BobbieOnFire

Why do we have accidents? Sure, we have a dangerous profession. But are accidents just the inevitable results of a perilous environment? I hope you don’t think so. We can and should look for ways to avoid injuries and worse for our personnel. In this story, Curtis Heaton and I talk about a couple issues on three historical fatality fires. I hope you listen and then think about what you might do in a similar circumstance. Remember we can’t improve performance if we don’t study and make changes.

Thanks for listening but don’t forget to read my memoir, Both Sides Of The Fire Line, available at your favorite bookstore.

Todays podcast is an interview with Riva Duncan, the Vice President of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters Organization. She’ll talk about the Presidents proposed 2024 budget and all that it might mean for our federal wildland firefighters as well as the promised permanent changes in pay grades and job classifications. Tune in and hear the latest that could have long lasting impacts on all of the firefighting community.

A few years back, I was flying around with a political appointee who many of us used to work for. We were visiting some large, complex incidents, talking to the ICs and our jurisdictional partners. It wasn’t my favorite kind of duty, but once I worked at the Regional Office, that was my typical day. Listen in to a short conversation I had with this gentleman that day. That conversation was both frustrating and greatly disappointing for me.

The future of wildland fire management is really complex and unknown. But we know it’s only going to get worse. What are we going to do differently? You know the famous saying that Einstein is supposed to have said that goes, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results?”

Ever get that feeling during fire season? Fire after fire, year after year we say, “if I have one more shift I can catch this one.” Or, “we just need 2 more shot crews to hook this thing. It happens on almost every extended attack fire. It really is insane. Year after year we’re repeating the same actions and getting the same results.

Fires are getting bigger, more homes are burning, we’re spending more money and more firefighters are dying... but we’re not really making any substantive changes. Seems like insanity to me because there no political will to do anything substantially different. Listen to this episode and see what you think. You future leaders are going to have to fix what me and the rest of my generation couldn’t.

Sometimes, we as leaders think an employees question is a threat to our authority. They may be trying to learn, but their curiosity can be squashed by how we respond. Our body language and the words we use are critical. You might not realize it but you have a direct impact on your organizations learning culture. How we react can filter down through the entire organization effecting how everyone responds to simple questions or providing perspective and input. The culture we create is critical for the learning environment that our employees and co-workers are living and working in.

Listen in to this story and decide for yourselves – what you think about it.

Have you ever felt like a failure? How about just having failed from time to time? In this episode, we talk about what it means to fail versus what it means to merely make a mistake. The difference may be our ability to learn from our mistakes. But how do we learn from our mistakes? Is it easy to do? I think our attitude is everything. Listen in today and get some insights from a couple old firefighters about how we learn from our mistakes and succeed.