Station 1902

Chief Ed Mann: Welcome back to another Provident podcast. I'm your host, Ed Mann, Director of Training and Education. I'm excited to have Rich Gasway, owner and founder of Situational Awareness Matters. I will have Rich tell you more about himself in a few minutes. Over the years, I've had the opportunity to listen to Rich at several national conferences and I've always been intrigued by his message. It's hard to argue with science, even though some still do. I retired as a volunteer fire chief at the end of 2021, no longer fight fire or have the worries of being an incident commander. I still try to keep current on the latest trends in technology and my capacity as a director of Training and Education for Provident. In fact, earlier this year, I enrolled in and completed 14 modules of the online Sam program. I must tell you, looking back on my fire service career as a volunteer fire chief and as a career fire officer, I realized there were times when I was lucky as an incident commander and none of my people were hurt or killed. So what I'm saying, if you're a department or company officer who has the responsibility to ensure the safety of the troops and you're depending or on luck or the old ways of thinking, it's time to learn the art and science of situational awareness simply because it does matter. Furthermore, if you're a young firefighter who aspires to be an officer someday, now's the time to begin learning what Sam is all about. Don't wait until you've been promoted. On one final note to our listeners. While our focus today will be on the fire service, the techniques from Sam can be applied to EMS, law enforcement, industry, and I'm sure Rich will tell you more about this. Rich, welcome to the show. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners and explain how your journey into situational awareness and why it matters.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Well, first, thank you. And thank Provident for giving me the opportunity to be on your podcast. It's really quite an honor when I get contacted by somebody like yourself that says, hey, we've got this show and we'd like to have you on as a guest. So thank you for that. I spent 33 years as a first responder, including 22 years as a fireground commander. And along the way in the journey, like you, Ed, I now realize, although I can't say that I realized it at the time, just how lucky I have been to not have a firefighter seriously hurt or killed under my command. And also along the way I was a student of near miss and line of duty death reports, reading many, many and wondering sometimes in frustration, how could the person in charge not see the bad things that were coming? How could they be so blind to what was seemingly so obvious to me as I was reading the report? Now obviously, when you read the report, you have the benefit of the hindsight bias, you know how the story is going to end. So it does give you an advantage of being able to see things that maybe a person in the moment couldn't see. But nonetheless, it was happening over and over and over and over again. And in 2004, I guess, inspired by frustration and ambition to see if there could be answers that I couldn't find anywhere, I enrolled in a doctoral program and did some research in cognitive neuroscience, trying to understand what happens to firefighters, company officers, and incident commanders when they're working in a high stress, high consequence, time compressed environment with changing conditions. How does the brain function change? How do we sort out information? How do we come to conclusions and make decisions? And how do we implement them? And more importantly, as it relates to situational awareness, how is it that we can not see what is happening in front of us in time to prevent something bad from happening? So in that five year journey, I assembled a list of what I come to term situational awareness barriers, over 100 of them, and then researched what causes these? What can we learn from them? What do we need to know about them? Tips, tricks, hacks, best practices that we can use to counteract, if that's the right word. Some of these barriers, some of them I wish I had great solutions for some of them. Some of them, the best I can tell you is it can occur. And just have you be aware of the fact that it can occur to you, so when it starts to happen, you can see it happening to you and proactively try to counter it with some kind of a reaction or something to get you back on track. It's kind of like the best example I can give is if a person knows that when they get blood drawn, they're going to faint, there might be nothing you could do to tell them to keep them from fainting. But you might be able to prop them up in a chair and put a pillow against the wall so that then when they do faint, they don't get hurt. You can't prevent the fainting, although if you know it's going to happen, you can do proactive things to try to lessen the consequence of that happening or of a situational awareness barrier happening. So I retired in 2009, and I've now spent all of my time full time traveling around and teaching classes to first responders, fire, EMS, law enforcement, dispatch, emergency management, hazmat, industry, aviation, medicine, military on situational awareness, and the barriers of flaw awareness and how to make better high risk decisions. And that has kept me active, would be the word I would choose for the better part of heading into 14 full time years of teaching these classes literally around the world. It's amazing the opportunities that have come. And I've written seven books on the topic, so if people think, well, this is a simple topic you can cover in ten minutes. You can't fill seven books with ten minutes worth of information. There's a lot there. I'm happy to be with you and maybe share a little bit of that knowledge to maybe inspire your listeners to come to our webinar. It's going to be upcoming. I know you'll talk about that or visit the website and try to learn some more about it.

Chief Ed Mann: Well, first of all, I got to tell you I'm glad you made the journey that you've made because it's certainly been beneficial to those that have sat and listened to the message. I know it's been beneficial to me even though I don't chase fire trucks anymore, even though I don't have that responsibility on my shoulders anymore as an incident commander, I've been able to use some of it in my day to day life. And your last statement is kind of a good lead into my next question. I've followed you closely for the last several years and you're constantly on the road, not only presenting to the fire service but other public safety organizations and industry. What similarities have you found when it comes to the overall lack of understanding of situational awareness?

