To the Destructive Element, Submit: Introducing Economics to the Fire Service
Often, economics seems counter-intuitive but only because disturbing facts tend to hide in plain sight. Obscured only by self-interest, we miss what we don’t want to see. For instance, it should be intuitively obvious that three decades of steady casualties mean that our annual rate of 100 lives per year is a structural loss rate – the cost of doing business under a stable set of conditions. Accordingly, it should be equally obvious that the only way to change that rate is to change our structure. We’ve missed this not because we lack smart people trying hard to solve our casualty problem, but because after two centuries we’re comfortable with our present structure and don’t want to change.
The goal of this essay is to introduce economic analysis to the fire service as a way to identify what we need to change and how to go about it. In this essay we’ll use an economic lens to scan the fire service broadly. Once we see the lay of that land and identify some obstacles, we can begin to chart a course forward. This means we must face and recognize five basic ideas that are essential for any systematic reevaluation of the fire service, uncomfortable as that may be. These edgy ideas, the destructive elements of my title quote, are commonality, monopoly, insurance, incentive, & infrequency. That quote comes from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, a story of salvation. We’ve got to understand these ideas in order to save our own. It’s that simple.
The Economic Mode of Thought
Before we do so, a couple of examples might help those unfamiliar with economics acclimate to this style of thinking. First, as I just did, we can think of economics as a lens through which to view the world. Like polarized sunglasses, this lens reduces glare but at the cost of screening out some wavelengths. This means we take in less, but what gets through is seen more clearly. For many -- and especially for newcomers – this lens also colors things oddly, even to the point of distaste. This happens, in part, because economics doesn’t concern itself with what people should do – that sort of glare is screened out. Instead, economics focuses on what people actually do. By doing so, it highlights self-interests and motives that otherwise remain obscure, and it does so in order to price behavior. The working idea here is that people do what is important to them, that they act on their values. The problem, of course, is that sometimes what we say we value and how we act don’t line up, and no one likes to be caught out – something our candid economic camera is built to do.
Another way to understand economic thought is to think of it as another sort of reality, different from the everyday, but just as useful. This sounds odd, but we use alternative modes of thinking every day. Consider a firehouse kitchen table. In our everyday reality we see it as a big, solid, single wooden thing. At the same time, courtesy a layman’s notion of atomic physics, we can also describe the same table as a collection of billions of various types of atoms arranged in all sorts of ways. Even weirder, according to this description, our solid table is mostly empty space. This is at odds with our common-sense understanding, but we accept the atomic description as a valid alternative reality because of all the goods that come with it – like the solid-state microprocessors that allow you to read this on-line. Like that table, the fire service can be described both with every-day, common-sense perceptions, and unusual but valuable economic ones. In fact, understanding our economic reality provides the key to reducing our casualties. Like atomic physics at the beginning of the last century, this new reality is likely be regarded as impossible by many both in and out of the fire service – but only until we discover its usefulness. Let’s begin.
Commonality
Commonality is the first and maybe most crucial idea we must accept in order to build a 21st century fire service. Commonality is the simple realization that the fire service is not exceptional. We may deliver a unique product, but that’s all. People are people, organizations are organizations, in or out of the fire service. Basic economic and managerial principles apply as much to us as any other. This may not be news. The National Fire Academy certainly recognizes it, openly stating as much in its course on Supervision for the Fire Service, and ICS 300 states that sound management is essential to positive operational outcomes. But too often that understanding doesn’t travel to the firehouse where we hold that the fire service is different from all others: what applies elsewhere doesn’t hold for us.
An example is the assertion that the fire service is composed of the finest people in the world. Nice as that would be, its only part of the story. We have our dud rounds too, and the economic perspective unflinchingly demands that admission. Comforting as it may be, we must abandon the myth of exceptionalism because keeping it denies us the ability to learn from other disciplines and industries, at least regarding economics, organization, and management. Once we accept commonality, we can start to consider ideas long avoided – comparative ideas like that successful service organizations usually have a much less vertical structure than ours. That idea doesn’t fit well with tradition, but it’s the kind of uncomfortable thinking we must dare if we’re serious about addressing the casualty problem. By admitting commonality, we gain the ability to use lessons from our own economic history, as well as mainstream economic and managerial concepts, to address current, pressing issues.
