BY IAN W. CASSIDY
A lesson learned is a slide you add to your slide show. After hearing this for the past 20 years, I found myself one Sunday morning at the firehouse thinking about the thousands of slides that I should have in the carousel in my head. Although I had many questions, the one question that I found myself stuck on was, “Are we developing good slide shows for our firefighters, or is there a better way to do it?” Before I get into a possible answer to that question, let’s briefly look at how our memory works in developing these slides.
Declarative Memory
Our memories consist of declarative and procedural memories. You use your declarative memory when you are doing a task or trying to figure out the answer to a problem. The process starts as memories are encoded by your hippocampus (an area in the central base of the brain associated with emotion and memory) and then stored in the temporal cortex (the large plum-like lobe on each side of the brain) along with some other places for use later.
Accessing these memories isn’t like going to “Your List” on Netflix and selecting the memory; it’s more like a photo slide show that a screen saver provides. Your brain accesses the various areas where the pieces of information that you’re trying to recall are stored and puts them together to give you the memory or answer you are looking for. Associations that may have been formed as the memory was created further aid this process. To translate a piece of training into a memory or slide in your decision-making process, your brain uses four encoding avenues: sight, sound, touch, and context (meaning).
While reading a recent line-of-duty death (LODD) report, I encoded the information by sight and possibly by context (meaning). The more avenues of encoding information I use, the more easily I can recall that memory or lesson. Also, I will be more likely to match my current problem with the most feasible solution based on past practices or experiences. So, if I want an accurate slide show, I need to use as many of the encoding options as I can. As much as I believe I am creating slides through reading LODD reports or professional journals, I wonder if the fire service should be doing more in creating actionable slides for firefighters.
(1) The 1862 Battle of Shiloh began when Confederate soldiers, occupying the high ground where the field meets the woods at Fraley Field, fired on a Union army patrol. Studying all the factors influencing an event, whether a battle or a firefight, can yield lessons learned to apply in the future. (Photo by author.)
Procedural Memory
Compared to declarative memories, procedural memories are the unconscious memories of how we complete skills, or “muscle memory.” Once we learn procedural memories, we can do them almost automatically—for example, tying your shoes or throwing on self-contained breathing apparatus. These memories and skills are learned only through repetition and practice. They cannot be learned through the same methods as declarative memory, the ability to recall facts.
As with many blue-collar trades, the fire service’s activities are based on performing physical tasks; we excel in our ability to create master craftspeople. We send recruits through approximately 640 hours of academy time teaching them apprentice-level skills. After graduation, recruits typically spend a year in probation, which accounts for another 2,800 hours of journeyman work. After several more years, most members have become master craftspeople, logging in about 10,000 hours to perfect those same task-level skills. We have this one down.
Emotion: The Slide Maker
Our parents probably said the same things to each of us as we were growing up. “Don’t make the same mistakes I made” or “Learn from my mistakes.” But most of us didn’t listen. The fire service isn’t much different. Many of the mistakes that I have made in my career on the fireground or in professional relationships have been things that wiser firefighters or officers may have told me not to make. Once I made the mistake, I could almost recall verbatim the conversation and warning those individuals gave me before in training sessions. It’s significant that after making the mistake myself and suffering the consequences, the associated emotions—mostly regret, sometimes embarrassment—that I felt helped imprint the lesson much more effectively, and I have been better equipped not to repeat those same mistakes again.
It’s not that I never learned anything from those seasoned professionals or training programs or that I made every single mistake that they warned me about. Rather, there is a clear difference in decisions made that had emotions attached to them vs. the ones that didn’t. The lessons with an associated emotion were more easily recalled and, therefore, helped me to make better quality decisions in critical situations with limited discretionary time.
