Combustible CTP Group

Whenever you lose your way as a leader, you can always ask yourself, “What would Ted do?”

In this episode, we dive into how firefighters’ decision-making process works, and how critically reliant that process is on experience. So, where are we missing opportunities to build experience and convert it to expertise?

We’ve come up with a new concept called DIFOS that is a series of questions that can be asked to really examine how a decision-making process evolved. It can be used on-scene after a fire or in any situation where an important decision was made.

In Part 3 of our interview we pick up where we left off and get into how we evaluate accidents in the fire service, what we might be able to learn about that process from the airline industry, how to remove dominoes, and we give Bob “The Questions.”

Bob is the first guest we’ve had to show up to the recording with a powerpoint presentation. And while that gave us a chuckle, it’s a presentation filled with concepts that blew us away…and it’s a presentation that he threw together the day before. There’s a lot here, and we barely scratched the surface on some of it, but we really dig into purposeful non-compliance in Part 2.

We also discuss getting everyone dialed in on paying attention on scene, as well as teaching all of our folks to speak up when they see something they think may be important. We also discuss what accident investigation in the airline industry may hold for the fire service, heuristics, and Bob throws in a literal war story from Vietnam about tunnel vision.

Bob Maynard is Shane’s father-in-law, and he just happens to also be one of the most interesting people we’ve ever met. Highlights from his past include Chinook helicopter pilot during Vietnam, personal pilot of one of our leadership idols, did 20 years with the FAA, and now runs his own company training pilots to fight forest fires. And while he’s never fought a fire in his life, a LOT of what he knows about flying directly applies to the fire service.

In Part 1 of our interview with Bob, we begin to explore purposeful non-compliance - when you know you shouldn’t do something, but for some reason do it anyway.

This episode started with the deceptively simple question, “At what level in your organization do people begin to feel and act as if they are valued more for their judgment than for their technical expertise?” We applied that question to our own experience in fire departments, but it’s an interesting question for any organization. And that’s just the jumping off point for a discussion on the nature of judgment, what experience has to do with it, and the other ways you can build and strengthen your judgment.