Monopoly
The second critical idea we must understand— and this requires admitting commonality – is the economic concept of monopoly. Like commonality, that the fire service functions as a monopoly should be obvious and unquestioned. We’re a government-granted monopoly for good reason – market failure is historically well-established. Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days of competing insurance company brigades. Some might object that the existence of Rural-Metro disproves this by counter-example, but that’s not so. First, a local government is going to grant monopoly either to a public fire department, or a private, for-profit fire protection firm, but it’s still going to grant a monopoly within its corporate limits. Even if that weren’t so, monopoly doesn’t require 100% market share, only market domination. Nationwide, the public fire service meets that test, whether career, volunteer, or something in between.
This is important because every monopoly suffers from three unavoidable faults: high cost, low quality, and idle capital. Those are uncomfortable ideas. They are unpleasant because they are more than the cynical complaints that “if something’s approved for firefighting, you can charge a double price” (high cost); that there’s a lot of crap gear for sale (low quality); and that we carry a lot of stupid stuff we never use because ISO says we have to (idle capital).
Our monopolistic problems are bigger than these examples, because we’ve been unchallenged for so long, and because they involve more than the physical. For instance, we don’t have much history of training managers, due in part to cultural belief in exceptionalism. Like it or not, that shortage of trained managers shows up as a quality problem. When managerial quality is low, management is easily overwhelmed by the maintenance demands of idle capital. This leads, in turn, to the high cost of unnecessary casualties. An example is a slip/strain/sprain injury on the fireground. How so? A firefighter sent to rehab but unwilling to sit idly by starts helping when she should be resting, and suffers an injury. A curious firefighter who’d been held in RIT wants to see inside, goes for a peek, and trips. Without much effort against a tolerant, traditional IC, an officer successfully resists an order to go to rehab, and keeps his crew working (much to their delight) until somebody pulls a muscle or puts out a back. We don’t often call such activity free-lancing, but it is -- and economically this is an idle capital problem for scene management.
That we need more officers better trained in management isn’t exactly new thinking – the sentiment is expressed in the NFAs Supervision course too, as well as in numerous articles in FE and elsewhere. But I don’t believe anyone has said why, or thought through what monopoly implies. Provocatively stated, what the idea of monopoly means for the fire service is that we give less than the best possible service for too high a price with too many people and too much stuff. This is not a common sentiment, to put it lightly. But it only means that there’s room to improve, that we can become more effective and efficient if we dare, and most of us can live with that. However, part of the power and a good portion of the value of the discipline of economics is that it states problems nakedly, so they may be dealt with efficiently and accurately. “Room for improvement” is vague, and does us no favors when we look for ways to improve. But like the everyday perception of a table, this vague, mild phrase reminds us of our goal, allowing us to keep the threat of this new way of thinking in perspective. In other words, these new bifocals may be uncomfortable, and we may curse them, but we’ll wear them because they’re useful.
Insurance
A third essential realization is that our economic lens reveals is that the fire service is all about insurance. We provide insurance against loss to the public we service, and in return are provided with insurance in the form of public good will. Unfortunately, like monopoly, insurance has its unavoidable faults. People being people, where there is insurance, there is both a laxity and fraud. The fire service suffers from both. Mostly the fraud is innocent , but whether we like to admit it or not, part of it can be seen as active brand management by a range of vested interest groups including the public and the media. Together, this band of invisible hands shields our service from scrutiny and criticism. In large part, nobody wants change because change threatens the comfortable myth of the Everyman Hero, which like any good myth, has some basis in reality and is so deeply woven into the fabric of our social consciousness as to be near-invisible. This may be beginning to change – as demonstrated by the perceived up-tick in liability lawsuits against the fire service – but for the most part we remain socially well-insured.
We’ll have to put off investigation of the Everyman myth, and of how it drives our primary casualty-production engine, the Hero Tournament for another time, but a brief introduction isn’t out of place. Basically, the idea of the Hero Tournament is what it sounds like: we compete for the chance to be the hero, and the scarcer the opportunity, the more vigorous the competition. This is as obvious to the firefighter who has raced to be first-in as it is to the economist. You don’t have to be Alan Greenspan to see how this might help account for why traffic accidents are the second-leading cause of duty death and disability. The Everyman myth drives this tournament by creating strong social demand for an accessible hero figure, a role that the firefighter fills well. Economics tells us that where demand is strong, price will be high. What does 100 lives/year tell you?
