and the patterns and the things that people are actually considering, you can definitely design training to inculcate those cues in particular.
- [72:33]
B
Absolutely.
- [72:34]
A
But, but the staff, the uniform staff, listening to the training on the radio and how hearing that people were being unsuccessful. No comfort with that. Sure. That's not how they trained. Sure. They, they design. They were trained and they designed training when they were coming up. In the system, where success was defined as meeting some objective, if you didn't meet whatever the objective was that you were on success, tactical or task level skill, you weren't. The drill was unsuccessful. Sure, sure. And that's hard to explain. Like, like, they don't. They just didn't get it. Now, fortunately, we had enough sway in the command staff of that training cadre that we didn't just get what we got told because quit using the radio so they couldn't hear it.
- [73:31]
B
Right, right, right, right. So no one else could hear it.
- [73:35]
A
Yeah. They couldn't hear it out. Like, we just gave. Instead of using real radios, we just gave blocks of wood. Right. It had zero impact on the actual training. I mean, I wouldn't say zero nominal because there's a, you know, the, the process of using a radio is, is, is a skill set, right?
- [73:50]
B
Absolutely.
- [73:52]
A
Yes it is. Right. But so we lost that piece of the puzzle, but we maintained the, the value of the rest of the training. And so take that. Right. So we're training, we're. We're developing a cadre at the lieutenant and the captain level who both understands this theory and is interested in the practice of, of asking the questions, delving into the details, creating open ended relationships, peer feedback relationships between the instructor cadre, all sorts of stuff going on at that level. And just enough support above us, not tons of understanding, but enough support to keep us moving. And so as that moves up in the, in the organization. Well, one those instruct that instructor cadre is, was pretty broad. Right. And they have a lot of influence. But when it came time to like when I made chief and they're like, hey, we want you to train a bunch of chiefs to do this process. Like, you know, they selected the chiefs and of the eight, one, One good, one good, good, good person. I mean they're all good people. I don't want to say it that way. One person who, who was correctly identify what the skill set was even though they were all trained and taught and mentored. One who accepted like, oh, I see what this is. Sure, sure. And the rest, the rest of them. There was, there was sort of an in between group who was. Yeah. Pretty okay. I mean they were acceptable. And there were two who like if you give them a bank of questions, I would always start with a bank of questions. And those are just conversation starters. You're looking to get answers and relay those back into deeper questions. Yeah, right. Like you. But I had two who just like read the first question, get the answer, read the second question, get the answer, read the third question, get the answer. Like just very. Yeah. And you try to give me feedback and they're like, hey man, if you want me to ask different questions, just write different questions on the piece of paper. It's like, oh, okay, thank you. The next so. But it still takes, right? Like in the organization, it still takes. You got to finish that. Yep. You got to finish that training assignment. You have to take one good debriefer and two or three. Right. So you're ending up with four or five who now you can start to leverage at that rank. What we're doing, what we're doing that entire time is developing all of the new people. Yes, all of the new people. They came in, oh, they get, they were asked these questions. They had experienced this as a, as a student, as a first level trainer to where all of a sudden it just becomes like, all of a sudden it's like, oh, they're doing it over there, they're doing it over there, they're doing it over there. Right. You're, you're. But that's influencing the organization. And we're talking about at least two decades, really, at least in my organization. And I can't speak to what it's like since I've left. And I'm not saying that I was like the guy who did all that stuff. I'm just saying, like, look, I was part of that cadre and there was a lot of institutional resistance that we had to maneuver, we had to maneuver around it. Sure. We never went right at it. We just, you know, just thought, just, just keep influencing at my level and trying to influence one level above. And as those people move through the system, all of a sudden, the deputy chief of training or the deputy chief of ops or the deputy chief of the alarm center. Right. Those, those, those are people who you were working alongside while you were creating this culture earlier, and they understand it, they get it, they demonstrate it, all those sorts of things.
- [77:47]
B
Absolutely. Well, talk about this quote, Chief, replace judgment with curiosity.
- [77:53]
A
Yeah. Because one of the things, and I didn't correct at the time, one of you. One of the things you said was that you paraphrased back to me was that the decision the person made was the best decision they could at the time. And that's not 100% right. What it is is it's the first solution that they believed would work.
- [78:11]
B
Got it.
