BY MARK WALLACE
This article explains the basics of fire department strategic planning for those new to the concept. As a member of the fire service and believing that you have had a reasonable amount of training, you already make strategic plans and are probably effective at it, at least when it involves emergency operations. This article is not about emergency operations; it is more about organizational development. But a strategy for emergency operations is a good place to start the discussion.
For nearly every type of emergency/incident response, our basic strategic plan has been listed as three strategic goals:
- Life safety,
- Incident stabilization, and
- Property conservation.
This is as simple as it gets for most strategic plans for emergency incident response. It’s the tactical or operational plans with all of the details concerning what we must do to achieve the strategic goals that are the usual focus of most articles that mention strategies. I am going to get to the management side of strategic planning shortly; first, I want to expand the usual strategic plan with a few more essential strategies that are often taken for granted. That, however, creates some of the big-picture strategies issues we face in today’s fire service.
OPERATIONAL PLANNING
Strategic plans simply address the issues or problems we face in our fire department today and will face in the foreseeable future. If we can identify the strategic issues we face, the strategies follow easily. Therefore, strategic planning can be thought of as a process designed to identify those big-picture issues we are facing now and in an undefined future. Dr. John Bryson, author of Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, describes strategic planning as “organized common sense.” Strategic plans provide guidance and direction. Specific plans explaining how to solve a problem or what to do about a particular situation involve creating tactical plans or operational plans. Operational plans should be SMART. SMART is an acronym designed to suggest that operational plans are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-oriented, and Time-limited. For emergency incidents, we usually call them tactical plans. For management or nonemergency purposes, we refer to them as operational plans.
Leaving emergency operations behind, the fire service, as a whole, is pretty good at operational planning. The traditional long-range plans, medium-range plans, short-range plans, and action plans are the normal menu of an organization’s fire planning efforts. This includes the fire service.
Over the past 10 years or so, real strategic planning efforts have spread through many fire departments. An effective strategic plan or a master plan is required before a fire department can become accredited by the Commission on Fire Service Accreditation. This requirement has resulted in many more fire departments’ spending the time to develop effective and well-designed strategic plans. Many “strategic plans” that I reviewed in years past were really operational plans called a strategic plan. Today, this is much less the case. If your organization has not started planning strategically, you can expect it in your not-too-distant future.
NIMS
The question of the day in the fire service is, What about NIMS? Is our planning effort compliant with the requirements of the National Incident Management System (NIMS)? In NIMS terminology, the incident action plan (IAP) is really the department’s plan for the next operational period of an ongoing incident. An effective IAP involves a strategic component as well as a tactical component for the incident during the next defined time period of the incident, called an operational period. The overall incident objectives form (ICS form 202) describes the strategic plan for the incident and provides the guidance and direction for the overall incident. The “202” doesn’t change much even if the incident lasts for days or weeks. The rest of the IAP for each operational period is really the tactical plan for the next operational period. The ICS course G-300, “Intermediate Incident Command for Expanding Incidents,” instructs in the process of creating a written IAP. So, yes, strategic planning and operational planning are both NIMS compliant, if completed effectively.
There are a couple of more strategic issues that should not be forgotten (but are often taken for granted in some departments). The first additional strategic issue we face in an emergency incident is finding out that there is actually an emergency going on at the time and just exactly where the incident is occurring. Second, we have to get the right apparatus and personnel to the incident scene in time to make a difference in the outcome of the emergency incident. With these two strategic issues addressed, we can then start on the big three incident strategies: life safety, incident stabilization, and property conservation. But, these two issues really extend beyond an individual emergency incident and get to the heart of communitywide strategic issues.
These two issues are really about community needs and expectations as well as the level of risk the community is willing to accept. They get into adoption of fire codes and how the community wants to develop over time. They involve basic community decisions about the type of fire department the community wants, the number of fire stations it needs, and how the fire department will be staffed and equipped.
