“How did we get to a place where when things go wrong—and they will—you are damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t?” Chief Bobby Halton, education director, FDIC/editor in chief of Fire Engineering, posed this question to the audience at today’s General Session. He explained: “If we follow all the rules and things go wrong on the fireground, the elite among us will cry and those with no skin in the game will bemoan that we failed to innovate, deviate, and improvise. If we innovate, deviate, and improvise and things go wrong on the fireground, the elite among us will cry and those with no skin in the game will bemoan we didn’t follow the rules.” He labeled the situation “a zero-sum game.”
“It our fire service,” Halton declared, “and if we want to keep it, we must continue to make the rules, locally. We cannot allow some self-appointed genius with no skin in the game, some enlightened progressive bureaucrat who idolizes systems, or some politician who has never had the guts to bunker up and lay it on the line dictate to us, those with skin in the game, how to fight fires.”
All it takes to be a firefighter, Halton noted, “are thousands of hours of drill; thousands of hours of training; thousands of hours of study; thousands of hours of PT; thousands of hours of evaluating every call; thousands of hours of getting certified, qualified, and cleared so you can learn something new every day. Then, someday if you are lucky--after years of hard work and dedication and years of sweat, blood, sore muscles, bruises, bumps, and fractures--if you are like the men and women in this room, you might be worthy to be called a firefighter, a craftsman, and be recognized by your peers as a highly skilled master of the most complex craft in history.”
Halton cited conditions today that are working to interfere with firefighters exercising their skills as craftsmen. Standards are encouraged for everything, he said. “They gave rise to centralized control incident commanders, specialization, division of labor, and systems of compliance that are useful to a point. They have made us obsessed with records, data, reports, policies, and procedures. All of this is beneficial and useful to a point; then it becomes tyrannical.” He noted also “the misguided belief in the perfection of man through behavioral control.”
“Standardization, compliant ways of doing work, is very good for working with the risks and accounts for much of what we do, but it falls short in novel, diverse, and complex incidents, which we also do a lot,” Halton explained. “It gets messy where we deal with uncertainty, risks we don’t know or aren’t aware of, and when we deal with what we think we know or, worse, ‘what we know that ain’t so.’
“Our fire service has reverence for complexity, randomness, and the unpredictability of where we do our work. Fires spot, winds change,
floors fail, ceilings collapse—some things are unpredictable. As such, we accept and respect the critical necessity to complete the mission in standard ways when possible or alternative ways when possible, but surrendering or doing nothing, is never an option.
“We firefighters appreciate that the complexity of our mission requires that we take a broad view, are modest in our assessments, are
respectful of uncertainty, and that we understand the difference between the times we should follow the rules and the times we should throw the rules out,” Halton continued.
Halton said that the rise of collectivism prevalent in our society has begotten a legacy of “authoritarian modernism, the belief that no one will get hurt if we follow the rules and stay to the procedures.” The elitists and those not affected by the rules they promote and enforce have been indoctrinated that “all accidents are caused by humans who are bad actors, macho cowboys, immoral, reckless, aggressive deviants and that devia