Incentive
As noted earlier, economics is called “the dismal science” because it focuses on what people actually do, or are likely to do, not what we think they should do or wish they would do. It is not concerned at all with fairness – “distribution” in the jargon. Instead, economics concerns itself with efficiency, and because of that, to very many people it seems amoral, counter-intuitive, or both. In short, it’s the complete opposite of common sense. This misunderstanding is truly unfortunate, even tragic, for the fire service, where common sense is the standard. The great economists meant their systems to provide the basis for ethical decision-making, and that at heart their systems are simple and direct. This is as true of Adam Smith as it is of Karl Marx, despite their differences. The point is that while the logic of economic argument may seem contrary and harsh, it only does so because it neglects or steps on conventional ideas which are often expressed as “common sense”, not because it doesn’t care about effective, moral action.
For an economist, fairness is subjective, and a possible result – not a goal – of voluntary exchange. This is at odds with the common notion that we should value fairness over consistency, and is frequently a stumbling block for all who are new to the discipline. It may be especially difficult for the fire service, where common sense and consensus opinion hold sway. Perhaps even more difficult is the economic concept of incentive.
In the fire service, an incentive is synonymous with a bribe. No self-respecting fire officer from engine lieutenant to city commissioner is going to bribe his people to do their work. But in economics the term is much broader. To an economist, any time you make a rule or policy that conditions behavior, you create incentives. If it is a good rule, by nature it will be easily followed because it creates incentives for following it, and disincentives for breaking it. As good managers we want to create rules like that, and avoid making policies that create incentives to encourage dysfunctional behavior, and/or discourage desired behavior. In common language, we try not to set our people up for failure.
To that extent, the idea of incentive is or should be common sense. With that statement, however, we risk abandoning economic thought in favor of speculation regarding the ideal. This shows how careful we’ve got to be with our language to avoid being both self-serving and self-contradicting. Economic analysis of common-sense assertions often reveals them to be nothing more than a gloss over naked, narrow self-interest. In other words, it may be common sense for you to argue for what’s good for you – but it doesn’t follow that what’s good for the individual is equally good for the organization, or even for other individuals within it. Fortunately, that’s not the case here because a well-designed incentive structure aligns the desires of the individual with the needs of the organization. This will be true for almost everybody, almost all of the time. That makes it good sense, if not common sense, and as a service we need more of it.
Infrequency
Our final idea is infrequency. Economic analysis reveals that emergency service at any scale is an infrequently consumed good. As a result, private persons and policy makers alike lack systematic ways to measure the quality of the service rendered. The same is true of fire service professionals. After all, our internal review processes are almost wholly subjective, and the standards we measure performance against are set by a consensus of interested stake-holders. That makes them suspect from both economic and common-sense perspectives, and rightly so: it’s the old question of who’s guarding the guards. Part of the reason this question isn’t raised is because of infrequency itself – most of us don’t run enough fire calls to attain the depth of experience we need to achieve a measure of objectivity and question ourselves. Instead, we’re busy building skill and confidence, which are other important professional development concerns. This isn’t to say our post-incident critiques aren’t worthwhile – they are. It’s just that with fewer fires, as a service we have more journeymen and fewer masters at all levels, and this affects the goals and discussion priorities of our critiques.
Another part of the reason we tend not to question the currency and adequacy of our internal standards is the trust engendered by the Everyman myth. Because the social insurance of that public trust and good will protects us from any incentive to innovate or improve, only traditional, 19th century measures are used to evaluate performance. As we will see, the old measures of extinguishment and property conservation no longer apply – and haven’t for some time. In other words, our 19th century organization has problems coping with a 21st century world. This fact is borne out by our casualty statistics. Recognizing that infrequency is a real problem, and one that prevents us from realizing that the economic realities underlying our service have changed, we must also recognize that if we’re serious about reducing casualties, it’s time to take a long, hard, look at our industry, our organization, and our culture. If we don’t, no one else will, but that’s the sort of ethic that makes a career as a fire service professional worth pursuing.
All that Glitters is not Gold: Fire Service Economic Reality, Part 1
Last time I gave you a couple of metaphors for applying economics to the fire service, and introduced the ideas of commonality, monopoly, insurance, incentive, and infrequency. This time, using those metaphors as a touchstone, we’re going to look at the odd, alternative world of economic reality and explore what that atomic-level lens reveals.