We need to build on our experiences involving emergency operations for the nonemergency components of our fire departments and apply the organized common sense throughout the organization. The question is, Where should a strategic planning effort start?
WHERE TO START
In my book, Fire Department Strategic Planning: Creating Future Excellence,1 I explain a suggested strategic planning process as well as provide a detailed process for conducting a strategic planning process using the Fire Department Strategic Planning Model. The basic components of this model are described below.
Firefighters, like any group of people, have a set of operating principles called values. These are standards of behavior that every person adheres to because it’s how they were brought up and it’s how they have decided to live their lives individually. No matter what, a person will stick to his value system throughout life whether or not he recognizes this is what he is doing at the time he makes behavioral choices.
Collectively, the people of an organization share certain core values, like honesty and integrity. The first step in understanding any organization and the strategic issues it faces is to have a good understanding of the values those in the organization share and live by at all times. Understanding the common shared values of the members of a fire department will shape the organization as it faces and operates in the future.
The next consideration when working to understand the strategic issues an organization is facing is to develop a vision of what the people within the organization hope “their” organization will become. People naturally want to make a difference in the success of a fire department, because they are a part of it. They want to leave the organization better than it was before. This vision is a collective description of what the members of the fire department would like their department to look like and operate like at some point in the future. This vision describes the ideal fire department in the collective opinion of the members of the department. This isn’t always as easy as it might seem at first blush. Members should not hesitate to “reach for the stars” as they consider the ideal future they would create if they change the department to achieve the department of their dreams.
Fire departments don’t exist to give a bunch of nice people someplace to go and interact with other people or have a good job for life. Fire departments exist because our communities have decided (and learned from bad experiences) that an organization must exist to deal with the fires, floods, tornados, tropical storms, winter storms, and other tragedies or emergencies of life. The fire service’s “menu” of services has changed over time, because the community has identified changing needs and it was decided that their fire department could and should provide services to meet those needs. These services were developed and later enacted as laws, statutes, ordinances, city charters, regulations, and other forms of mandates that codify the role of the fire department in a community. An important part of our job is to understand what we are mandated to do and what needs our community has that we can fill and then what we have to do to effectively deliver those services within the community.
These mandates, both formal and informal, drive the mission of the fire service. Your fire department’s mission statement should be reflective of who you are as an organization, what services you are mandated to provide, and how your organization intends to go about its business.
PHILOSOPY OF OPERATIONS
How your department provides its menu of services can be described as your Philosophy of Operations. Every organization, including every fire department, has a philosophy of its operations, whether it has identified this philosophy as such or not. This is not complicated. It is simply a recognition that the philosophy of my fire department is _____ ; you fill in the blank. In my organization’s case, our philosophy of operations is as follows:
- Do the right thing.
- Do your best.
- Treat people the way you would like to be treated.
Understanding the core values of an organization and its philosophy of operations is often all you really need to know about an organization to determine its distinctive competencies.
THE ENVIRONMENT
The next essential component of strategic planning is to understand the environment within which your department operates. There are two environments, an external environment and an internal environment. The external environment involves everything the fire department does not control. The external environment is the reason for the very existence of the fire department. We must understand, react, and respond to the needs of our external environment. To understand this environment, we must ask those outside of the fire department to help us understand it from their perspective. From inside the department, we can only guess and often get it wrong. The external environment provides us with challenges and opportunities in relation to the success of our fire department. The external environment must be a driving force for the entire fire department.
Those things that we can control within the fire department involve components of our internal environment. With an understanding of this internal environment, we can assess some parts of our internal organization as they involve our strengths as an organization. Other parts can be described as weaknesses of the organization. We would like to maximize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses. These are sometimes thought of as opposite sides of the same coin. Some consideration, however, should be given to the opposite of a strength or the opposite of a weakness. Not strong is not necessarily weak, and not weak is not necessarily strong. The best organizations spend as much of their time as possible using their strengths to control their internal environment. These are usually called the distinctive competencies of the department or what the department is “known for”i.e., the McKinney Fire Department is known for its high-quality customer service and for being especially skilled at auto extrication. (This concept is intended to explain that departments should highlight their strengths and find “work-arounds” or ways to make their weaknesses less weak.)
