I recently spent a few hours authoring an article, one that I really felt the fire service needed to hear. It was a reality check of sorts of how we have gotten to where we are and what is going to happen if we don’t make some serious adjustments on where we are going. The more I wrote, the more I vented, and the more I felt like Ralphie in the movie A Christmas Story as he penned his theme about his beloved BB gun. “Oh, rarely had the words poured from my penny pencil with such feverish fluidity”, I thought, only in this case my “pencil” was wireless logi keyboard. I felt the same way as he did, imagining the reactions, comments, and shares the piece would attract. I even fantasized about some of my most cherished mentors reacting the way he thought his teacher would, reaching out to commend me for sharing such accurate thoughts and conclusions. Yet, the more drunken I became on the very blunt, honest, and eloquent assessment of the fire service I was authoring, the more I realized I had to stop.
I was about half way through when I realized if I continued, my fate would be much of the same as Ralphie because frankly the fire service isn’t ready to hear what some of us are trying to say. We are too caught up in our own bullshit to believe anything that suggests we are slowly drifting off course. Instead of admitting that we don’t always get it right, we would prefer to attack those willing to adhere to the core values we make them recite because our fragile egos and flawed concepts would simply break under the pressure. And while I am not scared or ashamed of the words I was putting down, I realized that doing so could potentially have a negative impact on my career in the present and/or the future. So, instead of driving myself off the proverbial cliff, I filed those ideas away for another time, place, or person, and landed on sharing the shame of the reality that made me stop.
Have you ever noticed the majority of the most honest people in the game are retired? Crazy, right? We spend 20 to 30 years in a profession that is constantly heralded for courage and bravery, yet aside from the confines of a house fire, most never truly feel comfortable enough to share their honest thoughts and experiences until after their careers have come to end. Even then there are those that attempt to refute the truths of their experiences because they are obviously “out of touch”, “aren’t current”, or some other half-assed attempt to discredit what someone who gave decades to this job have concluded because they have taken in their last run. But no matter how much noise people make to try and hide these hard truths, there are plenty out there still listening.
Believe it or not there are scholarly terms for what the fire service is experiencing, confirming the fact there is substance to the reality most on the job are holding back when asked for their thoughts and opinions. Organizational silence, groupthink, organizational dissonance, and the normalization of deviance are a few that come to mind, and worth a little research to better understand. All are terms that address the various reasons that we have been conditioned to stick to the program rather than speak up, no matter how dangerous or harmful the consequences may be. Instead, we either bottle up our concerns until things boil over or painfully place them in the queue of things we want to unload once we hit the twilight of our careers.
We don’t have to enter too many firehouses to know the silence of the fire service is becoming quite palpable. It has suppressed innovation, stifled creativity, and produced shift long games of hide and seek. Behind the closed bay doors that once stayed up more than they stayed down, the boisterous hustle and bustle of men and women playfully ragging on each other, tuning their tools, and conducting informal tactical assessments on a giant map or chalkboard have given way to desolate environments so subdued that the only sounds we might hear are water dripping from the pump packing or the drone of a radio in the background as we patiently wait for someone to notice our presence. And while the sounds of the fire service of the past are more metaphorical in some cases, they are the first of many important qualities slowly fading from our firehouses and cultures, taking the sights and smells along with them as the character of our craft continues to be slowly institutionalized under the guise of consistency.
At the end of the day, we really only have a problem with what people have to say when it doesn’t follow the party line, which is actually even more disturbing than not wanting them to say anything at all. We should not wonder why our personnel don’t speak up if we constantly tell them to shut up or choose to become silent because their concerns constantly fall on deaf ears. The ramifications go far beyond the fragility of our pride as we risk creating cultures (if we haven’t already) where the fear to address concerns creeps into the execution of the mission, jeopardizing the safety of ourselves and those around us. This is why the next generation to occupy positions of authority must be proactive in bringing back healthy debate, teaching those under their command how to professionally disagree in the process, a check and balance that used to help us regulate. We need to get to a place where the consequences for keeping quiet are far more severe than the consequences for speaking up, a concept we just can’t seem to grasp.
Perhaps my thoughts are a little overboard. Perhaps I am just hitting a point in my career where I’m feeling nostalgic about the fire service that once existed when I came on the job. Or perhaps I am right and the sound of our profession slowly dying is not the screams we thought it would be, but rather the deafening silence of a profession that slowly silenced itself. If we can at least recognize that we have entered a scary space where many fear what will happen to them for addressing the issues more than what will happen if they do not, perhaps we can start moving in a direction that will allow us to act on the very things we champion after we leave, long before we retire…
Comments