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Well, what I find it is that nearly everybody in my audience is in the exact same spot that I was in before I took the journey, which is to say I knew nothing about it, which you'd say, oh gosh, you're a fire chief for 22 years. Surely you knew some stuff about situational awareness. Well, as OD as it sounds and ironic as it is, I really didn't. And as I pull my audiences say by show of hands, most of the people in the audience have heard of or are familiar with the term situational awareness, but very few know anything more than the words situational awareness. If I ask for a definition, the room falls silent quickly. If I ask someone to explain how to have good situational awareness, the most typical answers that I'll get is, well, you got to pay attention or I might hear the colloquial. You got to keep your head on a swivel. And while paying attention and keeping your head on a swivel are certainly important components to situation awareness, those two terms only describe the starting point of a three step process that's essential for developing and maintaining good situational awareness. So maybe I should just say what that three step process is and take all the mystery out for your listeners. So if you want to know what the definition is, try to commit this to memory. But I'm going to make it easy for you. I'm going to tell you the whole definition and I'm going to make it easier for you in the end. So situational awareness is a person's ability to perceive and understand what is happening in the environment around them while being mindful about how time is passing. Because as time passes, conditions change. And as conditions change, then so should awareness. And then being able to accurately predict what's going to happen in the future and to be able to make those predictions in time to prevent a bad outcome. Now there's a lot of words in that definition. So when I'm teaching my class, after I share the definition, I have three of the words in that definition highlighted on the screen in red, bold red. And that's what we spend the better part of the following 2 hours trying to understand the three component parts of situational awareness perception, understanding and prediction. So if I could just get responders to just be mindful of the fact that they have to have perception that's to keep your head on a swivel and pay attention perceptive of the environment around you. And if I could have them remember that they have to understand what it means, what they're seeing and hearing and feeling and tasting and smelling. And I think people way underestimate the challenges of perception and the challenges of understanding. They think it's as easy as see it and understand and hear it or understand. And it's not that easy because of those barriers. But if I could get them to be able to learn how to be good at perceiving their environment, understanding what the environment that they're perceiving means, and then being able to use that understanding to make accurate predictions about what's going to happen in the future, two minutes from now, five minutes from now, ten minutes from now. The goal of the program is to help them to be really good at understanding how to do those three parts. And that would be if we could take the class and divide it into two pieces. Part one of the class is learning all about what situational awareness is and then part two of the class is helping them to understand just how it can go wrong, how it can go off the rails, and then sharing some tips and best practices on how to improve it. So in summary, I think in general the fire service has an understanding that situational awareness is important and after that we struggle mightily to know anything more about it. And that's the mission I'm on is to try to change that part.

Chief Ed Mann: So with that in mind then chief, so obviously many of our listeners, if not all of them, will be from the Fire and EMS communities. Can you share with us some of the common mistakes made by incident commanders? And obviously I know there's a lot of them, but some of the common mistakes that you see?

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Yeah, well, first, I don't think the challenges with situation awareness are exclusive to the incident Commander. So if somebody's on this podcast and they're like well, I'm not an incident commander so I don't need to worry about some of the things that he's talking about. I contend that having good situational awareness is important for everyone operating in an incident scene. In fact, I would be very saddened to think that there would be a firefighter out there who would say, well, I don't have to have good situation awareness. That's what my company officer is for. Or to have a company officer say I don't have to have good situational awareness. That's what the incident commander is for. So I think that it transcends every position on an incident from the tip of the hose line to the person on the roof, to the safety officer, to the incident commander, to everyone the need to have good situational awareness. For example, I think it would be, I guess, like a blinding flash of obvious for me to say this, but I feel compelled to say it. It'd be extremely difficult for an incident commander to have good situational awareness about what the interior conditions are like inside of a structure when they're at the command post. They just can't see it and feel it and have a good understanding. That awareness has to come from the crew on the interior. Now, they can by radio share their awareness with the person at the command level by using words and articulating what they're experiencing or not. But it's equally difficult for the interior crew to have good situation awareness about the exterior conditions if they're crawling down a dark hallway. They can't possibly know what the smoke or fire environment is like on the exterior or how the building might be weakening under the stress of fire. So I think it transcends all the positions. And if you don't mind, I think I'd like to just swing at this question in a slightly different way by instead of discussing the mistakes that occur, discuss the challenges that occur simply because in my observation, is in. Most circumstances, the responder be that the AC or the person on either end of the hose. Really? They don't realize that they're experiencing issues with situational awareness. In other words, they're doing everything that they think is the right thing. So they're not really making any mistakes per se, other than the fact that they're human and humans are fallible creatures, subject to the imperfections and the limitations that we have as humans, and our ability to see, hear and understand everything that's happening in our environment, especially in dynamically, changing environments that are time compressed when we're under stress. And so with that noted, if we think about those three component parts of situational awareness perception, understanding and prediction it's been my assessment that the greatest challenge for all responders comes when in the area of having to make accurate and timely predictions of future events in time to prevent bad outcomes. I think most responders if you said, you know, when you get on a scene, you got to pay attention, I think most would understand that that's pretty important. Now, there's some challenges with paying attention that I don't know that they necessarily know they're going to be facing when they're trying to pay attention in a high risk, time compressed environment. But I think most of them would know that paying attention is important. I think most of them would know that understanding what's going on around them is important. Where I see the challenges is when it comes to prediction. Now, it's worth noting that even with very strong situational awareness, bad things can still happen. Unpredictable things can still occur. Even if we have good prediction skills, we cannot predict the outcome of every possible scenario. If we're able to learn about the most common contributing factors or the most common environmental clues and cues that lead to a catastrophic outcome, then we can make better predictions and thus make better decisions based on those predictions. If you pause in the moment and you look into the future, say five minutes into the future, mentally, you're kind of using your imagination, and you look five minutes into the future and you see this decision that you're about to implement has got a pretty high probability of not working out so well. Well, then you should probably rethink. Should I do this? Is this going to be smart to take this kind of risk or this kind of gamble when I can see this not achieving what I would want it to achieve, or even holding a grave consequence for myself or others? So, for example, if I had to give context this, when firefighters who die while in the act of firefighting, while operating inside residential dwelling fires, it's often attributed to a flashover or a rapid thermal assault or a partial structural collapse. Most often the firefighter falling through a floor that's been weakened by fire. So if we can help firefighters perceive the clues and cues, flash over and collapse, understand what those clues and cues mean, and then help them to make accurate and timely predictions about outcomes, it puts the crew and the commanders in the best position to make a decision to prevent an injury or a fatality. But in summary, it's in the predictive area that we hold the greatest potential for improving.

