This page contains essays on unrecognized structural problems faced by a tradition-blinded fire service. These include institutional discrimination, a hero tournament, the Everyman Effect -- a nexus of overlapping interests that obstruct change -- and perverse incentives for both organized labor and municipal human resource managers.
Contents
Institutional Discrimination
Hero Tournament
Everyman Effect
Perverse Incentives for Labor
Peer Evaluation
Perverse Incentives for Management
Institutional Discrimination in the Fire Service
It’s hard to identify an issue closer to the top of our national sensitive issue list than race relations. Two generations after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act the fire service can take pride in the near-eradication of overt racism in the workplace, yet the issue remains. Minorities insist we still have a long way to go, while many whites feel unfairly burdened, as if paying for crimes they did not commit and try not to perpetuate in the face of constant aggravation. It is a complex problem indeed, one that haunts the fire service as it does our nation. Justifiably proud of the progress we’ve made, and of the majority and minority leaders who’ve helped us to accomplish it, we’re frustrated by a problem that resists resolution.
Despite our best efforts, institutional discrimination is prevalent and powerful across our service. This isn’t pleasant to consider, but shouldn’t be surprising or offensive: it only means that like the America we reflect, firefighters are human. Evidence for discrimination is found in the existence of organizations like Women in the Fire Service, and the Black Firefighters Association. If there was no real need for them, these groups would not exist because they require time, capital, and human resources to maintain. Though I lack the wherewithal to conduct the necessary surveys, I’ll bet that any minority will guardedly agree with me, while those in the majority – white males like myself – will dispute the assertion as nonsense.
The argument against discrimination has been expressed by the actor Denis Leary of Rescue Me: fire burns all equally, catastrophe strikes with no regard for race, and firefighters respond in the same way. We don’t ask about race, creed, gender, orientation, etc before attempting rescue, any more than we’d abandon a rescue should such information become known. We don’t care whether the firefighters backing us up are members of a minority or not: we trust them to look out for us and do a good job, just as we look out for them and perform professionally when positions are reversed. Discrimination doesn’t exist on the emergency scene or in the firehouse because it’s in no one’s interest to engage in it or tolerate it.
This is a compelling argument. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up because it substitutes bigotry for institutional discrimination. In other words, it attributes widespread discrimination to irrational racial hatred, whose blatant exercise has been more or less stamped out – which is not to say that it doesn’t exist. Institutional discrimination, on the other hand, is the result of economic motives that create and maintain disparity in respectable fashion. It is a strong, rational, silent force – something much harder to identify and address. If there is a bright side to the idea of discrimination in our ranks, it is that it is no longer – and maybe never was -- due primarily to bigotry.
Instead, the invisible discrimination suffered by fire service minorities is due to the economic self interest of a historically fortunate demographic – the white male. Members of this group are not generally working against any minority in a consciously organized fashion. They are simply working within existing law and normal, well-mannered social convention to further their own interests in straightforward conservative fashion. Disparate impact is not, for the most part, created by malice on their part, but unconsciously leveraged from a position of historical advantage.
Because white males are just playing by the rules of the game, it’s no wonder that they feel attacked when claims of discrimination are made – they aren’t doing anything wrong. But neither are minorities wrong to claim disadvantage when the rules of the game impose fewer constraints on white males. The worst that can be said about white males is that as a group, they fail to appreciate their advantage. But this is only human: when you’re king of the hill, and everyone is trying to knock you down, it’s hard not to feel threatened. And when you’ve always been on top, it’s not just hard to imagine any other view, it’s impossible.
Had I not experienced this bias firsthand on the basis of education level, it’s unlikely I’d have ever seen it myself. Institutional discrimination easily avoids detection. By nature, the blinders that self-interest imposes are very hard to lay aside. Generally, as in my case, we have to fall victim to economic discrimination before we can see it. This is compounded by the fact that minority status is a local affair. In other words, it doesn’t matter if, nationwide, white firefighters outnumber black firefighters; what matters is who dominates force composition in a given department.
People are people, after all, regardless of race. The economic structures that further the interests of the current majority will do the same for another group should it come to power. In other words, in a department of where most firefighters are African- or Asian-American, members of that demographic will treat whites just like majority whites treat minorities elsewhere. Because of this and other factors we’ll discuss, there can be an appearance of greater progress and less discrimination than actually exists. Because racial issues are difficult and emotionally charged, when the situation is quiet on the surface we tend not to risk stirring things up by delving deeper. An example will help clarify the situation.
