I was having breakfast last weekend with an old friend from another fire department the other morning. We were meeting to work on a project for the Nebraska Society of Fire Service Instructors, and of course to catch up on what has been going on. As often happens at these breakfast meetings, the conversation went to training and how it relates to emergency operations.
He had just completed a class with a couple of other instructors teaching a class on Situational Awareness to a fairly large and diverse group of paid and volunteer firefighters that started with the classroom and the second day they went out and burned down a residential structure.
During this conversation, it occurred to me that I read a report on line of duty death, where task saturation of the incident commander was a contributing factor. I wondered if more training on situational awareness would help avoid an incident commander suffering from task saturation.
What do you think? Have you ever experienced task saturation, or a lack of situational awareness? Give me your comments and lets see what kind of discussion we can get going.
When you say "task saturation" I assume it goes hand-in-hand with the old joke "when you are up to your ass in aligators, it's hard to remember your primary objective was to draing the swamp".
ReplyDeleteBreak the fire scene down to the three primary tasks (situational priorities)Life Safety, Incident Stablization and poperty conservation.
A good leader will delegate those tasks to subordinates that he or she can trust will do the job. If you have a well trained cadre of junior officers, this can be an easy assignment. But the key word in the whole statement is "delegation". Very few fire officers are capable of running the entire fire scene by themselves. Even those who are capable shouldn't.
Train and work with your junior officers so that they trust you and, in turn, you trust them. Delegate assignments even on the small incidents through the use of the incident command/managment system. That way, when the big one hits, that could lead to "task saturation" you will be able to delegate those tasks out confident in the knowledge that the job will get done!