Fire Service Economic History, Condensed
Elsewhere I’ve alleged that the US Fire Service is operating as a 19th century entity in the 21st. This is historical argument, so we turn to economic history for evidence. Unsurprisingly, life in the 19th century was different, economically, than it is today. Fire service priorities should therefore be different because the fire service is at root an economic entity. In other words, the fire service is an insurance provider, and insurance protects economic assets by partially counteracting loss. It doesn’t matter if the capital is financial, material, and human – all have economic value that can be insured. Firefighters provide insurance physically and financially by limiting loss and saving lives, so our charter is principally economic in nature. Unfortunately, while times have changed, we haven’t.
In the 19th century infant mortality rates were higher, life expectancy was shorter, and our society was less wealthy and less insured. This means that although the population was smaller, life was cheaper. This is an expected-value argument, one borne out in many ways, not the least of which are historical labor law and industrial casualty figures. Another difference between then and now is that in the 19th century a greater portion individual wealth was tied up in durable personal property. Consequently, fire service response was geared as much toward property conservation as life safety, for good reason. If you suffered a catastrophic fire and – lacking insurance -- lost most of your wealth, you weren’t likely to recover because you didn’t have the time to do so: life was literally too short. From the economic perspective, this means that you effectively lost the life you had before the fire. Remember that the social safety net was much smaller before the New Deal. Therefore, life and property were much more closely linked, a situation society and the fire service addressed by developing aggressive firefighting tactics, and rightly so.
The situation is different today. Infant mortality is lower while life expectancy longer and still growing. Life, paradoxically, is in greater supply and more highly valued, at least rhetorically. Society is much wealthier and much more insured. Less wealth is tied up in durable personal property -- even what we consider durable today isn’t, comparatively speaking. As a result, if you suffer a fire, you are more likely to recover from it, or at least entertain realistic hopes of doing so.
Let me point out that both examples assume middle-class status for the fire victim, something rarer in the 19th century than it is today. This makes the first example all the more powerful. Regardless, in the event of a fire, the poor lack resources before and after, so remain poor. Moving from poverty to destitution doesn’t much alter their economic status, though it may have great impact on their longevity. On the other hand, then as now, the rich have surplus resources on which to draw (that’s what makes them rich). This makes the wealthy more or less self-insured, so unless they were marginally rich to begin with, their status is no more likely to change than that of the poor. The point here is that economically, the fire service protects the middle class more than either the rich or the poor however brightly our call statistics to the poorer parts of town may glitter. Recognizing this might help us maintain a compassionate service ethic towards those less fortunate.
All that aside, our fireground tactics should have evolved to meet current economic reality, but due to internal and external insulating factors, for the most part they have not. This is beginning to change, as the casualty problem becomes intolerable, illustrating our service’s preference for emotion over analysis. We adhere to traditions we’re attached to, and we’ll only change when we can no longer bear the emotional consequences of doing so. The point of this essay is to spotlight economic reality so that we may rationally choose better ways to meet the demands of our market effectively and ethically. It does so at the cost of a conventional perspective and cherished tradition, but custom is a small price to pay.
An Alternative Reality: Economic Common Good
To understand fire service economics we must reflect on the fact of monopoly. Communities grant local monopolies to their service providers, public or private. Since most of us work in the public sector, we’ll assume fire protection is provided by a municipal department for the rest of this discussion, but the logic applies equally to private fire protection companies.
As a public firefighter, if asked who you work for, the conventional response would be the fire department. If pressed, you’d say the City; if pressed further, you’d say the city residents, maybe even “the common good”. For the most part this everyday view works well enough. From an economic perspective, however, all but one those sentiments are inaccurate. Economically, you work for the insurance industry and through it, the common good.
How can this be, especially if paychecks come from the City, who gets its money through taxation? First, it all boils down to the common good – what it is and who benefits. Second, this should not be surprising as there are plenty of clues. Who oversees your pension fund? Your state Department of Insurance. Who indirectly sets many conditions for your department? The Insurance Service Organization (ISO). They do so by setting conditions that your department must meet to get a favorable rating. This affects how desirable your town is to the business community, which in turn affects your budget. But these are only clues, not causes.