Consider an unskilled job like picking strawberries. After one day, if not before, a new worker will be indistinguishable from an experienced picker. In fact, after one day in the fields, he’ll be an experienced picker – as far as skill acquisition is concerned. Therefore, given the same opportunity, it is unlikely that any one picker will significantly out-perform any other over a season. Motivation will vary day to day, and harvest rate will follow. Thin patches and heavy-bearing ones will even out over time. This makes unskilled workers essentially interchangeable.
The key phrase in the previous paragraph is “given the same opportunity”. Statisticians and economists would say “all else being equal”. But all else is not equal.
Being human, we have preferences. One consistent human preference is for similar company. Let’s say I’m a white male strawberry farmer. Let’s say most of my pickers are white males too. My workers will naturally prefer to work with other whites for understandable reasons: shared language, holidays, experiences, etc – culture, in a word. Believing in the value of diversity, I could hire 12 workers from 12 different cultures speaking 12 different languages, and come out fine – but only if the work is truly unskilled and done in relative isolation – which seems to be the case with berry-picking. But if some communication is necessary for optimal production, I’m likely to suffer an economic hit – one row will get doubled-picked, another will get missed due to inefficient communication. Let’s say that through trial and error I’ve found that some communication helps production – as is certainly the case on the fireground. Put that in the back of your mind, and let’s return to the end of the last paragraph where we found that unskilled workers were interchangeable.
Another way to state that is to say that where work is unskilled, there is no opportunity for any worker to distinguish himself from his coworkers on a skill basis. Lacking that, the primary determinant of success in the workplace must be fluency with workplace culture – politics, in a word. The berry-picking workplace is a blend of worker culture and farmer culture, and those most fluent are able to work in both. For my white males, this means that the strongest workers will be those who can lead or coerce their fellows, and/or communicate with the farmer they work for. This is as true for the farmer as it is for the worker. The worker needs to be able to converse with the farmer to negotiate wages and benefits, and determine if the farmer is paying a fair wage. The farmer needs to converse with his workers to negotiate, and to determine if he is getting fair effort.
Now let’s say I pay very well, and can communicate easily, but don’t monitor my workers very closely. Word will get out, and there will be competition for jobs at my farm. I will most likely end up with an experienced crew who speaks my language. Offering unskilled work, I’d be just as well off – maybe better off -- hiring newcomers with whom I can barely communicate. But being human I prefer those like me.
Due to my preference for other white males, my crew has access to a valuable resource – high-wage, low-skill, low-oversight jobs. This is something valuable, a resource worth protecting, but also worth exploiting. My workers are likely to collude in a number of ways to maximize its utilization. To keep jobs secure, they will pick at a reasonable rate, not too fast, and not too slow. Most likely, they will take a little longer than necessary to pick the crop in order to draw some extra wages from me without being conspicuous. This is exactly what we expect in from a monopoly which is what my white males enjoy – a monopoly on access to my jobs. If I notice it, I will likely bear that as a premium paid for English-speaking white male workers.
But collusion won’t stop there. To protect their valuable jobs, my workers are likely to self-police. Day by day, they will lean on any who jeopardize job security through under-performance . They will lean even heavier on any who jeopardize maximum return through over-performance. In an unskilled environment, collective job security hinges on preventing innovation and skill development because technological improvements save labor.
On the other hand, when all are indistinguishable, all are equally safe from blame, though this safety is purchased by forfeiting any chance of praise. Significant peer pressure will be mobilized to rein in any mavericks who threaten the status quo from either end. Note that this is just another way of saying that fluency with workplace culture is the determining factor of job success in the unskilled workplace. A corollary is that the stronger the culture, the greater the fluency effect will be. Put that in the back of your mind, too.
Returning to my workers, I expect them to organize themselves to one degree or another, too. Like any union, formal or otherwise, they’d prefer to boost wages rather than increase the workforce, but only to a point. Beyond that point, as an employer, I will likely either demand greater productivity , or replace all current workers with cheap new labor. So, to retain access to my valuable jobs, I expect current employees to recruit along family lines when more workers are needed, introducing the discriminatory practice of nepotism to the workplace. But so long as the work is unskilled, this doesn’t matter.