Chief Ed Mann: So along those lines, when it comes to prediction, you talked earlier about all the near missed reports that you read and NIOS reports, so on and so forth. If an individual would take the time to read near missed reports and read the NIOS reports and look at those things that continue to kill and injure firefighters, would it help them be able to be better predictors of the situation that they're in, having learned from people who have already experienced a death or an injury?

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if it amazes me or disappoints me when I survey audiences of how many of you have read near miss reports from the firefighter near miss reporting system and so few hands go up. And how many of you have read line of duty death reports from NIOSH? And so few hands go up. And as time has marched on, more hands are going up now than in the earlier years, but still not a substantial amount. Which is to say, if I have a class of 50 people, and let's just say the 50 represent multiple departments, not like 50 from one department, because that might skew the results of this survey. But if I had 50 from, say, ten different departments, I might get four or five hands that would go up for each of those questions. And I think to myself, what a missed opportunity. Every firefighter that dies in the line of duty has given us the gift of knowledge, if there's been an investigation report, the gift of understanding how it happened, why it happened, and what we can learn from it to keep it from happening again. I once heard somebody say, and it really gut punched me, we're not inventing any new ways to kill firefighters. We're just taking all the ways we know how to do it, and we perfect it. We just keep on getting better and better and better at it. And one of the best ways to break that cycle is not to try to experience all these things yourself at your incidents, but to learn from those near myths and tragedies of others. So that when you're in a very similar circumstance. You can hearken back that lesson that you learned and said, whoa, this reminds me a whole lot of this feels a whole lot like that incident that I was reading about where that firefighter died, doing what I'm thinking I was just getting ready to do because I thought it was a good idea. But now I don't think it's such a good idea, because I remember in that report they did that, and these were the consequences. So the value of learning from others experiences is extremely beneficial and extremely powerful in the development of situation awareness. Because one of the parts of the process of developing situation awareness when we're trying to make predictions is we're going through our collection of stored memories and saying, what memory do I have about have I had this before? Have I trained on this? Do I have experience with this? Have I read of near or miss or a casual report on this? We're trying to find those data points to help drive a good decision. And if you don't have that experience and you haven't read of someone else having that experience with a catastrophe, you could find yourself doing exactly the same thing that they did. And now we got another casualty. The one thing that really frustrated me when I read all those line of duty death reports and serious injury reports is how many times we just kept doing the same thing over and over and over again. Like, we're not learning anything from firefighters that die. Of course, then when I survey and find out that only four or five hands go up out of 50 people. Well, then I know why we're not learning why firefighters die. Because people aren't investing the time to read to read a report. I don't know what it is. I don't want to conclude anything. Whether it's they don't have time or they just don't like reading, or they think, well, that would just happen to some other unlucky person, but I've got better skills. I can't really say for sure what prevents or drives somebody to not want to learn from tragedy. I think it was saying something like history. If we don't learn from history, we're destined to repeat it. Well, that's kind of like what we're doing in the fire service. We're not learning from the history, so we're repeating it.

Chief Ed Mann: So in preparation for today, I went back through my notes for the 14 module online Sam program I completed. And obviously we don't have enough time in an hour podcast to discuss them all. But with that in mind, and kind of to the point you were just making earlier, with the proliferation of social media with everybody, a cell phone is now a potential news reporter. We all see videos of fire department's response to incidents, and obviously many people offer their comments on what they see. Often those comments are negative. The one thing I remember from course one general first responder safety was not being judgmental because it's not compatible with learning. Expand on that message for our listeners.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Sure. Well, I'm very glad that that lesson stuck with you and that you made a note of that, because that is a really briefly important lesson. Sometimes people just gloss right over that one and miss just how powerful that is. And there are several ways that we can become better firefighters. We can take classes, classroom classes. We can do hands on training. We can do simulated scenarios. We can respond to actual emergency incidents and get experience that way. We can read near miss reports. We can read line of duty death reports, and we can watch videos, be it on YouTube or social media. And I think that's kind of what you're making the reference to everybody with a cell phone putting stuff on social media. So it's the last three on that list that speak to the challenges of creating the judgmental mindset when learning from near misses or injuries or tragedies of fellow responders. We learn more, if we can, withhold our judgment. One of the most frustrating things for me and reading the comments on social media about the actions of a department is when the writer in the comments OPINS that the firefighter or the crew or the commander or whoever is doing something dumb or stupid. That really bristles me, because responders aren't stupid. Just because something doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean that in the moment that it didn't make sense to them. To judge them stupid is to believe that they should have known better but if they knew better, they probably wouldn't have done what they were doing when they did it. The judging mind simply cannot be a learning mind. We are either in the mindset of judging others or we're in the mindset of learning from others. The next time you see something on social media or on YouTube that turned out poorly, instead of saying to yourself, what in the world were they thinking when they did that? Ask yourself this question why did what they were doing at that moment of time when something went bad? Why did that make sense to them? It doesn't have to make sense to you. It may never make sense to you. Try to understand. Force yourself to come up with some plausible explanation as to why what they were doing made sense to them. Maybe it's because that's how they were trained. Maybe because that's the way they've always done it. Maybe it's because they were just following orders from a superior officer. Maybe they didn't know what to do but felt some pressure to do something and they did that. Now, unless we can ask them directly, we probably won't ever know what really compelled that behavior. But it is so easy to find fault in others, especially when the outcome is bad. I see videos posted on social media that are supposed to be examples of good things that are happening, a good practice on an incident, and there will still be people that go to the comments and find ways to criticize and to be judgmental. So when they're doing that, they're not learning from the good that's happening in the video either. They're finding fault and blame like they're going to win some kind of prize when they find it and they get really good at it. But there's nothing to be gained. So instead of judging, just try learning. Open your mind up to why it made sense to them. And what we might find out is we could end up maybe doing the same thing. In other words, if we can find a way to make it seem sensible for them under stress in the moment, with time compression, changing conditions, lives at risk. Some of these people who judge, I think they think that they've never had fault in their life, that they've never made mistakes. They have. But they're so easy to find the fault in judgment in others. And you don't learn that way. You learn with a learner's mindset, not a judgment mindset.