It may be easier for us to relate to the power of emotion-producing memories (or slides) when we consider how a song or an activity takes us back in time and gives us a nostalgic experience. Nostalgia is almost always associated with a happy or positive time in our lives, but the same encoding takes place when stress or fear is involved. Emotion is a powerful tool for memory recollection or “slide development” because it taps into all of the encoding avenues mentioned above. It’s not that we aren’t creating slides through standard training avenues, but when we can inject emotion and engage our members on that level, we are sure to see better results.
The Staff Ride: An Encoded After-Action Review
Now that we are armed with the knowledge of how our brains process memories into lessons and how emotion-based memories are more easily recalled, I would challenge fire service organizations to tap into all of these methods and use them in an after-action review (AAR) format. The difference is that instead of presenting a formal document that members read or have a quick talk about after the incident and never revisiting the issue again, the organization brings members in and engages all four encoding methods. Members are asked the following questions:
• What was the weather?
• How many calls did the crew have prior to the incident?
• What was their last shift like—busy or slow? Were they well-rested?
• What route did they take to the call?
• Were they still in the station or already out?
• What time of day was it?
• How was traffic?
• What decisions did they make, and why?
When we start to flesh out all of these other factors and even use technology to take the class on a virtual drive of the route, show them the scene, the hydrant locations and so forth, they can start to picture themselves in that crew’s shoes. They are engaged on every sensory level, which will help encode that lesson for future use in similar situations. Especially when it comes to reviewing LODDs, doing this will have drastic preventive effects in the fire service.
Fortunately, these concepts aren’t new; the military has been doing this for a long time. In the traditional staff ride, conducted on horseback, the general staff would travel to the site of an historical battle such as the 1862 Battle of Shiloh in the American Civil War and study it. They would immerse themselves in what was going on when specific decisions were made to capture lessons they could apply to future events (photo 1). I have an opportunity to attend several military staff rides this coming year with a friend and mentor.
Staff rides are an opportunity to teach leadership lessons regardless of your profession. The frustrations and human dynamics at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 still exist in today’s fire service. The Battle of Shiloh occurred early in the war. The Union had some battle-tested officers and soldiers but not that many; the Confederates did not. So the commanders at Shiloh had the stress of a new command on them just as would a fire battalion with new fire company officers who are not yet fire tested. At Shiloh, the weather before the battle was extremely wet and cold; the soldiers were in wool uniforms and had been marching through deep mud. The effects of wet clothing, fatigue, and new untested commanders are dynamics that are just as relevant on a fireground as they were on the battleground at Shiloh. At a fire department staff ride, you would consider the impact of these human dynamics and frustrations to understand why certain decisions were made so that we can plan a better response in the future.
Because of the time and effort required to prepare a fire service staff ride, it is not possible to revisit every incident to which our respective fire departments have responded. But consider what one or two prepared staff rides a year would do for officer development and succession planning in your organization. When I think about how many lessons learned are lost with each veteran retirement in my organization, I wonder if we are setting ourselves up to repeat history. How many firefighter injuries or deaths could we prevent if we were better able to memorialize these lessons and pass them on to future generations? The military has used the staff ride successfully for years. If we apply it in the fire service, I have no doubt we will see similar results.
If you’re a student of your craft, constantly poring over information on strategies, tactics, leadership, building construction, and LODDs (to name a few) to be better equipped for what the next 24 hours has in store, you’re definitely doing the right things. At the same time, it’s worth saying that there are no shortcuts to experience. It takes 20 years of experience to get 20 years of experience, but we can do something to encode the experiences of others into our memories. The staff ride is one way to study history so that we are better prepared strategically for the future.
IAN W. CASSIDY, a 20-year veteran of the fire service, is the captain of Engine 331 of the Northwest Fire/Rescue District in Tucson, Arizona. He is a certified fire instructor II and fire officer I and teaches the National Fire Academy leadership series in Arizona. Cassidy has served in various leadership roles in emergency medical service, training, hazmat response, and technical rescue. He is a contributor to the ISFSI Training Officer’s Desk Reference.