If internal control of the group is highly centralized, some will be forced to pick up the slack of the slow nephew or stupid in-law. This means the less connected workers – meaning less internally connected and more independent/externally connected -- will be overworked, crowded out, or both. It is possible for the group to coalesce along more democratic lines into a team of peers, and just the opposite will happen: cross-culture fluency will determine who succeeds and who fails. However, this arrangement is uncommon except in highly skilled workplaces, blood being thicker than merit.
Collusion does not stop with self-policing or family recruiting. Since I can communicate easily with my white male workers, I’ll explain to them that to meet governmental regulations, I need to hire some people of different races, some women, etc. I resist doing so, not because I have any animosity to members of these groups, but because it’s a twofold cost: 1) it’s harder for me to communicate with these groups, and 2) it’s likely to create friction within my workforce for the same reason, negatively affecting production. Being a businessman, my goal is minimize this unavoidable cost, which is another way of saying that I’ll seek token compliance. Again, this isn’t because I have anything against either the government, or the minorities, it’s just economics.
An HR professional might restate this, saying in a low-skill environment, where discrimination on a skill basis is impossible, and fluency with workplace culture is the measure of job success, hiring the predominant demographic in the relevant local labor market is the most efficient practice. In other words, if most of the strawberry pickers in my area are white males, I’m best off hiring only white males because this keeps the expected cost of internal dispute low. That such practice isn’t legal or ethical shouldn’t obscure this basic fact because this is a major driver of institutional discrimination.
Because moral unease and regulatory fines impose costs of their own, as a decent man with a general belief in fairness, I’ll comply with regulations, but I’m likely to do so only to the point of minimal cost – which means minimal compliance. There is nothing nefarious about this – its normal, human behavior. If it weren’t, my workers wouldn’t help me do it.
My white males will help me minimally comply because, like me, they seek a good return. I try to get mine by minimizing costs; they get theirs by maximizing access to the valuable resource my jobs represent. So, just as my white males will use peer pressure to police their ranks and drive out over- and under- performers alike, they’ll do the same with any minority. Those minorities who best conform and can tolerate low-grade antagonism by the entrenched majority will be tolerated in return. Those who resist assimilation into the workplace culture will be set up to fail in a variety of ways. Some will leave of their own accord, some will get fired. Because both whites and minorities will be hired and fired, and both will be hired and retained (though in different proportions) an appearance of equal opportunity will be generated where it does not actually exist.
Minorities will learn that becoming a strawberry picker is an uphill battle, and seek other opportunities where their demographic dominates the workplace and its culture. To say it one more time, groups self-segregate less out of xenophobia and antipathy (i.e. bigotry) than simple economic self-interest. This is so because it is both human nature and lower cost (i.e. easier and more appealing) to work with those similar to us, than with those who are different.
This is essentially the situation the fire service faces today. There are two keys to understanding and remedying discrimination within our ranks, neither of which is surface demographics. These elements are peer approval and skill level. Determined by fluency with workplace culture, the withholding of peer approval by the white males who’ve set the culture is a strong, negative force. One reason why institutional discrimination is invisible is that it’s not something that’s done to a minority, it’s something that’s not done them. In other words, it’s passive, not active.
This is not to say that white male culture is bad. On the contrary, it’s because there is so much good and right about it that others want to join it. It’s not just economics that draw people to the fire service – its ideas and values too. Employment as a firefighter represents an opportunity to put our nobler sentiments into action, and to test ourselves for a cause more worthwhile than mere vanity or profit. Because part of the job is about duty, honor, integrity, courage, service, sacrifice, or any other beatific, all sorts of people seek to become firefighters. Put another way, regardless of what the dominant demographic is, these values would be part of our profession because they embody the best aspirations of humanity. White males got these values right, but so would black Muslim gay females or any other group – and the same goes for the negatives, like active and passive discrimination.
There are three key points to understand here. First, discrimination isn’t based on what we share across cultures, but on the differences between them. A Hispanic fire service will be just as noble as a white one, but it will express itself in different ways, some of which whites won’t appreciate, and vice versa. This is true for all demographics. Second, minorities need recognize that much of the dominant culture is good, and be willing to conform and assimilate; in the diverse workplace, the majority is not the only side that needs to give ground. Third, because the nobler elements of our culture are shared with all humanity, when we withhold peer approval, we’re denying the validity of someone’s claim to those aspects of his or her humanity. That’s why peer approval based on cultural fluency is such a powerful force.
