Adapt and Overcome...

"If you don't work as a team you fail..."

- Colorado Firefighter

Good morning - I took the opportunity to relisten to the interview last week with a local firefighter. The themes on teamwork, cohesion and training were crystal clear and well presented. This is a talented, skilled, experienced firefighter with 20+ years of firefighting work - he has seen a lot.

I appreciated his insight and candid responses to this question: "Your team... what are some specific examples of being in total synch, on the same page mentally, etc.? Are there examples where this did not happen or the teamwork started to fall apart? How did you respond?"

Here are a few key comments I pulled from the audio recording that are reminders to just how much work is involved in building a tight-knit team and being in total sync. 

Teamwork
"There is always going to be teamwork. It is a huge part of our job. If you don't work as a team, you fail...and everybody knows that."

"You have to adapt and overcome - when things change with your crew...everyone has different personalities, so when you get different personalities coming in that can cause problems... that doesn't mean they're wrong, people are just different and you have to find a way to make that work."

"...we have all been part of that same crew for awhile, the same people - through that experience of training together and running calls together, it is huge. We have a plan, we know our responsibilities, we know what that person is doing, we know their capabilities - you get that knowledge by working with them longer and by training with them, by going through the real-life things with them."

Cohesion
"The more you work together the stronger that gel gets. It also depends on how much training you do together and how many calls you run together. Somewhere around a year you are beginning to understand everyone else in your crew and things are starting to come together."

"You see crews that have been together for five years and it shows...and it helps. When you know exactly what that person is going to do, you don't have to worry about it and you can focus on your own tasks - that makes a huge difference."

Training
"We can train all day long. We can run through scenarios in our heads all day long. The bottom line is every situation is different. There is going to be chaos and knowing how your crew reacts to that chaos, that's big too."

"Obviously, I encounter situations I haven't been in before but I always fall back on my experience and training. I've seen this situation before and I have a feeling this is how it is going to turn out and this is how I am going to attack this situation."
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Some powerful concepts and principles called out by this talented firefighter. I love his focus on the criticality of teamwork and how it is human-centric first and foremost.

I will leave you with some questions to consider...

** How many operations centers are still trying to engineer the chaos out of these emergency situations by chasing the top-down solution based on "more, more, more:"

• More data
• More hardware
• More software
• More bits of precision; and
• More quantification

This approach is important but insufficient. The surprising bottom-up solution in an emergency operations center is more informal interaction via social media - "who can we dialog with?"

** How is your team engaging collaboratively in real-time (i.e., the actual time when an incident takes place)? How is your Human Net performing?

** How well does your operations center respond to chaos?

Humbly,
Collabman