BY ALAN BRUNACINI
My fire service career occurred during the most active period of change in our business. When I started (1958), we were basically a bunch of white guys hanging off the tailboards of open-cab rigs powered by huge gas engines, driven by (very skillful) maniacs. We wore cotton duck coats, responding to pretty much only structural fires that we fought with primitive tools like a bunch of wild men. When I checked out (2006), we were a gender/race-diverse department that was equipped with a full array of current technology. We now respond in air-conditioned (!) apparatus with an onboard computer, dispatched by a satellite-driven GPS system to a full array of servicesEMS, special operations, community service, etc. The firefighters now riding in that truck are the best trained in our history. They wear the most advanced personal protective equipment (PPE), are protected by modern safety/wellness programs, and back at the station relax in human factors-engineered recliners. During that same period, our service has shifted our collective mentality from protecting victims to delivering highly responsive service to customers.
During that exciting almost 50 years, I was fortunate to work in a city that was, and still is, among the fastest growing in the country. That expansion created the opportunity for fast promotion. This afforded me the chance to go through the ranks fairly quickly. Being promoted during such a period of active, major, intense organizational change created a very special set of experiences for me. Based on being in the right place at the right time (I guess), it was my job to take “the word” to the firefighters for many of the new operational programs then being developed and implemented. This experience created a very practical set of lessons about how firefighters react to the change process.
Most of that education I received about the change process was based on the road rash that was the natural result of standing up in front of the troops and directly interacting with them about some proposed change that was just about to obliterate the comfort zone they had been in for the past 25 years. I was not some razzle-dazzle guy from out of town who stood up and blabbed about the latest and greatest and then went back to where I came from. I was the hometown, internal “change agent” that got to live with those same firefighters throughout the entire change process.
Change-School Lessons
The following are some of the change-school lessons in which I am still enrolled as the oldest student.
Firefighters are pretty much on the action-oriented “business end” of the change process in their department. They know the difference between beef and baloney. The way the change dance typically works is that Engine 1 is directed (i.e., ordered) by some boss “downtown” to show up at an appointed time in some class/conference room. As Engine 1 shuffles into the room, the formal/informal leader (who has attended 576 of these meetings) quietly says, “Don’t ask any questions, and we will go home early.” The big boss appears and lays out the latest and greatest change plan that will march everyone down the road to paradise. The meeting runs its course, and when Chief Smith runs out of gas (pun), Engine 1 goes home.
Engine 1 knows that the easiest part of how organizational change occurs is for the boss to come up with an idea and then conduct a “sales meeting” with the troops. For the boss, it’s quick and easy and doesn’t cost much. Engine 1 also knows that the chances are that if they just “sit it out” that they probably will never hear anything else about the ideasimply because ideas are a lot like babies. It is really, really fun to make them, BUT it is also really, really messy, painful, inconvenient, and many times heart wrenching (and heart warming) to raise them. Lots of times, when babies/ideas grow up, they leave home. If they are successful, you don’t get any credit for all your work; but if they turn out lousy, you have your name on them forever.
Given Engine 1’s experience in sitting as far back as you can get in “new idea” meetings, their typical initial response is to simply sit and wait and watch. They know that the quickest and most effective way to deal with the change agent of the day is to tell him what he wants to hear. They have seen change agents come and they have seen them go. It is some boss’s job to stand up in front and talk about a brave new world, and at that point it is the workers’ job to sit in the back and attentively nod their heads.
Engine 1 begins to pay attention when they see signs of authentic follow-through. When that same boss shows up with a set of SOPs that provide an effective, understandable explanation and description of the program, the troops start to listen. The troops are completely awake and engaged when those SOPs get translated into practical, realistic training experiences that produce a more effective performance/skill level. Everyone becomes connected when the SOPs become an integrated part of actual operations and make those operations safer and more effective.
The take-home lesson for bosses attempting to take the troops on a change trip is to start out with a map that shows where we are and where we are going, a “compass” that shows the direction in which the organization is currently headed and, most of all, a full tank of gas. The crew on Engine 1 has done a lot of traveling, so they know if the change bus is actually going to go somewhere and when it will never leave the station.
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.
