Dane Carley

How can there be a discrepancy between how a fire chief thinks his department is doing vs. what the line firefighters think is going on? Dane Carley focuses on cultural cognitive dissonance within fire service organizations.

Dane Carly discusses that focusing on the people in the department is the silver bullet because it multiplies the department’s opportunity for success for every member engaged through this process.

“Why do fire department members do what they do and make the decisions they do?” That’s a question I wanted to answer while studying fire service leadership. I kept encountering the concept of higher reliability organizations (HRO) and how they use their culture to increase reliability in decision making and to learn from mistakes made to prevent it from happening again. This reduces the chances for loss of life or property. The wildland fire community has identified specific ways to progress toward being an HRO for many years with positive results, so I applied that to structural fire departments. It would definitely benefit the fire service on a broad scale.