Chief Ed Mann: And I honestly don't think we do our profession any justice when we start. I mean, look, both volunteering careers are having issues with recruiting people. So if I'm Johnny Q. Public and I'm watching a video that happens to come across YouTube and I see all the negative comments from other firefighters, I may think to myself, as a civilian, do I really want to be part of that? Where their own people destroy them on Facebook or on YouTube.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Yeah, like tigers we are.

Chief Ed Mann: You know. Look, I'll be honest with you. I watch videos sometimes and my wife will say, to know, if you're going to talk that way, why do you bother watching them? But I've never made a comment on social media about it. I refuse to make any comments about it on social media because I don't know what they were going through at that moment in time and I couldn't agree with you more. And now when I watch these videos after completing your course, I try to put myself in their shoes to understand why they may have done what they did at that particular time.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: It changes perspective.

Chief Ed Mann: Yes, it does. Most definitely, yeah.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Good on you for taking that lesson.

Chief Ed Mann: So you kind of talked about it here a little bit, but in course five, you address staffing. And this isn't only an issue for volunteer fire service, but many career departments too. As I recall, during your studies and interviews with incident commanders, staffing was the number one barrier to situational awareness. Can you take a few minutes to expand on that for our listeners?

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Yeah. Again. Good on you, Ed. You must have took some good notes or have a really good memory.

