BY ALAN BRUNACINI
Last month we started a discussion about how I discovered Mrs. Smith about halfway through my boss career. Before she came into my life and created a humanizing balance, I really focused on delivering service to buildings that were burning. Looking back, I realize that I really related to and regarded the fire—even though it was the enemy—more as a customer than the humans who came with the situation. I also concentrated on studying, visiting, diagramming, and trying to understand how buildings were designed, built, and used and what happens when building construction and fire behavior come together.
I was so connected to fire behavior that throughout my career in the street I would actually conduct real-live conversations with the fire. I remember as a battalion chief I would “interview” the fire as we were operating to remove it. Most of my colleagues who listened in to these “Hello, Mr. Fire; I am here now so you had better get ready to go out” conversations felt that I was unhinged. Sometimes, the fire would talk back: “Hello, Mr. Battalion Chief; I just went next door because you were looking the other way!” I was more literate and comfortable using combustion words and language to converse with the fire than I was talking to many humans. I hesitate to mention it, but I occasionally have some of these same discussions when I am daydreaming/night dreaming. I am certain this is included somewhere in the “Handbook of Treatment of the Moderately Insane.”
For a long time, I instructed community college fire science students in firefighting tactics and strategy. In the class, as we did fire simulations (very primitive in the beginning), we would assign one of the students to play the role of the fire. The person playing the fire would sit next to the fireground commander (FGC) (incident command terms had not been invented yet), and the two would engage in an ongoing dialogue as the incident evolved. Having the “fire” describe what it was doing, where it was, where it was going, and how it was outsmarting the FGC was an interesting way to connect fire behavior with tactical action, and the conversation was very instructive and generally very exciting to the entire class.
The technique of creating a very simple, online (modern term), very animated process that caused the fire to be actively and actually represented caused the enemy to be present, engaged, and represented in a very real way (a little like my earlier on scene semi-deranged conversations). Having the FGC actually ask Fire, “Why are you in the attic?” and have Fire respond, “Because you’re not!” created a great opportunity for the class to engage in a useful and practical discussion of both doing and commanding (as an example) attic fire tactics. It also expressed the agony of concealed space fires and how critical it is to get ahead of the fire and how painful it is to get behind. While this teaching/learning approach was very robust and effective, it only reinforced my very personal, almost singular, preoccupation with putting water on burning buildings.
Looking back on that stage of my addiction, it would have been pretty simple to have just expanded my cast of classroom characters. We could have Fire sit on one side of the FGC and Mrs. Smith (the customer) sit on the other side. It would have been both interesting and instructive to listen to what Fire had to say to the FGC about how it was tactically damaging and then destroying everything that it could radiate, conduct, and convect itself onto and that its basic plan was to continue to do what came naturally until all the fuel was all gone. Mr. Fire would describe how he hated the effective application of adequate, well-placed water. The FGC would have had a very practical, real-world experience being the meat in a customer/fire sandwich—which is where a command person really is on the fireground.
It would have also been an instructive contrast to then listen to Mrs. Smith describe how, at that moment, Mr. Fire was essentially wrecking her life. She would articulate her part in this adventure in her personal terms and would use emotional words, not tactical ones. In fact, at that awful moment in her life, the “industry” words we routinely use (and love) to describe what we do are complete gibberish to her. She is a smart (normal) person who really has little interest or ability (at that moment) to understand what a 1¾-inch hose is or does and really can’t effectively connect to ventilation, whether vertical, horizontal, or mechanical. Listen to the language well-trained mental health professionals use to help someone in distress. They don’t say things like “positive-pressure ventilation” or “right-hand wall search.”
Looking back, I am certain that at that point in my “development,” it would have been very awkward for me to effectively manage the Mrs. Smith part of the tactics class-training skit. I had been educated, trained, programmed, and socialized to focus on the connection between what was burning and what we were doing to make it stop burning. I was a very typical 1980 fire officer/student/teacher. All of my experience had been directed toward managing the operational part of what we did.
I think Mrs. Smith has always been “at the table,” but for a very long time we had not really connected to her personally in deliberate terms that considered what she was going through and that she is connected to the incident on a very different level than we are. We have historically had a very positive relationship with her since the beginning of our service. She typically admires and trusts us more than any other public service. As I said last month, the firefighters are very positive about improving in any way we can to better help her; they also almost immediately connect to the reality and opportunity that we can do a lot better job of supporting her emotional needs.
The need for the change was not that we were doing anything wrong; it was that we had the opportunity to do what we had always done even better. Becoming more customer-centered did not require a major change—the operational service we had always delivered got us to the 95-yard line. Adding emotional understanding and support quickly got us over the goal line (quick/effective/nice).
