By Barry Bouwsema
与快速火灾地是一个动态的环境ly changing conditions. It is in this demanding worksite that the incident commander must make many rapid life and death decisions: Is an offensive or defensive strategy required? Is the roof stable enough for ventilation? Will building conditions allow for interior search? The list goes on. Studies have shown that the incident commander’s level of experience is a large factor in determining whether an appropriate decision will be made.
Alan Brunacini, chief (Ret.) of the Phoenix (AZ) Fire Department, states that the incident commander must quickly prioritize problems and develop solutions (Brunacini,Fire Command, p. 6), but how does a incident commander actually accomplish these objectives? In his bookCommand and Control of Fires and Emergencies, Vincent Dunn, deputy chief (Ret.) Fire Department of New York (FDNY), relates that the US Marine Corps routinely uses the experiences of FDNY incident commanders to teach the process of making life-and-death decisions (Dunn,Command and Control of Fires and Emergencies, p.9). You can teach the skills of rapid decision making by using the experiences of the incident commanders.
Dr. Gary Klein has investigated the subject of recognition primed decisions (RPD) related to the decision-making process. According to Klein,”Fireground commanders will make 80% of their decisions in less than one minute” (Klein,Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, p. 4). Emergency scene decision making relies heavily on experience, especially when the incident commander is faced with a time-pressure situation. In RPD, the decision maker is assumed to generate a possible course of action in response to the emergency and then compare it to the constraints imposed by the emergency situation. The first course of action that is not rejected following the rapid comparison is then selected as an appropriate decision.
The RPD decision-making model combines two ways of developing a decision; the first is recognizing which course of action makes sense; the second is evaluating the course of action through imagination to evaluate if the actions of the decision make sense. When making an RPD, the IC will not consciously consider a plan B until a mental simulation of plan A has shown that plan A will not work. For example, an IC may initially order a pump crew to stretch a 45mm handline into a fire. While the crew is performing the required task, the IC commander begins a mental simulation in which the line is stretched into the fire and an interior attack initiated. If he visualizes the attack line as having little to no effect because of the volume of fire, he will change his order and initiate plan B, where a 65mm line is put into action. The decision-making evaluation often happens at the “speed of thought,” and would seem to be an almost unconscious action. RPD proposes that the IC will make a fireground decision based on pattern matching as the current problem is compared with similar problems encountered in the past. The solution to the problem presents itself from the manner in which similar problems were solved in the past.
The difference between being an experienced or inexperienced IC plays a major factor in the RPD decision-making process. An experienced commander will be able to rapidly process the needed information to make an appropriate decision. Having the ability to gather the necessary information for a sophisticated judgment in a short period of time has been called “thin slicing.” The mind unconsciously filters a few select factors that really matter from an overwhelming number of variables (Gladwell,Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, p.23). The veteran IC can take in and evaluate a large amount of information without experiencing information overload; conversely, a novice IC will not be able to take in and process the same amount of information in the time necessary to make a critical command and control decision.
Through experience the IC can evaluate the decision by imagining potential roadblocks that would prevent a successful outcome. The inexperienced IC will need more time and more information to make a decision and may also lack the experience needed to identify potential problems. Experienced ICs have developed a higher level of expectations on how the fire scene will progress. Using pattern matching, the IC will be able to recognize if the fire is fitting within the prototypical response expected from the fire scene. If the events are not typical, the IC must determine why and possibly change his course of action to accommodate changes in the fire scene. The inexperienced IC will not have the mental bank of data to draw from to help identify when the sequence of events is not progressing according to expectation. There may be a change in the fire situation, and the novice IC may not recognize it because he has not developed an appropriate expectation because he lacks experience.
The RPD paradigm of decision making applies to fireground command because decisions on the fireground are under time pressure conditions and experience of the fire commander plays a large part in determining if the appropriate decision will be made. Today’s new generation of fireground commanders deserve to be given opportunities to develop this experience through training and mentoring before being asked to make these life-and-death decisions.
References
Brunacini, A. (1985).Fire Command. College Park, Maryland: YBS Productions.
Dunn, V. (1999).Command and Control of Fires and Emergencies. Saddle Brook, New Jersey: PennWell Publishing Company.
Gladwell, M. (2005).Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York, New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Klein, G. (1998).Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Barry Bouwsema, a 21-year veteran of the fire service, is a fire officer and paramedic with the Strathcona County Emergency Services in Alberta, Canada.