Chief Ed Mann: I took lots of notes, so I would.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Good, good. Initially, I was really surprised by this finding in the research because with over 100 barriers, those 100 barriers were classified into about a dozen categories of barriers. In other words, there were groupings where groupings for staffing, groupings for attention, groupings for different barriers that kind of fit together. And I really didn't expect that staffing was going to come to the top of the list as the most frequently identified barrier to awareness. And again, this research was using experienced incident commanders. They had to have at least 15 years of experience of commanding fireground incidents. So these were not novice commanders, but experienced ones. As a fire chief, I think I knew intuitively that staffing levels are important to me and trying to get things accomplished on an incident scene, but I didn't expect it to be the highest rated barrier for situational awareness. But if you pause and think about it for a moment, it really does make sense because everything we do as Responders is dependent on staffing. So if you take a moment to think about the role of the incident commander as a movie director, so we're going to make an analogy. So the incident commander is similar to that of a movie director and the crews of Responders are the actors in the movie. So as the incident commander gives orders, or as the movie director gives orders on the set, then the incident commander or director holds expectations that the crew, or in the case of the director, the actors are going to perform the tasks that they were given in unison. In other words, it's timed out and everything has a choreography to it. Under. Time constraints toward accomplishing a common goal. So when you think about the analogy of an IC to a movie director, it really does make sense because if you look at the actors, the ability to accomplish everything that the director wants or everything that the IC wants done within a finite amount of time depends entirely on people. So when you look at the barriers to situational awareness related to staffing, you have barriers related to crew quantity. How many people are on each crew? It's almost indisputable, I think. I don't know. I guess, as you said, Ed, somebody will find a way to argue with it that a crew of four can get more done than a crew of two, or a crew of six can get more done than a crew of three. So crew quantity impacts the awareness of the commander because they hold some expectations that based on crew size, certain things are going to get done in a certain amount of time. So you have crew quantity. Now, ironically, in my research, when I looked at crew quantity as a barrier, there were two components. There was understaffing and overstaffing. Now, most often people would say, overstaffing. What a wonderful problem to have to be overstaffed on an incident. Well, it is a wonderful problem till it becomes a problem because we can front load an incident that ends up not needing 30 people, 40 people. But then we got 30 or 40 people there who are action oriented, who want to get something done, who wanted to get in the game, who want to be part of the action. And if we either engage them in doing something or we stage them or we send them home, and if you turn around and send them home, you don't have an overstaffing issue because you cancel them and send them home. When you hold them in staging or you try to find things for too many people that you have to do something, it actually ends up being challenging for the incident commander. So, overstaffing, understaffing, unpredictable staffing, how many people are going to show up on each vehicle? What is the physical stamina of each person on each crew? What is the experience level of each person on each crew? We would hope that everyone would have the same stamina and same experience, and we know that that's just simply not true. And then response time delays, because if a commander is, say, a crew on the interior is saying, well, we need to have ventilation, but the crew that's going to do the ventilation isn't there yet, well, then that messes up the movie script, because the script, the well played script would be interior crew would order ventilation. Command would tell the vent crew, conduct the ventilation. The vent crew would conduct the ventilation, clear the interior out, make conditions better for the interior crew. But if you don't have all the actors or all the players there when the task needs done that can impact the game plan or it can draw the commander's attention off the task. And they can find themselves getting hyper focused on the task that isn't getting done, because they know of how important it is that that task get done. To coordinate with the crew that's on the interior, with all the demands on the IC, it's easy. Not easy, but it can happen that an IC can lose sight of the fact that not all crews, all members of all crews, that they're not equal in knowledge, skills, ability, experience, fitness, stamina, even passion to do high quality work can vary person to person. Commitment to doing it safe and by best practices can also vary widely. So there's the potential for a great deal of inequities in all of these traits. So the complexity and the challenge of awareness of staffing levels and the ability to get the task done to a plan turns out to be really stressful and really complex and likely even more complicated in volunteer organizations when you don't really know who's turning out. Even if, say, department has a, and it's a best practice to have a procedure that on a volunteer department to say, our engines route with four, so at least the commander knows how many is going to arrive on that apparatus versus engine one is in route, you don't know how many turned out, 23456, you don't know. So if they call around with their staffing, at least you know, I got four on the engine or two on the engine. And that can help the commander think about what they want to have that crew do when they get there. Because if you have a crew of four, you can get more done or even split the crews into two and two and get something done versus if, when they're responding, they're only approved two. You see that the quantity of staffing there influences then the commander's planning. But you think about volunteer departments, you might if you have that best practice of calling in route with a certain number, you might know how many is coming, but you really don't know anything about the crew quality, fitness, stamina, experience, abilities, until they get there. And you put eyeballs on them and say, okay, I ended up with good cards, I got a good crew, and now I know with that good crew, here's what we can get done. Or if I end up with four very inexperienced people, it would be foolish for us as commanders to think that those four inexperienced people are going to be able to get something done as efficiently and as quickly as four highly experienced people. If they did, it would probably be more by luck because they don't have the experience. Now, throw in the complication of using mutual aid and automatic aid. It's hard enough to know those traits about your own people. Now, if you're a commander and you've got mutual aid coming or auto aid coming, do you know those traits about those others coming from another community? So say for example, a mutual aid department arrives or an auto aid department arrives and you assign them to be your rapid intervention team. So you take four of those people and say, okay, we're required to have two in, two out, or Writ team or RIT team, whatever term you want to put to it. We'll allow this auto aid department to serve as our Writ team. Well what do you know about them? What do you know about their experience, their fitness, their stamina, their training on RIT procedures? Are they going to be able to perform? You think about when you have to make a RIT team, you're really going to get one chance for a perfect execution and you definitely want people that are going to know what they're doing and be well trained and well coordinated to execute that. And we just colloquially assign a company to be the Writ team because of probably when they arrived in the sequence of arrivals, when you're going to name a team to be the Writ team and you might not really even know anything about them. If a commander would pause and just reflect back and say, I just assigned four people for maybe one of our most critical tasks and I don't know anything about those four people and their abilities and their limitations. And then you just maybe say a little prayer that you hope you don't have to activate the Writ Team, which is not a good strategy.

Chief Ed Mann: So the bottom line is typically when you use the word staffing, people think of numbers, not necessarily quality of those people. And to that point, Chief, I use this, I did a class in Old Forge, New York on managing an incident and I threw the question out when I say staffing, what's it mean to you? And most people said, well, number of people. Well then I started asking some of the same questions to raise the same points that you just did. Okay, well what do you know about them? How well trained are they? Can they do the things you're going to ask them to do if you have automatic aid? Do you train with your automatic aid departments and know what their capabilities are? How many of you as incident commanders have heard a voice on the radio and you felt some relief because you know that guy or gal is headed in your direction and you're going to get some help, but at the same time you hear somebody else on the radio and you go, oh no, not him. The bottom line is, to your point, staffing goes much deeper than just numbers and I don't think we think beyond the number. We think of quantity and not quality a lot of times.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: I did a quick scenario at a program once and I said if you had an officer that. I said, let me give you a scenario. We're going to take four firefighters, put them on the engine, have them drive around to the back of the station. You got a training facility back there. We're going to have them pull an engine, three quarter line, take a ladder, set the ladder up to the building, advance the hose, line up to the second floor, go into the building, go down the hallway to the room at the end of the hallway where there's going to be a traffic cone. And we're going to have them spray water on the traffic cone. And the clock begins when the air brakes go on and the clock ends when the water hits the cone. How long would it take those four firefighters to get that task done? And the person's response was spot on. He said, it depends on which four firefighters we're talking about.

Chief Ed Mann: Absolutely. So the words our listeners are when you hear the word staffing, folks, it goes much deeper than just numbers, quantity.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: And quality, fitness, stamina, attitude. I don't want to go down that.

Chief Ed Mann: So to our listeners, if you want to learn more about what staffing means, enroll in the online program or make it to one of Rich's live presentations and I guarantee you, you'll learn a little more about what staffing actually means.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Thank you.

Chief Ed Mann: Obviously, during an incident, decisions must be made by everyone from the firefighter to the incident commander. So there's the typical standard decision making process. Why doesn't that work well for emergencies?