- [78:11]
A
Give it a little more discretionary time. Giving a little, Given a little bit more information, you know, given a little bit more training or a little bit more experience, they very well, I bet if you ask them in hindsight they might go, yeah, I would have rather done this. Right. So all of a sudden they've created a better decision than they created at the moment. Right. So it only matters that they believe that would be a decision that would be effective. Whatever they're choosing, that's an effective way to handle this problem. And so if I just go, that was terrible decision, and hammer them in front of a group of officers and move on, like, I'm damaging myself, I'm damaging them, I'm damaging the organization. Right? Yes. And I have to have a skill set that says, look, I'm not judging the decision. I want to understand how you made the decision because for all I know, if I looked at the inf. See, it's problematic because after the incident I have a lot of information that they did not have. Have at the time they were making that decision. Especially if I've interviewed a couple of people or asked, you know, just even, not even formal interview that walked around, say, hey, when you guys got here, what'd you see? What'd you do? Like, that person was on the Charlie side. How was the guy on the front of the building supposed to ever have that piece of information? Did you tell them that? No. Like, right, so, so now I'm coming at the decision with way more information than the person had at the time they made data. Right? It's easy to judge. In hindsight, it's easy to judge. So if I, if I come out there with the, with a real curiosity as to how they made the decision, what were the factors that, what did the, what was the information they had at the time that they thought was valuable? What was the information they had at the time that they did not think was valuable? Because that might have been the actual piece of information that was most important. Right. Very often when you, when you compare expert decision makers to novices within any domain, novices regularly do not correctly identify the pieces of information that are the most valuable. They give a high value to information that experts think is inconsequential and give no value to information that experts think is critical to the actual decision or to the eventual outcome. But without, without, if I come at it with like, oh, dude, that was so stupid, like, it's, it's not going to work, right? And I made like, I'm not holding myself out. I'm, I make plenty of mistakes now and I made lots of mistakes before in trying to figure out how all this stuff works and then not only just figure out how it works for me, but how to train people to do it, how to think about it, all those sorts of things. Right? But if, if the first reaction is that dude's messed up, you've already lost. Yep. You've already lost. Yep.
- [81:15]
B
Curiosity is just so key because if you just go straight to the judgment piece, you're not gonna have that relationship, you're not gonna build upon it, you're not gonna have anything to go off of. But remaining curious, asking open ended questions, finding out the other perspective, like what you said, because we do, right? Let's just, let's just call it what it is. Firefighters are inherently judgmental. Right? We are, right. And so an element of curiosity also Requires some level of vulnerability, too.
- [81:38]
A
Right.
- [81:39]
B
To be able to trust in the fact that many people might say, you got to counsel that individual. You got to discipline that individual for that decision. Well, no, I'm going to remain curious and find out more.
- [81:51]
A
Right.
- [81:51]
B
I'm not just going to jump to a conclusion. Let's find out more. Because some people will view vulnerability as a weakness as well. Right. I mean, when you think vulnerability, it's not necessarily give out the connotation of like, oh, a strength. But vulnerability, like curiosity, is a trait that I think we would all agree that is necessary in a strong leader. But not everybody is there. We'll say not everybody. Every leader will say, right. So if a leader wishes to be curious about something, we'll say like, you know, a question, a proposal, or maybe bringing an idea forward or bringing a project idea forward. They must be willing to ask the question in the first place.
- [82:27]
A
Right.
- [82:27]
B
They must be willing to put themselves out there for sometimes a potential no. Or just sometimes get ridiculed. Like, why would this person ever bring that forward? That's kind of. That's a dumb idea. But curiosity as a leader is key. Right. Why does this person want to bring that idea forward? Why does this person think this is a good idea? Why. Do tell me why you thought that was a good decision the time that you made it. Right. Because without being curious at that moment, we are more or less just ridiculing others if we're jumping to the conclusion of, yeah, I wouldn't have done that.
- [82:58]
A
Yeah. And I think I can only speak for my institution, Right. I mean, my, my experience is the Seattle Fire Department. I mean, I, you know, long, long time ago, I. And I worked for another, or not work, but volunteered for another organization. And I certainly have dealt with plenty of other organizations, you know, in my time. But, but my experience basis, essentially the Seattle Fire Department. And so culturally, for a long. I think that there's a little bit of this still, although, like I said, I've been gone for a while, but is that there was just an expectation that when you became a battalion chief, you knew, like, you just, you're supposed to know, right? Well, there was no training, right? There was no training, like literally no training for battalion chiefs. Right? Now that's been remedied. But, like, for decades and decades, a century perhaps, you were just, if you got a white shirt, you were just supposed to know, well, if that's the expectation, then the natural, the human response to that is like, oh, yeah, what I know, I know what I know. And what I say goes, because I've got these bugles, these cross bugles on my collar. And that was enough in the organization for a century and that's not enough anymore. Right. And, but, but I have empathy and sympathy for those people because that could not have been fun.
