What’s Wrong with Us? The Six Sicknesses of the Fire Industry

This week I had to accept that others had lost confidence in my leadership following a momentary lapse of judgment and self control over issues about which I am passionate and bigger causes to which I am deeply committed. After accepting the consequences, I looked back to see I too had lost confidence, not in my sense of purpose or my values, but in my ability to engage and encourage others to take risks and endure the discomfort of making others uncomfortable. If I lack confidence in the others with whom I am expected to lead, I have no reasonable hope or expectation of engendering their confidence in me, especially when I ask them to confront and accept the need for meaningful, lasting, and some say radical change.

As a result of this reflection on confidence and even deeper reflection on the state of the fire industry and the intersections of its issues with the existential crises of our age, I have distilled the following list I am calling the Six Sicknesses that describe the challenges I see inhibiting real and lasting change in the fire safety industry.

1. Reliance on Rules Over Reason. The fire industry has never fully recovered from the collapse of the rules-based fire safety regime, which depended upon simplifying, often undocumented, and even unsubstantiated assumptions to develop prescriptions and justify decisions. Once adopted, these rules were accepted uncritically as received wisdom rather than encouraging the development of faculties that encourage considered judgment and interpretation rather than unquestioning application. When new circumstances suggested the received wisdom was incomplete or simply wrong, we revised them to make exceptions the new rules, often without regard to what made them exceptional in the first place. As a consequence, the rules-based order often made solutions to even rather simple problems unnecessarily complicated, which imposed compliance and transaction costs in addition to the direct costs of addressing the situation itself. These tendencies also made people who knew how to 'talk-the-talk' seem much savvier than they really were, which in turn said to less fluent practitioners, "you need my help to navigate these complicated waters." This often left those truly responsible for decisions about fire safety performance and compliance unaware of the accountabilities that accompanied the advice they accepted. On top of all his, notwithstanding increased social pressure to pursue performance and improve efficiency, competence is often still assessed in terms of the received wisdom rather than the application of critical thinking, careful assessment, and sound judgment. A rules-based order pays little attention a priori to root causes, contributing factors, and social and environmental context (feedback loops), which are critical to improving performance in complex adaptive systems.
2. Confusing Complexity with Uncertainty. Most of us recognize we live in a complex world and often find ourselves surrounded by chaos and conflict. This can make it hard to know what to do, much less when or how to act. But the ambiguity that accompanies complexity is not the same as uncertainty. Too often the problem is not that we don't know what to do, how to do, when to do it, or why, we simply have too many options, which makes it difficult to know which one's right. Too many fire safety practitioners take advantage of this to imply the world is more dangerous even than it seems and to convince others that only they have the right answers. Too often though, they have no idea what the problems are or consider the problem for which they do have a solution the only one that matters enough to warrant others' attention. Getting your attention is their primary objective. They leverage the anxiety and fear induced by complexity to sell you on their simplifying assumptions. These tactics employ hyperbole, misplaced metaphors, misrepresentation, and misleading rhetoric to convince others that what they have to offer is what you need to achieve optimal results.
3. Over-expectation of Optimal Performance. In complex systems, especially socio-technical domains like fire safety, high-stakes competing goals, conflicting values, and inaccurate, incomplete, or inadequate information are the name of the game. These factors increase expectations on decision-makers to get their calls right. Too often decision-makers perceive and respond to these pressures by assuming two things: a) they must try to make everyone happy or at least try not to make everyone unhappy and b) their decision, even more so than its execution, will determine ultimate return-on-investment. However, more often than not, making the decision is more important than the decision itself. In a great many instances like this, either all of the available options are bad or all of the options are just good enough. The degrees of difference among any of the choices is not that great. That means what really matters is how the people affected by the decision appreciate the costs and consequences of the choices available and how prepared they are — usually working together as a team — to manage what comes next.
4. Reactive Rather Than Proactive Mindsets. Accompanying calls for better performance and improved efficiency came expectations that a proactive, preventive mindset would displace, if not fully replace, the reactive mindset that defined the rules-based regime. However, the reactive mindset has proven spectacularly durable and difficult to overcome. As appealing as prevention and mitigation may seem on their faces, they require us to confront the complexity in which we are immersed now rather than waiting and responding later when all is said and done. This gives those on the periphery of any consequences the sanguine sense they are above the fray, rather than forcing them to engage the thorny issues that come with getting in front of a situation and acting before it occurs or at least before it spins out of control. As a result, this too often leaves fire safety centered on the experience of firefighters rather than the people most directly exposed to fire risks. This creates and sustains a fatalistic (and often fantastic) mindset that reinforces the expectation that the world is a dangerous place, which as mentioned above makes us vulnerable to charlatans, crooks, and cheats selling us snake-oil rather than genuine salvation. Centering fire safety on the experience of firefighters also generates the false impression that true courage only comes from confronting the reality of danger after consequences become manifest rather than leading from the front and taking actions that could avoid damage, death, and disruption.
5. Fire Defined as a Technical Problem. Defining fire as a primarily if not purely technical problem has kept us from confronting the social inequities that fuel fire risk and increase vulnerability. The occurrence of fires is not purely random. How people, live, where people live, and the resources they have to satisfy their daily needs influences fire safety to a much greater extent than the rules-based regime can accommodate. The technical focus drives utilitarian approaches aimed at generating the greatest good for the greatest number. Unfortunately, raising the mean or the median too often leaves those near the bottom just scraping by while those at or near the top profit from the expectation that things are getting better, even if only very marginally so. Defining fire in technical terms keeps us from confronting our deeply held and often implicit assumptions and biases that imply the occurrence of fires, especially among the poor, reflect the moral failings of those who experience them, allow them to happen, or fail to prevent them. This fuels rhetoric among self-identified experts in the field that attributes failures to accept their rules-based technical advice as evidence of apathy, ignorance, avarice, or greed. This framing justifies interventions that minimize human intervention (except for ‘experts’ like firefighters) and marginalize human agency. We may think, “The world would be much less messy if it weren’t for all these damned people.” But thinking this way is looking more and more like a self-fulfilling prophecy owing to our technical hubris and the Law of Unintended Consequences.
6. Preoccupation with Perceptions and Reputations. The most ardent adherents to the rules-based regime and others tethered to the past seem much more worried about how others perceive them than actual performance. Concerns for their reputations replace reasoning and carefully considered risk-taking. This tendency reinforces expectations of instant gratification and immediate results that come with recognition of rules-based compliance even when the circumstances suggest the need for long-term thinking to avoid latent risks. Saying "I did what was expected today" does not eliminate much less alleviate us of the future burden of any unforeseen consequences that may come tomorrow. As humans, we have developed innate abilities to avoid certain risks, chief among them the risk of looking foolish or being seen as too rash or too brash. But this does not change the fact that we often learn the most and the best from the mistakes we make rather than any successes we achieve. It remains within our power to change this by rewarding those willing to take reasonable risks, encouraging them to fail forward, learn from any and every mistake, accept responsibility for consequences, make amends, and adjust course. However, such a change in attitude will force us to take a long, hard look at ourselves in the mirror and acknowledge our own immorality, which encourages us to place blame elsewhere and cast ourselves as victims rather than potential villains.