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Well, the traditional decision making process has been known and taught for decades. So on the surface, there's nothing inherently bad about what is called the traditional or rational decision making process. In fact, it's a really solid process. If you want to make a decision like, here's three houses that I could buy, which one would be the best for me? You could do an analysis and figure it out. Or if you're deciding where to go on vacation next summer, the traditional decision making process can help you to come up with the best decision because it's analytical, it's rational, it's assigning weights and measures to different criteria of what is the more important criteria here. So I'll give this a weighting of 60% and this one is less important. So I'll give this a weighting of 20%. And it could even be as rational as involving some math and calculations and coming up with the number that represents the best decision based on your most important to least important criteria. So on the surface unto itself, the rational decision making process is worthwhile and has a place. But where it faces challenges on emergency scenes is that emergency scenes are fast paced, dynamically changing environments coupled with stress. And it just makes it extremely difficult, arguably impossible, to do all the analytics and apply the weights and measures to multiple decision options. Because by the time you even got halfway through the process. Half the information that you're trying to analyze will have changed and become new information because of how dynamic the environment is changing. And all of that was the big finding of Dr. Gary Klein's research in the 1980s when the military hired him to help figure out how battleground commanders were messing up making battleground decisions in the moment. And they had been taught to use this rational, traditional decision making process and it was leading to some bad outcomes. And the Klein group could have embedded with soldiers but they thought, well, that's not going to be very safe for the researchers to be out there where the bullets are flying. So what they did is they embedded with fireground commanders and then they went and they rode along with the fireground commanders in Cleveland, Ohio. And this was in the from that research realized that fireground commanders don't use a traditional rational decision making process. But what they do use is a intuitive driven, what Gary Klein called recognition primed decision making process where they use a collection of past experiences, stored knowledge, line of duty death reports, near missed reports to help them to identify the best choice in the moment. And they don't spend a lot of time in analysis. And in fact, part of the whole lesson as we teach the decision making process of intuitive decisions is a lot of times intuitive decisions come to us as the feeling of knowledge, not as facts and data. Facts and data are conscious knowledge. Intuitive decisions come from the subconscious, from the stored knowledge of experiences that we have. So the more robust that collection of knowledge that we have of experiences and training and near miss reports and line of duty death reports and simulations and training scenarios, the more robust the access to knowledge stores that can drive our decisions. That's why Gary Klein called it recognition Primed, because the decision is primed by the recognition of similar past experiences, be they good outcomes or bad outcomes. If you train every time to a good outcome, train every time to a good outcome, well then you don't have any collection of stored experiences of bad outcomes, which is not good. So you have to kind of balance it. I'm not encouraging you to go out and make a bunch of mistakes. So you have stored bad outcomes, but you have a collection of knowledge in the stored bad outcomes of near misses and line of duty deaths that you can read about. And then when you're on an incident scene, you may simply have the feeling that what you're about to do isn't a good idea, but you might not actually remember chapter and verse this particular report of this particular incident. All you have is the intuitive knowledge that something doesn't seem right or feel right or you get a sense that what you're about to do is going to turn out tragically, that's feeling of doom. So we spend some time in the program, in the academy and in the live programs talking about the power of intuition and the power of intuitive knowledge and how to use it to help guide good decision making. And just like making traditional decisions can still have a bad outcome, making intuitive decisions can still have a bad outcome too. I just wrote it's funny we got onto this topic. I just wrote an article. It's been submitted. It's a peer reviewed journal for healthcare in Canada. And I wrote an article about intuitive decision making for trauma teams. How in the Er, a trauma team could not do very well using analytical decision processes because the trauma patient isn't going to wait around for the analysis. Their condition is going to change, and it's likely in a state of deterioration which is going to then not get better if they delay treatment waiting for analysis. Sometimes those trauma teams have to use intuitive processes based on experience. Nothing replaces the value of having subject matter experts. If you had two responders side by side, maybe the ideal scenario is one of them would be young. And I'm not trying to make young and old judgments here, but they'd be a CrossFitter, and they would have all this stamina and ability, and then the other one would just be the wise one, the one who's been around for 30 or 40 years. And you'd put them together and you'd say, the one with the fitness and stamina can do the heavy lifting, and the one, the heavy physical lifting and the one with all the wisdom could do the heavy mental lifting, and each of them would be an asset to each other. In other words, you would balance physical abilities with stored knowledge of the subject matter expert. That's maybe a little too ideal. In reality, we'd want well rounded responders that have both physical abilities and mental stored expertise. But the boy, I got the rant in there so much I almost kind of forgot the question about traditional decision making. It just doesn't lend itself well to high stress, rapidly changing environmental conditions because there just isn't the time to be analytical. Now, if you're talking about, say, like you're planning for a wildfire and you're planning out days in advance and weeks in advance yeah. Then there's probably a really good opportunity to use analytical decision processes because you're not under the time compression of decisions have to be made in a matter of seconds and minutes. For long range planning of wildland incidents or maybe even some hazmat incidents, your planning can go hours and days. And then when you have that advantage, you can slow the whole thing down and do rational analysis. So really the time compression is the enemy of rational traditional decision making.

