This episode is about delaying decision-making. Or maybe it’s not. We really don’t know what to think of Falkland’s Law, but we have a good time not getting anywhere.

We talk about it A LOT, but we’ve never really tried to define what we think leadership is. In this episode, we discuss various definitions of leadership; what we like and what we don’t like.

Photo Credit: Cottonbro Studio

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.

Bob (left) on the Appalachian Trail.

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.”

Photo credit: Maarten Visser This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

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.

Former Birmingham Firefighter George Cowgill posted a very personal account of his time as a firefighter, and why he’s leaving that behind. If you’ve read it, you’re probably not surprised that it went viral, which is how we came across it.

In this episode, we interview George (in Birmingham) by telephone as he discusses how he decided it was time to go.

Like the picture above, psychological contracts can be binding, circular, heavy, old, rusty, and sometimes broken.

Before this episode, two of us hadn’t ever heard of a psychological contract, but apparently we all have them. What they really are, who you have them with, and whether or not it’s okay to break them are questions that aren’t so easily answered, but we give it the ol’ Combustible try.