Once you have effectively assessed the external and internal environments, you should be able to easily identify the strategic issues your fire department is facing as an organization. Understanding these strategic issues is the main purpose of strategic planning and its key component. These are those big-picture issues your department is or will be facing in the next time period. Dealing with rapid growth is an example of a common strategic issue. Analysis of these strategic issues is often accomplished by posing the issue as a question. Although growth may be the problem/issue, the real strategic question involves how we will achieve acceptable outcomes in light of the rapid growth our community faces. This may lead to a strategy that says, “The department needs a new fire station when 500 buildings are located outside of the six-minute-response-time-designated area of an existing fire station.”
The answers to these questions lead to the department’s strategies. Strategies are guides and directions only. Like the above example, you can’t sit in, complete on time, or finalize a strategy. Strategies do not involve measurable performance or SMART objectives (specific, measurable, achievable, results defined, and time-limited).
If you can sit in it, drive it, and accomplish it, it’s operational, not strategic. As an example, a typical strategy for replacing fire engines is to “Replace fire engines at the end of their useful service life.” The operational plan for this issue might be “Replace Engine 5 by September 30, 2008.”
If you plan to replace Engine 5 in 2008, it is an operational plan. It is also operational if you plan to replace Engine 5 in 2028. An operational plan for building a new fire station might be: “Build Fire Station 7 at 900 South Independence Parkway within the guaranteed maximum price and completed by the contractual completion date.”
PROACTIVE FUTURING
Once you have identified the department’s strategies, the next component is proactive futuring. It is a process that involves creating the future rather than simply reacting to it. It is a process of confirming the direction of the department as compared to its vision. It involves working to understand what will occur in your community in the future and how that will impact the outcomes of the fire department. It involves being ahead of the game by working to create the future by asking, “What can I do today to move the department closer to the ideal future described in our vision?” It involves understanding the likely future changes within the community and getting ahead of the change so that your organization will be ready for it when it occurs.
ACTION
The strategic plan is just entertainment unless it results in action. Actions result from effective operational planning, and the best operational plans are developed using the guidance provided in the strategic plan. Operational plans can be broken down into long-range plans, mid-range plans, short-range plans, and action plans. There is a planning continuum that must exist with the action plans on one end and the strategic plan at the other end. What the organization is doing today will impact the direction of the department in the future. This entire process is described as master planning. The master plan of a fire department is a composite of the strategic plan and the operational plan, including all of the various time horizons.
This master plan can be thought of as the IAP for the overall fire department with a time horizon reaching from today for the action plan to the indefinite future of the strategic plan. The farther and farther out into the future the plan goes, the less definite the outcomes will be and the predictions of long-range plans are wishes and guesses more than reality. Your best long-range planning efforts will have been wrong when the time comes, but maintaining an effective strategic plan as part of your master plan will keep your organization pointed in the right direction and refocusing on the moving targets. As the time horizons get closer and closer, the accuracy and specific details of your operational plans will be more and more accurate.
Developing an effective strategic planning process within your fire department is an important part of creating future excellence within your department. It will provide the guidance and direction needed to create future excellence rather than responding to changes after they have occurred.
Endnote
1. Second Edition, Fire Engineering Books, 2006.
MARK WALLACE, MPA, EFO, CFOD, MIFireE, CEM, is chief in McKinney, Texas, and a former Colorado chief and public safety director/city manager. He is the author of Fire Department Strategic Planning: Creating Future Excellence, Second Edition (Fire Engineering, 2006). He helps organizations initiate effective strategic planning using his 39 years of experience.