- [84:32]
B
Sure.
- [84:32]
A
To just be expected to, to just be expected to know everything all, all of a sudden. Right. And even then, I'm sure the best ones are the ones who were like, yeah, I don't know, let's find out together better. And that's one of the things. Like your example of somebody who comes with kind of a hairbrained idea. I've, I've read, I've created and run across a fair number of hair brain ideas in my time, almost always. And I can't think of an example where this wasn't true. But there must be sometimes when it's not true. There is a kernel of a great idea in there. There's, there's, there's something in there that's gonna, that we, if we can find that piece that's going to add value to the organization. Let's do that. Let's, let's, let's be curious enough. Yeah. To figure out what it is that this person is offering. I mean, think about the, the effort it takes to come up with an idea, brainstorm it. Now I'm not talking about people who.
- [85:40]
B
Just throw like, yeah, just throw ideas at the wall.
- [85:44]
A
They're coming to you with a bunch of solutions that they have no, no interest in implementing themselves. Right. They're just trying to give you their monkey so you take on their work. Right? Yes. And you don't have to pick up all those monkeys. But the person who genuinely comes to you, who wants to change the organization is coming to you in a professional way with, with, with a solution to an idea that they're willing to put skin in the game on. Even if I didn't like the idea, I try to figure out a way to get that person in, to get them into the system, to get them into the development process, to, to, to. Because that person is, they're already demonstrating some of the skill set that we're going to need to move this organization forward. Yeah. Right. Even, even if it turns out this particular idea is terrible. Right. Or we've tried it before. I mean, you know, we did a lot. One of the things that did change in Seattle when I was there is the willingness to just pilot something, to try it at a company level. If it works, try it at a battalion level. And we have things that went battalion wide. It was like, no, we're going back. Yeah, right. And someone came with that idea five years later, I'd be like, I think we tried that already once. Go look at, so we, you know, go look at those documents, go look at that process, see if what you're offering is, is different than that and if so, how, right now they have skin in the game because it might be, it might have been a pretty good idea that just didn't pan out for us. Yeah, right. And not everything, not everything warrants this level of consideration.
- [87:32]
B
Right, sure, of course.
- [87:34]
A
Certainly. If somebody's showing up late for work. Well, if they showed up late for work once in a decade, we probably don't have to worry too much about that. Yeah. But if they start showing up late or close to late for work regularly, we can wait till they're actually late and we can then just hammer them with what the book says. Or we can go, wait a minute. Yeah, there you go. What's going on with this individual? What I remember when I worked with them over at Station 9 is that they were always early, they were always on time, they were always engaged. And now all of a sudden they're, you know, they're coming in instead of coming at 7:30, which is normal, and see how they're coming in at 10 to 8. They're, you know, they're not that engaged with the crew. Like, like something's happening there. And that's where I need to get involved before, before we have a, an institutional problem right now. We have, you know, like, we, maybe we can figure this out. But if, if I go, oh, that guy's, that guy's this or that guy's that, or like, I don't, I don't believe in divorce and he's getting divorced, well, I'm not going to engage with him like, dude, like, it doesn't matter what you, you see what I'm saying? It's like, like, yeah, people's people take these moral judgments and they put them on other people and don't see the opportunity. Opportunity. And I would offer you this, especially if you're in a leadership role in a public service organization who is taking tax money and spending it to the benefit of the people that they are sworn through an oath to do their best for, then those sorts of moral judgments don't belong here. What matters is, is the mission and the people and what we're, what we're delivering out there in, in the most. I, I say cost effective, but the Most effective way. That's the oath I swore to protect. I mean, in Seattle's oath, it has this line says. It says, I'll do all these things. Right. Follow the rules and regulations and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. To me, that's all. Blah, blah, blah. The key phrase to me in that oath is I will do all I agree to do all of these things to the best of my ability to the no cost. Yeah.