What causes you to work for the common good is the monopoly your department enjoys. That grant of monopoly was an economic act made to deliver an essential economic good, namely avoidance of market failure. Historically, we learned that competition between fire response companies didn’t work – that market failed because of what economists call externalities and perverse incentives. Externalities are costs borne by others as a result of one firm or person pursuing narrow self-interest. Perverse incentives are the other side of that counterfeit coin, as they create a benefit for interested parties to pursue narrow self-interest at the expense of common good. Historically, we learned through hard experience that competing fire companies had no incentive to aid each other when a structure fire erupted. Instead, competitors had an incentive to obstruct a rival’s response to a contractual obligation. This perverse incentive generally increased the loss and drove up the costs across the local economy, both short and long term. Additionally, there was small incentive for anyone to protect exposures, which had a similar effect.
The economic solution to this market failure was to grant a local monopoly, making one fire company responsible for all structures in the town. This solution wasn’t without costs or risks of its own, but it was greatly preferable to the more expensive alternative. The primary common good here is avoidance of market failure because by avoiding that pitfall, other goods like reduced losses and lives saved are secured. In exchange for the grant of monopoly, the fire department (public or private) became accountable to the citizenry, for not only were tax dollars paying for its services, there were no competitors on which blame could be foisted. So long as the public remained skeptical of those who provided its fire protection, the system worked. As time passed, however, the Everyman effect grew and vigilance relaxed. More to the point, once the fire monopoly became a proven market-stabilizer, a competitive insurance industry could and did thrive, resulting in an economy-wide efficiency gain.
This market stabilization, not direct emergency response, is how the fire service works for the common good. Economically speaking, putting out fires and saving babies are secondary effects, just frosting on the cake. From our atomic economic perspective, nothing else matters because it can all be accounted for economically – loss of life, property, etc can all be estimated and insured with a dollars-and-cents figure. You may not like it, you may contest the figures, but it can, is, and must be done to keep our economic life on track. The insurance industry has a vested interest in maintaining the fire protection monopoly because by doing so it escapes the costs of both service delivery and market failure. The insurance consumer shares those same interests. Next time we’ll look at some of the topsy-turvy economics that put any fire department in the employ of a diffuse and remote insurance industry, not the town or its citizens.
All that Glitters is not Gold: Fire Service Economic Reality, Part 2
As noted previously, an essential reality of fire service economics is that the fire service is an insurance service. In fact, it is a public part of the insurance industry – social insurance, if you will. It is important to understand that where we’re insured, our precautions grow lax. After all, we buy insurance to reduce our need for vigilance so that we can more profitably invest our energies elsewhere.
To combat laxity and the other bane of insurance – fraud -- a City seeking cost-effective gains in public safety can assert that taxes only provide the availability of fire apparatus and personnel: those that use them must pay for them. Similar logic gave us our successful “spiller pays” laws regarding chemical incidents. In doing so, the City reduces the amount of insurance it offers to residents, creating an incentive for them to become more fire-safe. However, this obliges the City to boost prevention efforts: if it’s going to charge residents for emergency services, the City must try to limit how often it gets in their pockets.
The common objection here is that taxes pay for fire protection, but this is only true indirectly. What gets missed is that you’re not paying for firefighters to save your house: you pay for them to keep your home from catching fire if your neighbor’s house burns. In other words, you don’t care about your unfortunate neighbor as much as you care about the risk his lack of precaution exposed you to. This is why you want him to be more vigilant, and should support a “burner pays” ordinance.
Why don’t you care about your house? Being well-insured, you’re indifferent to the loss of the structure: it will get rebuilt. The things you care about are your irreplaceables: baby books, wedding photos, the wall where the kids were measured every birthday. These things, being unique, are both uninsurable, and valuable only to you. There is no real market for your priceless junk.
Fine words to the contrary, firefighters could care less about some marks on a wall: if fire is behind that sheet-rock, it’s coming off, however dear those birthday marks on it may be to you. Firefighters won’t do this needlessly – because for the most part we take pride in minimizing damage -- but property conservation is last on the firefighter’s list, behind life safety and incident stabilization (i.e., keeping fire from spreading to neighboring homes). Therefore, in the event of a fire, you must consider all your treasures lost. If a few are saved, so much the better.
But it’s only these priceless mementoes that provide your incentive to be fire-safe – these, and the irritation of finding temporary housing. This isn’t much of an incentive, and helps explain fire incidence by socio-economic strata: the poor, being more mobile and having less to lose, lack incentive to be fire-safe, so suffer more fires. Firefighters are paid to minimize loss regardless of victim’s income, but that’s insurable loss – something the poor don’t have. At your house fire, the firefighters are really working more for your insurance company than they are for you because what they’re saving isn’t the stuff you’re really worried about – unless you have an irrational attachment to 2x4s. This is why your taxes pay firefighters to fight your neighbor’s fire: success there keeps your priceless junk safe.