Nothing reflects the persistence of the rules-based regime and the Six Sicknesses more fully than the current approach to codes of conduct and reliance upon ethics investigations to redress grievances in the name of rooting out wrongdoers. Ethics is a branch of philosophy that focuses on virtues and behavior over values.

Reliance upon ethics has largely displaced moral reasoning in contemporary culture. The fire industry’s reliance on norms reinforces a focus on solutions for their own sake rather than questioning long and dearly held assumptions that prevent us from facing up to the problems themselves.

The world has much bigger problems than fire safety. And these issues affect most people and move them deeply and differently than fire safety. Again, the biggest issues often inspire opposing opinions, competing goals, and conflicting values. This makes it awfully appealing to simply change the subject, but the elephant in the room is too big to ignore. Avoiding it won’t make it go away. Sooner or later we’ll either get trampled or sat upon. Either outcome is bad.

Fire safety — our small corner of the wider world — intersects with nearly every big problem confronting our species. We can choose to stay centered on ourselves believing (or more often simply fooling ourselves into thinking) we have others’ best interests at heart or we can recenter ourselves on community, society, sustainability, morality, and justice, which connect us with the existential crises of our age and position ourselves to pursue a better future.

I know which direction I’m heading. And now I’m heading in that direction with renewed confidence it’s the right way for me to head. I am looking forward to joining others outside our industry who are already blazing the trail ahead of me. And I hope others of you who took the time to read this reflection will join me on that journey.