- [90:02]
B
Not just do. Not just do.
- [90:03]
A
Right. Not just do. Yeah. Right. Like I. And I. I fell down on that oath a lot of times when I was working there. Sure. But I believe in the oath. I believe the oath matters. It says I'm gonna. Says I'm gonna follow the rules. It says I'm gonna show up on time. Yeah. All that stuff. Yeah. Okay. Right. But it's that piece of. To the best of my ability that I think brings the true value to that statement and the two measure against what I hope that I'm trying to fulfill. Yeah. When I. When I'm wearing that patch and every day I was part of the organization every day that is now. I mean, there's nothing in my life that I do not that is not a direct result of the generosity of the citizens of the city of Seattle. Nothing. Yeah. I don't. I don't own a single thing. My house, my truck, my wife. I gotta own her. But you see my point, like, yes. There's nothing good in my life that isn't a result of the generosity that they demonstrated to me to hire me when I was a young kid and give me the opportunity that they did. Yeah. And I'll always owe them a debt of service for that. Sure.
- [91:19]
B
And I hope we all do. Like all of us here in the fire service and listeners have that same gratitude during our careers and obviously when we're finished with our careers to round up kind of what you said, Chief, what I'm going to say from that is curious leaders prevail. Meaning the curious leader of, you know, those going back to what we've talked about a second ago, the individual that brings an idea to you, a project to you, we won't know what great idea becomes until that leader was curious to say, let me run with this with you, versus one that's not curious and says, yeah, that's just another idea. I'm going to ignore it. Right. And we can't quantify that. Right. How many ideas out there, there never got brought forward? The only ones that we did know of were because those curious leaders we'll Call them that helped foster that environment for those ideas to be brought forward. And then using the other example that you talked about was that late employee, that curious leader, who said, you know what, there's something going on here versus you're late, gotta write you up.
- [92:17]
A
Right?
- [92:17]
B
The curious leader helped us identify, you know, systemic problems, helped an employee through, you know, a situation that never would have otherwise opened up until, unless that, you know, leader was curious and asking, you know, you haven't been late in 10 years, something's going on, open up. And then it opens up that individual to say, you know what? Because of your curiosity, because of your ability to recognize that something else was going on, I am going to open up to you. And these are things sometimes we can't quantify, unfortunately. But ultimately what I'm getting at is the curious leader helps us prevail and sometimes we can't quantify it. So, which is why curiosity is so key. Let's go to action item, Chief. So curiosity being the theme of the day, if you were going to talk to three groups, firefighter group company officers, and chief officers, how do you suggest new firefighters build curiosity in their repertoire early in their career?
- [93:12]
A
Yeah, I, I, I'm hoping, I hope that in large part we're filtering for that so that it, so that it's part of their process when they get here. But you gotta just always be asking why? And, and it's important to develop competence at the level where you are. Right? So like, how do songs work? Why do they fail? How do I fix them? Like, what are, what are shortcuts? Like, like, why do we stretch hose like this? Is this the best way? Let's try a different way. If we do it this way, what are the signs of success? What are the signs of failure? Always be asking those questions, right? Can we figure out a way to make it, to make this host stretch 1 second faster? Because making it 1 second faster is better for the mission, no doubt. And so that cost that mindset, that organizationally we can constantly get better. And the way to do that is to, is to continue to question what we're doing in a professional, positive, forward looking way. And that starts with making sure that you're, that you truly, you can't think outside the box until you know not only what's in the box, but how the box was built, how the box works, how many openings are in the box, how do you open those openings? Like, like there, there's a lot of like, hey, I want to be the innovative thinker, but you, you Know, you got to start with understanding. You know, if you want to be an innovative engineer, you better learn math. Yeah.
- [94:49]
B
Basics, Fundamentals.
- [94:50]
A
Yeah. And so that's a big piece of it at the beginning, but you can have that questioning mindset in learning all of those tools, skills, techniques, even. Even looking at your leaders go, okay, everybody respects that officer. What are they doing? This other guy that they talk about, like, I do not participate in, in the rumor model. Right. Yeah. If, if, if you hear people are talking negatively about Officer A and positively about Officer B, your mindset should be, what. How do I. What's Officer B doing that Officer A is not doing? Or vice versa. What. What is making them effective? Right. Is. Is being just, Just constantly being out of the mindset that, like, hey man, we're here to, we're here to solve people's problems. And the more I understand about how those problems work, how to get them solved, the better I am at it, at achieving the mission and coming into compliance with the oath that I swore. When I put my right hand up, when I, When I, When I put that patch on my shoulder for the company officer level, I mean, I think it really translates up and down that, that anytime there's a. There's a great book actually called On Being Certain, On Being, and it, it describes a lot of it. It's been probably a decade since I read it. I still have the copy, so I'll probably, now that we've talked about, I'll probably go read it again. But it, it talks about the, just the, even the brain science of thinking. You know, the answer is very, very seductive.
