BY JOHN A. VAN DOREN
A MAJOR RESPONSIBILITY OF BEING AN OFFICER IS to find the best way to take advantage of your members’ contributions and to help them determine and define their usefulness on the fireground. One way to do this is by finding out what they think. A useful tool to facilitate this discussion is an after-action review, also know as a debriefing or post-incident analysis process.
A debriefing can be one of the most effective tools for change; it helps you find out what is going on inside a firefighter’s head during an incident. Effective debriefing sessions, when conducted properly, can help your department grow in many positive directions. A debriefing can help identify the need for reinforcement of standard operating guidelines (SOGs) or changes that need to be made in those guidelines. It can also identify training/mentorship issues, equipment limitations, and your personnel’s overall grasp of strategies and tactics. You can determine a firefighter’s perception of what just happened to him or what he perceived as his individual experience at the incident.
We may all attend the same incident, but we each a have a different experience. Our experience can be influenced by many factors: past experiences (mental file cabinet), what we heard or saw, our training, strategies (goals) and tactics we used or tried to use, time pressures, situational assessment, preplans, and our implemented policies or guidelines.
The main point is this: To determine how to take full advantage of your members’ strengths and contributions, you will need to share views in a guided, open, and respectful manner. The culture of your department will not evolve, grow, or even begin to solve its “Who do we trust? What were they thinking? I wish we would do this differently” issues unless you are all determined to share views and learn from your collective experience at an incident.
The incident commander (IC), safety officer, or any key player in an incident can facilitate the debriefing as long as he understands the purpose of it and strives to maintain the credibility of your shared trust in the process.
BASIC DEBRIEFING QUESTIONS
Here are some basic questions you can apply to a typical debriefing process:
- Scene: What did you see, hear, smell…?
- Knowledge: What information did you use in making this decision, and how was it obtained?
- Analogies: Were you reminded of any previous incidents or training exercises?
- Goals: What were your plans or strategies?
- Options: What other courses of action were considered or available to you?
- Basis: How was this option selected/other options rejected? What department guidelines were being followed?
- Experience: What specific training or experience was necessary or helpful in making this decision?
- Aiding: If the decision was not the best, what training, knowledge, or information could have helped?
- Time pressure: How much time pressure was involved in making this decision?
- Situational assessment: Imagine that you were asked to describe the situation to a relief officer at this point-how would you summarize the situation?
- Hypothetical situations: If a key feature of the incident would have been different, what difference would it have made in your decision?
A proper debriefing will be very difficult to conduct unless all of your members believe the session is not going to be a blame game, a personal fault-finding session, or a finger-pointing free-for-all that just makes matters worse. It is very hard to live with your mistakes, let alone expose them in front of your peers. Everyone will have to leave their egos out of the process if all are determined to make things better.
Some of your members may be participating in a debriefing, but in some cases not all the key players are present who can answer all the right questions. The issues solved in these smaller meetings typically are not shared or properly expressed with the rest of the department. This can be a repetitive source of frustration for some. It is important to find out the “whys” (i.e., the facts) of an incident from the key players so others can understand an individual viewpoint/perception without dealing in misinformation, rumors, or speculation.
Debriefing questions should create the possibility (opportunity) for personal self-assessment and reflection as well as address most of the concerns we may have had about an incident. Some members may wonder why they were even at the incident.
A LEGACY THAT KEEPS TEACHING
Debriefings also can develop collective memories and experiences into some great stories that shape your department’s legacy. These stories can serve as an “oral history,” passing on knowledge and memories from firefighters who have left the fire service to their successors, who can learn from the experiences of those who preceded them.
The debriefing process is an excellent opportunity for you and your mutual-aid companies to examine which aspects of your fire protection system need to be addressed and improved. The process also can serve to reinforce proper procedures. Whether the issue is communications, strategies and tactics, or fittings matching up, you can implement a debriefing process effectively and in a timely manner at the scene before mutual-aid companies return to their districts. These mutual-aid companies should already be aware of how your department operates and should expect your incidents to include this debriefing process.
If a debriefing process is done to your satisfaction and you are determined to grow and learn from each incident, challenge yourself. Ask yourself the same sort of debriefing questions suggested above. Write down your answers honestly, and take the time to find out the facts about what you don’t know. You can then decide which aspects of your performance you can improve. For officers, this is an excellent self-assessment exercise, but only if you can be honest with yourself.
So take advantage of every opportunity, and get the most out of each incident by finding out what your members experienced. They each have a story to tell, and each story has a lesson to be shared.
JOHN A. VAN DOREN is a captain in the Clyde (OH) Fire Department.