Chief Ed Mann: So that kind of leads into the next question. Take a few minutes to talk about high risk, low frequency events and how fire departments should prepare for them. And look I realize you could spend hours just talking about the high risk low frequency, but it kind of ties back to your statement earlier about training and having those slides in your slide deck, so on and so forth.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Yeah, as everyone who's on here would know that the most frequent types of calls that we respond to are the low risk but high frequency, a lift assist, a smoke investigation that turns out to be a good intent call because of an overheated furnace motor. We have a lot of calls that we go to that just don't have a lot of risk for us, but we go to a lot of them, even most of our medical calls. And I avoid the word routine because I don't want people to think that calls are routine because every call is unique and holds the potential to be high risk. But in the end, most of them turn out to be low risk and we go to a lot of those types of calls. In those low risk calls, there's room for error in a low risk call and we get good at those because we see a lot of them. So it's easy for us to learn from the errors of low risk calls, because we can make an error in a low risk call and say, okay, well, that was dumb. I'm going to try not to do that again, and slowly advance ourselves and get better even at those types of calls which can prepare us then for the other type. Contrasted though with high risk and low frequency events that we don't get a lot of them. And the potential for injury and death is a lot higher in the fact that the call itself is just high risk, but then we don't do a lot of them. So now we don't have a lot of stored experiences. So a couple of tips for people that would want to be better at the high risk low frequency is one, when you do your training, do your training in realistic ways, as realistic with element for safety, as realistic as you can make the scenario. So the neuroscience term for this would be context dependent learning. So context means realistic real world. So make the training world as realistic, right down to radio traffic, right down to things that you would be seeing. So train with flashing lights on, train with the sounds that you're going to have on an incident scene to create the realism of that environment, to use simulations to create realistic environments. In other words, you can't create in a burn building. It's really hard to create the smoke that would be like pre flashover smoke like that really thick, heavy, black, angry, fast moving, hydrocarbon rich smoke rolling out of the burn building in a turbulent way, leading the flashover. Chances are we're not burning the kind of things that would create that kind of smoke. And the instructors aren't going to let that fire get that advanced along in a burn building because it can damage the building. But we can use simulation software on an iPad and take pictures of buildings in our town and simulate pre flashover conditions. The very smoke that we would be seeing at a flashover we could create in simulation. And then another tip would be mental rehearsals. So mental rehearsals is pretending yourself to be at a high risk, low frequency event before it ever happens. So imagining yourself. Well, if I arrive, say you go to a fast food place and go to the drive through and get your food. Instead of getting your food and leaving the drive through and going on to wherever you're going get your food and back into a parking spot and look at the fast food restaurant and say, now, what would I do if this was on fire? And I pulled up here and I had fire conditions? What would the fire conditions look like? What would the smoke conditions look like? What would my life safety concerns profile look like? What would be the risk of firefighters if we decided to go interior on this fast food restaurant to put this fire out? What would be our risk? Okay, now let me do a connection here to line of duty deaths. Several firefighters have died while fighting fires in fast food restaurants. Because the HVAC units are on the roofs, and the roofing material is usually not really beefed up and it's not protected well enough, that fire that gets to the roofing material is going to weaken it, and the HVAC units fall through, and the firefighters are inside, and they get killed by the HVAC units. So now you've done a mental simulation and tied it to a line of duty death, and you say, well, I think we'll go interior. Well, wait a minute. I'm not feeling the love for this because I remember that line of duty death report I read where those firefighters went in on that fire at that fast food restaurant, and the HVAC units fell from the roof and killed them. So maybe we would try to maybe not go interior if this was well involved. So again, just three tips for high risk, low frequency, context dependent learning, use of simulations to build stored knowledge even though it's simulated, and to use mental rehearsals. I guess the last thing I'd want to say about that, Ed, is that depending on the size of your department and how many high risk, low frequency type calls you get, don't try to perform like a Navy Seal when your department has little League training and experience. I went to a program once where a guy in the program had this beard, and I'm like, well, how do you wear an air pack with a beard like that? And he said, I don't wear an air pack. And I said, well, how do you go interior on a structure fire? Without an air pack. And he said, we don't. I said, what do you mean you don't? He says, Our department has about one structure fire every four to five years. And what we have determined in our department is that's not enough structure fires for us to be good at it. So what we're good at is getting there and putting water in from the outside and trying to get the fire out from the outside. Now, there'll be plenty of critics who hear this would just roll their eyes and probably get vomit in their mouth from me even suggesting that a fire department operate that way. But when you think about a department that has such rarity of high risk, low frequency, why would they take that degree of risk when they know they're under prepared to take that level of risk? So they just have a realist kind of mindset about it that we're not going to today is not the day that we're going to have somebody die because this is the first structure fire we've had in ten years. And they just don't take that kind of risk. They're under prepared for it, and they're not fooling themselves. They don't come into it with a Navy Seal mindset like, today's the day that I'm going to save everybody and slay the dragon and walk away the hero. And they're very realist about their abilities and limitations when faced with high risk, low frequency events. And unfortunately, there are some departments out there that try to be Navy Seal performance when they're not experienced and dedicated and trained enough to have Navy Seal performance.

Chief Ed Mann: And that all ties back into several points you've made. You took the time to ask the question, and you got what I feel is a very reasonable explanation as to why they do what they. That makes perfect sense to me. When it's explained to you in those terms, I applaud it.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: In fact, I complimented him in front of the whole class. That is a perfectly acceptable risk management strategy for that organization. When I got to talking to him a little more. Their department runs 30 calls a year. That's it not like 30 structure fires, 30 calls. So you're going to be limited in your abilities. Not to mention that they probably don't train like Navy Seals to have one structure fire every ten years. And they know it. That's the beautiful thing about it. They know it, they know their limitations, and they're not going to try to overextend themselves. That's where we get in trouble with high risk, low frequency, is we try to do things that we're under prepared for.