- [96:30]
B
Yes.
- [96:30]
A
And it explains all that stuff to you. And, and, but the. There was the saying, like, it's not what you know that'll get you hurt, it's what you think what you think you know, that just ain't so. Yep. Right. So that's, that's what you're always looking for is, is what's the thing that, what's the thing that's going to make me better? And I actually don't think that that mindset changes. What changes is that how much you can influence those around you. Right. Like, you know, at the company officer, you can, you can mostly influence across and down. You can do. You can have some influence up. And that's, that's for every rank. You can have some influence up, but most of your influences across and down. And so, you know, looking to build that infrastructure of your influence. And I, I would have never imagined. Right. You know, this is a lack of Imagination on my part. But the number of relations, I mean, I was on a committee after the Mary Paying fire. We made a bunch of recommendations, most of which were shot down by the chief officers at the time. It was a group of brand new lieutenants. Every single one of the people on that committee was either a battalion or deputy chief by the time I retired. Right. It's like, wait a minute. Those five, those five people. Right. The relationships I had at that table at that time carry forward 20, 25 years. Yeah. And the people who are active, engaged, involved. Those people, you'll have some people who are just out for themselves, studying the book by themselves in their room. Right? Sure. But there's a lot of, A lot of the people that promote through the system of, are engaged, are forward looking, want to be better. Like. And it's, it's really amazing to me how that network works. I mean. Yeah. Like, even, even yesterday I got the, I got a promotional list, right. For lieutenant, like how the people have passed the exam. And you know, I'm on the retiree email list, so I get that one. And you know, stuff like that, it's like, oh, I remember that person that, hey, yo, recruit, recruit, recruitment. Like, oh, they came through my station for truck work or they came through my battalion for truck worker. You know, that's becoming less and less and less now because I'm not in the organization long enough. But when I look at the battalion list, like, I know everybody on there. Yeah. Right. And I know how I either positively or negatively influence our career because there's some that I go, oh, if only I would have, if only I would have done this differently, I could have helped that person more. Right. Or, you know, I, I mean, like I said, I made plenty of mistakes. But you see that influence grow and over the course of time and recognize it's 30 years, which is probably what most of the fire service is doing in some version of 30 years is a lot. It's a long time. Yeah. And you can, you can wield, you can, you can develop and wield a lot of influence on the organization over that time. And the grace you give people when they, when they make mistakes early, that comes. The, the amount that, that comes back to you is really shocking to me. Sure. The, the benefit, you know, I think of. I mean, I have. There's people who call me from jail. Right. And I had to, you know, like, okay, we're gonna, I mean, it's gonna trust me and it's gonna be a long road and you're gonna have to do a lot of mending fences to. But 10 years later. Yeah. Some of the most valuable members of the organization, completely dedicated and professional. Right. Because they made a terrible, terrible mistake and we didn't just cut them loose.
- [100:22]
B
Sure.
- [100:23]
A
Now maybe you, maybe your organization cannot do that. Certainly if they cross an egregious enough line, sure, they gotta go, man, because there's just no way around it. But there's all these lines in between where it's like, man, it's a brink, but you can come back from it and we can figure out a way to make that happen. And so there's tons and tons of positive examples that I would offer you that some of the ones that are most meaningful to me are the people where I decided if I just by giving a little tolerance and grace, create a really, really valuable, valuable outcome for the organization. And some of the times when I didn't extend that. Probably some of my biggest regrets too.
- [101:09]
B
Yeah, Tolerance and grace. There you go. Sometimes it something as small, we say as small as that, but sometimes it's not small. It goes a long way. Can, can prove beneficial in the long run. How about chief officers? How do chief officers remain curious.