I think the customer-support process finally sunk in with me simply because I was in a position where it was my job to review customer feedback, mostly thank you letters from folks we had helped. I got to do that for a long time (35 years). Our department delivered the full menu of fire department services to a busy metro city. That activity produced a lot of thank-you letters, and last month I started to describe the fairly standard parts of those letters.
The customer would very typically remember our short response time. When customers’ problems are serious enough (to them) to call us, they are understandably anxious for us to arrive. So when that happened, they would thank us. They would then make some observation about our effectiveness in solving the incident problem. They generally had more of an overall positive impression about how we operated rather than a memory of anything we did that was specifically tactical or technical.
The letter is generally a page and a half. The fast response time/fire went out quick parts take up about a third of the first page. The rest of the letter is directed toward how she (Mrs. Smith) and her family were treated and the way she would express that was: “I couldn’t believe how nice you were to me and my family.” Her saying/writing that and my hearing/reading that over and over was, as I look back, a drop of water bouncing over and over on my forehead. The challenge was not the consistency or clarity of the message; it was the thickness/hardness of my skull.
Everything that was loaded into my skull originally and then reinforced and rewarded had to do in some way with the tactical part of what we do (physically) when we deliver service. That training and socialization served me very well because a big part of what we have always done, what we do now, and what I hope we will always do is indeed tactical (“Fire” is our middle name). All the customer service stuff I am now blabbing about is not meant in any way to diminish the importance of our being able to deliver standard, effective, “mechanical” service.
I was fortunate to receive a first class education as a very young firefighter in fire protection technology (Oklahoma State University). During those studies, the word “nice” was never included. I do not make that comment with any disrespect to the angels and saints who were my instructors. In fact, I believe that their instruction was so effective that it set me in a tactical-technical service delivery direction that was so strong that just about everything I read (and wrote) had to do in some way with the technical part of firefighting.
Based on that socialization, it took 15 years for the word “nice” to really register (read: sink in) with me when I was reading Mrs. Smith’s letter. For those 15 years, I had a very low level of social language literacy. When I got to fast/effective, which typically occurred in the beginning of the letter, I just simply stopped reading because that was what I wanted to hear. It was a big day when I really (!) read the whole letter, particularly the “nice” part; that started my bilingual language education. I guess you could say that eventually Mrs. Smith taught me how to read. Her whole letter educated me on how regular, normal people who do not have conversations with a fire actually communicate.
For me, the experience of being able to begin to participate with the troops to add a better planned and executed customer-care component to what we had always done was an interesting adventure. We started to include this approach into our standard performance management model [standard operating procedures (SOPs)/training/application/critique/revise]. The standard model created an effective framework to naturally integrate how we planned to take better care of Mrs. Smith while we were doing all the regular tactical things we had always done. The new routine caused us to begin to think of her as a customer of the department instead of a victim of the fire.
I mentioned in my last column that we developed a new set of SOPs for the Owner/Occupant Support Sector. Using the regular standard procedures format was the basic way we had used historically to describe and define how we would operate in a standard situation. There is a critical message in a standard procedure, and it’s pretty simple: If it’s in the “book” (Operations Manual), it is important to the organization, and it is best to learn the procedure, practice it, and make it a regular practice if you want to make your boss happy. When the SOP is implemented before the incident, there is a really good chance that it is going to get reviewed after the incident (like in the critique).
Including customer care in the Operations Manual gave that activity the same status and importance as the procedures we used for regular/routine operations like fire attack, basic safety/survival, physical rescues, and all our other big-deal operations.
The regular performance model uses procedures as the beginning point of the whole process. That standard SOP front end requires the department to collectively decide how it is going to operate. Boss effectiveness is directly and very simply connected to SOP compliance. In this case, how the fire chief regarded Mrs. Smith (REALLY regarded) could be evaluated by how Engine One treated her. The best shot the crazy old fire chief had was to package and manage customer care like every other operation in which we engaged.
Everyone does not change at the same rate and, like with most new procedures, some of us caught on to the new customer service routine more quickly than others. We began to publicize inside the department stories of good customer service that described how our members used department resources to help Mrs. Smith and her family. These stories became an effective way for everyone in the department to learn what others were doing, what was possible, and to see the bosses actually commend and approve of our adding some new generally pretty simple, but really important, things to the Smiths’ service delivery. They also began to be more comfortable with taking the time to engage and support everyone at the incident in a more personal way and saw that doing that easily and naturally fit into our regular deployment routine.
Next month, we will discuss how the management of “nice” occurred.
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the quarterly fire service magazine BSHIFTER.com and the Blue Card hazard zone training and certification system. He can be reached at alanbrunacini@cox.net.
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