Fire is where the glory is. They call us firefighters, not building fighters. But fire isn’t really the enemy, is it? How well do you know your enemy?

Murder holes, force multipliers, and obstacles. All of them are components leading to what very well may be a unified theory of firefighters.

Spoiler Alert: we don’t really solve the pay problem. That would break a long-standing tradition on our podcast of not solving anything. But there are virtual arms races in some regions as departments raise salaries to compete for what seems to be an ever-shrinking pool of firefighters. Pay is one of those things that we’re all talking about, but we haven’t talked about. So, we took a stab at it.

What happens when lightning doesn’t strike a house, and you don’t act like the other firefighters?

And we wrap up our series on The Pathfinder with Part III, which picks up right where we left off at the end of Part II.

We think that the Pathfinder concept is such an important one, that we actually recorded two separate episodes trying to get it right. But each episode went different directions, so they both ended up being valuable to the discussion.

What do a fire recruit, a 70’s sitcom, and Walt Disney have to do with regret?

Every organization has those persons who push the organization from the inside. They advocate passionately for change, but while they’re doing it they can cause discomfort for those around them. They challenge long-held assumptions. They champion new technologies and strategies. They hold up a beacon and ask everyone else to follow into unchartered territory.

It’s important work to any successful organization, but it can be exceptionally frustrating for those who are either appointed by the organization, or those that choose all on their own to be a Pathfinder. Beating a path through the wilderness is hard work, and it isn’t for just anyone.

This isn’t really an outtake; it’s just a short take on a topic that wasn’t really large enough to devote an entire episode to. Bill, all by his lonesome, talks into the mic about the paradox of The Ship of Theseus and what that means for organizational identity…and maybe all of us.

A listener asked us: “At what point is a wrong decision actually worse than no decision at all?”

It’s a great starting point for a roving conversation that gets into whether results matter in that calculus. We also rehash our earlier debate on the nature of luck in the fire service (Episode 082), what the role of intent is, how Pabel dissects an incident moving forward and Bill goes backwards, and the difference between being wrong and making a mistake.