- [101:26]
A
Man, if you, I'd say if you're not there already, the ones who are there already don't need to talk to them. If, if you're one, I, I hate to tell you this, but if they're not curious, they're probably not listening to your podcast. There you go. Right. I mean, the reality is that the ones who are not curious, it's going to be tough. But if, if, if you are listening to this, you go, wait a minute, I'm not demonstrating enough curiosity. Okay, start looking it up, man. There's. Go to the American Psychological association and read about curiosity. Find books about curiosity. Find books about how to ask good questions and, and start creating a mindset that says, okay, I need to, I, Whatever it is, I need to know more about it. If you start doing that right, you, you can definitely change your mindset. But it does take a lot of work. Work. And I, I hate to be fatalistic about it, but I didn't of, of the couple of dozen chief officers that I had the opportunity to try to create curiosity. The re. The reason I started academics about how to create curiosity in people was because I was struggling so much doing it, like, you know, trying to do it because my mind says, oh yeah, they're definitely, they're going to be curious for sure. That was just. I, I did what the academics did and Just thought that because I was curious, everybody's going to be curious. And that just wasn't my experience. Right. But it was the bane of my existence was trying to. To seek out that advice from, from academics, because their entire culture is built on curiosity. Right. If that's what they, if. If being in school is what they do for a living. Right. Professors, doctors, like, like, like you just. That culture is a curious culture in and of itself, and it's, it's not typical of the fire department of the past, but I do believe it is the fire department of the future. And the, the influence that NIST and UL and all that kind of stuff is having. The, the constant improvement in how to do CPR and the other medical advances and how much. Much like, like there is a massive amount of change in the way fire departments operate. Relative. And I'm not even talking about relative to a hundred years ago. You know, it might have been the first hundred years of tradition unimpeded by progress, but during my time, and I think this is not just institutionally, but culturally as well, inside and outside the fire department, the pace of change is. We started changing, and now the pace of change is faster. Yes. And so like I said before, man, if you're. I. I do believe in iterating in every function of my life. And if you're not, if you're not iterating, if you're not interested in what's happening, you're falling behind. Oh, way behind. Yes. And, you know, if, if you're comfortable falling behind. Yeah. There's nothing anybody's going to say is going to change that behavior. But if you're interested in keeping up, then you gotta engage. You gotta start figuring out what's next for you, what's next for the organization. How do you, how do you make that happen? How do you take some of these things that are. These tools that are coming along? I mean, you're. You got a battalion chief somewhere who's responsible for deciding where a fire station is going to be placed. And if they're not using AI and the tools that are available for determining that sort of stuff, if they're just looking at a map and going, oh, that looks pretty good. Like, yeah, dude, you're not. You're not meeting your oath. Right, Right. The conditions under which you're. You're receiving 100 grand a year to do a much better job than that, and you don't have to figure all these things out, but you got to find the people who know. And trust me, it's probably not you if you've never done this before.
- [105:27]
B
Right.
- [105:27]
A
If you've never done a before, then it's. You're not the expert. Even if you. Even if you wear gold on your collar. Yeah. I hate to break it to you, man, there's a lot of things I'm not the expert in. Like I need legal help, I go to a lawyer.
- [105:43]
B
Absolutely.
- [105:44]
A
If I need a. If I need medical help, I go to a doctor. I don't go, hey, I think I'll. I'll do open heart surgery on myself. No, no, man, I want an expert. And, and what's funny about that is like, even, even in those endeavors, right. You want someone, if you get a person who's got year decades of experience and is still curious about how things work, that's the right person. But the worst person is somebody who's got 30 years of experience, that they learned it in college and they've been doing it the same. They didn't learn it in medical school and they've been doing it the same way for 30 years.
- [106:25]
B
Absolutely.
- [106:26]
A
That person's a hazard to you. Yes. And let's take that and say, look, don't be a hazard to your people and don't be a hazard to your fire department. Yeah. Be the person who is actively engaged at being the best at whatever your profession is. If your profession includes being the battalion chief that decides where fire stations go. Seek out the expertise, figure out what's best, what's actually best, and not just what you think. Think.
- [106:51]
B
Agreed.
- [106:53]
A
Because you're not the expert. And. And there's plenty of things I'm not the expert in. I'm sure there's plenty of things you're not the expert in.
- [106:59]
B
Absolutely.
- [107:00]
A
But there, there are experts out there.
- [107:03]
B
Well, that's where. And that's where teams come in.
- [107:06]
A
Right.