This is also why we work primarily for the middle class. Firefighters working for the uninsured poor are literally working for themselves because they are the only insurance other than religion that the poor have – and the poor don’t pay taxes or have insurable property. This is a deep, unseen conflict of interest, as powerful as it is invisible. It is the self-interest behind the idea that says paying for emergency services is wrong, even though doing so would create an incentive, however imperfect, for those with little to be more fire-safe.
Realizing this, let’s consider billing for emergency services a hard form of prevention because it encourages safe behavior. Other smart, hard strategies include billing for fire lane violations, excess false alarms, fire and life safety code violations, and all car wrecks (not just out-of-town drivers) – emergency response in general. More familiar are soft prevention strategies: inspections and investigations. These should not be billed for because it’s in the interest of public safety to help people take cost-effective precautions.
For example, if an elderly couple on a fixed income has their government-mandated carbon monoxide alarm go into alarm, we don’t want them considering whether or not they can afford to call the fire department. We want them to call without question because a few dollars in diesel and salary is well spent whether or not there is a serious problem. Either these folks learn they need a new battery or detector, or they avoid serious harm or death. Charging for services like these creates an incentive to skimp on safety, not invest in it as charging for emergency response does. This is counter to the fire department’s mission, and a disservice to the citizens it is pledged to protect. It will keep demand for emergency services high, however .
Another service that should not be billed for is commercial property inspection. No city wants to alienate business by imposing back-door taxes in the form of plan-review or inspection fees. Nor do towns want to cease inspections and put public safety and long-term economic viability at risk. To be clear, unremediated code violations found during an inspection must be penalized with fines, in order to create an incentive to adopt the safe practices the codes put forth. We’re just not charging for the inspection up-front, violations or no, in order to cover operational costs.
We don’t charge up-front because no fire department wants to be avoided as a self-interested tax collector. Our concern is public safety, and that requires cooperation. Separate fees for plan review and life safety inspection are obstacles to cooperation because they nickel-and-dime business owners, and raise the psychological cost of doing business far beyond the amount collected. Better to lump all such start-up costs together by pricing the business license appropriately.
Recognizing the difference between economics per se and policy economics aka political economy, some might object that while this might be a good theory, there is no way it would work in reality: people and their local politicians simply won’t support charging for “essential services”. That isn’t necessarily so if municipalities follow through by investing in prevention and other mitigation services, in order to minimize the frequency and costs of emergency services. We noted that the loss priceless junk and the hassle of finding temporary housing are what create the incentives to be fire-safe. A city could enact a fee-for-service policy in order to strengthen the fire-safety incentive, then offset that cost to a homeowner by providing short-term emergency housing to displaced fire victims through contract with local hotels. This would address the homeowner’s immediate need, while firefighting expenses would simply be tacked on to the insurance bill. This shifts costs off the public books onto the private ones. The homeowner pays a fixed deductable, so would be essentially unaffected. More accurately, homeowners would see a net gain as for the same out-of-pocket expense they get the same fire response plus emergency housing. The insurance companies, who have been free-riding the public’s dollar for two centuries, would bear their own costs for a change.
But what about the uninsured poor who lack the resources to pay for emergency services? You can’t get blood out of a turnip, after all, and no one would support taxing the unfortunate impoverished. True enough, but cities could peg their fees to income (with a non-zero minimum) and union locals could use their charity funds to cover the balance and make the poor whole. In fact, to the extent that the relatively fire-prone poor keep firefighters in their jobs, the Union has a moral obligation to return that financial support. Thus we see that fee-for-service is not a political impossibility, but only a leadership challenge.
Knowing all this, the wise fire chief will protect his people and their jobs by investing in prevention, and keeping staffing low. To perform effectively with low staffing, he needs skilled workers. To get them, he must invest in training, and for that investment to payoff, workers must be motivated to train. This means he needs good people, and therefore a system for identifying top prospects, for initial hire as well as the internal hire called promotion. As already mentioned, one problem is that we lack senior leaders who acknowledge, understand, and apply these concepts. Several forces drive that scarcity, and one of them – the black hole from which progress can’t escape – is the Everyman Hero effect, the subject we turn to next.