Chief Ed Mann: Excellent points, Chief. So we'll move along here. Obviously, everyone in our business is human, and you talked about this earlier. Please take a few minutes and share with our listeners your findings on how human factors impact situational awareness. And again, I realize that's like an entire chapter, so if you can summarize the human factors that impact situational awareness.

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Yes, well, as I'd said earlier, and I'll state it again, we're all human and therefore we're all fallible. And understanding our limitations and how our brains behave when our brain function changes because we're under stress can be very helpful toward keeping us grounded in the reality that we may be impacted by situational awareness barriers and not even realize that it's happening. Barriers like task fixation, auditory exclusion, just literally not hearing things that are happening around us, not seeing what is happening, not because you're not looking, but because you're blind to some of the things that are happening in front of you. confabulated realities, making up things that aren't even happening at all, or not seeing things that are happening, short term memory overload and all of these things that because we're human, we have limitations. And for some of these barriers, there are things that we can do about them, and for the others, there aren't things that we can do to prevent them. But knowing, as I said earlier about the person who passes out from when they give blood, knowing that can happen can help us to anticipate that they're going to happen and be ready to be proactive to counter it. But the whole premise of the flawed situational awareness course is to teach us something about ourselves as humans. And that is, unless a person has studied this at the university level, that is something that's just been missing almost entirely. For the fire service. We talk about building behavior, fire behavior, water behavior, but we don't talk about the human behavior now. We talk about mental health. So I'm not really talking about the mental health side of it. I'm talking about the human behavior, of how we're going to behave as humans under stress while working at high risk, high consequence incident scenes. And as you know from taking the Academy, some of it might seem obvious once it's said to you. And some of it is like, I never realized that although I've experienced it, I never really realized why I experienced it, or why this was happening, or why this was happening, or why I didn't see this or didn't hear this or why I said this when it really wasn't the truth. And these things happen because of our fallibility as humans, especially humans under stress.

Chief Ed Mann: So this leads to my next point. As I indicated earlier, there's simply no way we can address all aspects of good situational awareness in a 1 hour podcast. But I am hopeful that we've piqued the curiosity of our listeners to check out your website@www.sammatters.com to learn more. I'm going to put a plug in here again. Spend a little bit of money. It doesn't cost much. Enroll yourself on the online academy and take the courses. I'm telling you now, listeners, you're going to learn things about yourself that you didn't realize until you take the course. The whole idea, the. Human Factors is a big part of the course as well. And I can't say enough about the things I picked up on throughout the course and took lots of notes on. So again, go to the website, spend some time, kick the tires on it, enroll in the online academy. You won't be disappointed. So, Rich, as we near the end of the podcast, do you have any final words of wisdom for our listeners?

Dr. Rich Gasaway: Well, as it relates to situational awareness, it would be the importance to be well rounded, highly capable as a responder requires us as responders to develop five different situational awarenesses. When we think about situational awareness, we usually only think about the incident scene. Situational awareness and that's one, but there's actually five of them. It's personal awareness, and that's your knowledge, skills, abilities, fears, phobias, fitness, stamina, figuring out where you are, where you need to be, making a plan to how to get to where you need to be, personal awareness and knowing your limitations and not trying to go beyond them. The second one is team awareness. And that's the awareness of those that you're working with and working for and knowing their abilities and limitations. Because they say that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link. A crew is only as strong as the weakest member of that crew. And knowing that person's limitations can help keep you from becoming a victim. The third awareness is resource awareness. That's the awareness of everything that we depend upon that isn't human to get our job done. All of our tools, equipment, radios, monitoring equipment, thermal imaging cameras, knowing their abilities and limitations intimately before we need them under stress, including how all the buttons work and not going through which screen is it that shows that? That's not the time on an incident scene? We got to be proficient in our knowledge of all of our resources. The fourth one is the actual incident scene itself, which is one we talk about a lot in the class. And the fifth one, maybe the most challenging of all, which I made a minor mention of earlier, that is shared awareness. The ability to get everybody operating on an incident scene on the same page of understanding. In military terms, they might call that a common operating picture. Making sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, the command knows what the crews are doing, each crew knows what the other crews are doing. If there's multiple agencies, each agency knowing what the other agency's priorities are of what they're wanting to accomplish. Think about the complexity of a car accident scene where you have police, fire and EMS on the scene. Three different agencies, three different sets of priorities, three different packages of tactics that they're trying to accomplish and it isn't always compatible. And so creating a shared awareness of understanding each other's priorities and abilities and limitations, both within your agency and then cross agencies shared awareness from interior crew to exterior. That's what we were talking about a little bit earlier. So having a well developed five different awarenesses makes the responder more capable, at least from that aspect. It doesn't do anything about their physical abilities to do a job or their actual training on how to throw a ladder, that kind of things. This is all about the human side of it.

Chief Ed Mann: Well, look, I'm not one for blowing smoke, Chief, so I just want you to know I can't thank you enough for joining us today, and I truly mean that. I am not one that blows a lot of smoke at people, and sometimes that gets me in trouble. But I'm telling you, you don't know how happy I am that you agreed to join us today and share the message and to our listeners, if you have any questions or need additional resources from today, or you have an idea for a future webinar podcast, please email us at info@providentins.com. We'll get back to you as soon as we can. This does wrap up a provident podcast, but I want every one of our listeners to please join us on November the 21st at 07:00 p.m.. Eastern Standard Time for our live webinar with Chief Gasaway on how smart responders use situational awareness to improve safety. Until then, stay safe for your family safety.