- [107:06]
B
Because you use building fire stations as one example. But I believe it's just one example of many. Right. Whether it be training, whether it be operations, whether it be safety, whether the ems, whether it be, you know, very specific, like, you know, truck work, engine work, hose deployments, ladders. Like the battalion chief, the captain, lieutenant may not be the subject matter expert. I might have some expertise in it and some knowledge, but this is where. Utilizing an effective team, having said, a little bit of humility to say, okay, I'm a decision maker in this process, but I am not the subject matter expert. I need to find the team and the experts. AI for as an example that you use to help me get to the final decision to make the best decision. Otherwise I'm not fulfilling my oath to use kind of the words that you're saying, to deliver the best possible outcome, to have the best deliverable at the end of the day. Talked about, you know, getting books on curiosity. You talked about learning about good questioning, asking good questions. The favorite book that you had mentioned, and you mentioned his name already, was Gary Klein. Intuition at Work. Talk about why that book is so influential, why that's important.
- [108:12]
A
Well, it's, it's fundamental to understanding how you make decisions under pressure. And that's the kind of decisions we make right now. There's a lot of evidence that shows that how we make decisions when we're not under pressure as well. But if we, if, if we are making decision, make decisions under pressure, we have, I would say a duty to understand how your mental process works and to train it appropriately and to understand it weaknesses and try to mitigate those weaknesses. And if you're all involved in training, which all fire officers are, you should understand that well enough to develop training that is directed at making sure that the decision making process gets better because you're influencing on it. And our people make tons and tons of decisions on the fire ground and they're, you know, I mean even you gotta remember like if you're the commander and you assign somebody to go do vertical ventilation, you have zero control over the outcome. Zero. Your, your control was all on the training and the preparation side, right? Where they position the apparatus, what ladders they take, what equipment they take, who takes it, it in what order, where they decide to access the building, where they decide to cut holes. Like, like all that stuff is way outside of your ability to, to process, much less make decisions upon, you know, and so if you, if you look at the level of, of things that you do not have control over, you might as well focus on the things that you do have control over, which is how you're making decisions, how you're collecting information, understanding the parameters, the conditions under which these things are good, the conditions under which they're bad, how long these things take. Like there's, there's plenty that, that you can influence, but that book, right, tells you how people make, how people actually make decisions. And so it's fundamental. Now Gary's other books are good as well, but that's like, think of, to me, that's a foundational text and like I said earlier, if you, if I say Gary Klein and you go who you're way, way behind on understanding how it is that people make decisions in your profession, yes, You're. If you're. If you're a professional, you should understand how. How. How decisions are made in your profession at the tip of the spear when lives are on the line. And. And from that knowledge, then we can start to talk about the other things.
- [111:00]
B
That sounds like a required rating or should be a required rating for company officers at the very minimum in the fire service.
- [111:06]
A
Yeah, I would think so. Yeah, there you go. I would advocate for that position. All right.
- [111:09]
B
Intuition at Work by Gary A. Klein. Well, Chief, we get to the leadership challenge, and this is kind of how we wind down the show after you graciously giving us almost two hours of your time. But the Leadership Challenge allows us to continue the conversation because I can't have you for 10 hours today, even though I'm sure we could go for 10 hours or more. But it allows us to continue the conversation, to gather more perspectives for the listeners to grasp onto, to continue to learn. So we ask our guests to challenge. Anybody out there could be a fire service leader. It could be anybody, someone that they believe would bring value to the conversation. Is there someone out there that you would like us to reach out to?
- [111:44]
A
Yeah, I think I thought about this a lot, and then the guy I think that's. Can have a lot of influence with your audience is a guy named Nick Papa, and he wrote the book Coordinating Ventilation. I've had the pleasure of reading the original and the revised edition. People are like, why is that guy still reading ventilation books? Well, one, I think Nick's pretty good writer, too. I think that the theory and the practice has changed some, but I would say that we're. That we're where we have higher expectations on the. Or higher. There's more understanding that the reliance on that coordination is critical to the success of the mission and the safety of our people and the people we just want to protect. You get it wrong, it can be devastating. You know, so understanding that practice and that principle, and Nick, in my mind, has done the best job of taking all the stuff from the. From the laboratory, having the opportunity to use it on the street and develop actual skills that can be, you know, taught. Practice, taught. Used in fire departments to coordinate ventilation effectively and really understanding the entire process from where the air goes in the building to where the smoke comes out of the building, which. With reading smoke. Right. That's a piece of. Of. It's a piece of what I do as well. But not only that, but he's a true gentleman. I think he's an excellent leader, great family man, true friend And I think he would do well for your audience.
- [113:22]
B
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. We'll reach out to Nicholas Papa and let him know he was leadership challenged by Phil Jost here on the kitchen table. So on this show, Chief, I obviously want to credit you and thank you for your time today. We talked about classes that you taught, but our listeners, if they resonated, we'll hopefully look you up. They'll sign up for the classes that you teach here either in the Pacific Northwest or nationwide. But I'm going to announce it again. Today you teach the art of reading smoke, formerly taught by David Dodson and now by yourself, tactical decision making at the tip of the spear. And then obviously the tactical decision games@fireengineering.com we talked a lot about that earlier. And then the one that really resonated with me was instructional craftsmanship building your expertise and ability at the front of the room. I'm going to say, Chief, I'm going to advocate for that one. I'm going to look for that one for when you do teach it up in the Pacific Northwest. I'm going to see if we can bring you back up to our regional training division up here. That's something that I think is highly necessary. I spent time in the training division. My, my, my goal and aspiration is that training officers of the future really value becoming and getting trained up to be effective at instructors and not just getting into the role because they feel like it's their turn or like you mentioned, it's, you know, the rank tells them that they got to get there, they're trying to climb, you know, the ranks. But true instructional expertise is necessary in our profession. But in, in every profession, you know, just teaching is, is not the end goal. The getting the students to grasp and learn information is the end goal. And we can only accomplish such by becoming good instructors. So are there any other classes, courses, articles, how else can we find Chief Phil Joseph, we're looking for you.
- [114:55]
A
Well, my website is ignitionpoint training.com and I like to try to set your mind on fire. That's why I chose the Ignition Point as my company name. And there are, I list my classes on there when they're scheduled. I don't know if I have anything that's going to be publicly open, but I'm doing some stuff around, I think for company officer academies and stuff like that, which typically those are, are a little bit more closed than some of the I have had open and I do have open classes around here. But I'm always interested in having a discussion. I just taught a class which was focused on vertical ventilation. I worked with Steve Reno from Brass Monkey, and he does vert vet. So we sort of arranged the curriculum to reading soil curriculum to sort of focus on some of the vertical ventilation aspects, which was super exciting for me to not just work with a pro like Steve, but to get to sort of take a new look at my class and. And see how I can innovate what I do so that I'm not just. I'm not. I'm not much inclined to give the same exact class every single time I give it, that's for sure. So keep it interesting. And. And I'm always. I'm always interested in interesting ideas, so I appreciate being included, dude.
- [116:14]
B
Absolutely. Well, we'll reach out to you, Chief. I will reach out to you after we're done recording here. I'm gonna ask you a question offline before we close, though. What are your lasting leadership thoughts you want our listeners to walk away with?
- [116:25]
A
I would say, you know, this is coming from the old dude, right? But it's gonna go by a lot faster than you think it's gonna go by. And so in the end, it's about each interaction and making sure that you're. You're taking the opportunity to build the relationships and to build the culture around you and in your organization that's going to best be. Meet that oath. And I keep coming back to the oath, but I do think it's. It's the basis of what we do. But before you know it, you'll be on the outside looking in, and it's not terrible out here. I'm not. I'm not lamenting. Right. I'm just saying that. That before you know it, your chances to do these things. You know, you keep saying you're going to do something next year, and before you know it, it's going to be over. So whatever those opportunities are, if you want to be on that specialty team, if you want to promote to lieutenant, if you want a chance to teach in the training division, if you want to go work on the busy house, whatever those opportunities are, you got to go for them. You cannot wait for them to come to you, because you wait for that opportunity to show up on your doorstep, you'll be waiting a long time. But there is so. There's so much to be gained by being part of the profession of firefighting, and it has such a positive influence, both on the individual and on the. On the citizens that you serve that take. Take every opportunity to be part of it. It. That's perfect.
- [117:59]
B
Well said, chief. I don't think anyone could have said it any better. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in today to the kitchen table. We truly hope you found this time valuable, and we hope we've inspired you to take action, to lead and to spread the leadership conversation. Till next time, be safe, be intentional, stay curious.