Let me offer some evidence of institutional discrimination in my own department, for we are neither innocent nor immune. When I was president of our local, and leading negotiations , some members wanted my team to bargain for rules regarding the hiring eligibility list. I pissed many off by stating that I wasn’t going to spend and our raises bargaining for people who were not part of our union. I explained that this wasn’t because the caliber of new hires wasn’t a source of legitimate concern for the union, but that it was outside the scope of bargaining, and we had more pressing economic issues to consider. The list simply didn’t exist as far as negotiations were concerned.
Many felt this to be unfair to “good guys” on the list done wrong by being passed over in favor of minorities. Most of these good guys were young men on the volunteer department from which my department traditionally drew talent. Hiring criteria were and remain being an adult with a pulse, a high school diploma or GED, and a passing score on a simple exam – in other words, a process with little screening power. Since the work is low-skill and screening is impossible anyway, the willingness of my coworkers to sacrifice money, time-off, or favorable language to help others like them prevail against anti-discrimination efforts like Affirmative Action may not proof positive of culturally-driven institutional discrimination, but it certainly comes close.
The eligibility list remains an item of contention among the rank-and-file. Since Affirmative Action is just another lottery and heavy-handed late fix , their upset has some justification. Until we build effective screens for talent and motivation, the situation will not improve. To do so, we must first come to grips with the source of the problem, mentioned above – the low skill nature firefighting.
The reason we were concerned that firefighting is a low-skill job is because institutional discrimination thrives in the low-skill workplace. This happens because when skill levels are low, there is little opportunity for workers to distinguish themselves on a skill or quality basis. Instead, the primary determinant of success will be fluency with workplace culture – politics, in a word – and is wholly unrelated to worker quality. In a service industry, worker quality and product/service quality are two sides of the same coin. Among other negative effects, institutional discrimination harms quality by preferring less able cultural natives to talented minorities.
A strong passive force, institutional discrimination achieves these ends largely by withholding peer approval from minorities. Lacking social support in a foreign cultural environment, most of the best minorities will depart, leaving those unable to do elsewhere better trapped in unfriendly ranks. While the unskilled nature of the work will allow them to succeed at the work, their work environment is likely to difficult and stressful. To reduce that stress they must make strong efforts to fit in and become culturally acceptable, if not fully fluent. To do so they must endure cultural rites just like a native, but of amplified risk, in order to prove their merit.
This inflames the already rampant competition within the ranks as talented natives seek to distinguish themselves from their sluggish brethren who clog their ranks as a result of an ineffective but culturally ordained hiring process that operates as a lottery, not a screen. This competition we call the hero tournament. It may not be the primary means of supplying or denying peer approval, but it is certainly the most visible. As such it is the primary means of displaying skill mastery, which in a low-skill environment means meeting cultural expectations in the most difficult circumstances. This introduces risk. As a source of risk the hero tournament is a strong contributor to the casualty figures this work set out to address. In fact, this essay could be summarized so: culture drives risk; risk is misunderstood and mismanaged; casualties result. Having investigated the cultural risk driver of institutional discrimination, let’s turn our attention to the second pillar: the Hero Tournament.
The Hero Tournament: Casualty Engine of Low-Skill Firefighting
Consider the power of peer approval and its role in workplace inequality. Because peer approval is such a strong force in any culture, it’s worth taking a close look at how it operates in the fire service where the strength of workplace culture is legendary. Couple that strength with a low-skill, low-turnover work environment where opportunities to succeed are as limited as they are visible, and you have the conditions for bragging-rights tournament of epic proportion, one where reputations are as valuable as lives.
There are many contributing factors to our steady casualty statistics, and many have been investigated to some extent. However, until now the root cause has gone unmentioned. That cause is the hero tournament – an internal competition whose prizes include enhanced self-image, the professional satisfaction of a job well done, sharpened skill, peer recognition, and professional advancement. That this tournament has been long overlooked isn’t surprising because we don’t train many fire officers in human resource economics, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s just such a fundamental part of fire service culture that it never gets noticed for what it is – the old forest/trees problem.
Most of us understand the idea of a tournament – a crowded field of competitors vying for a single prize. The best known tournament in the fire service is the promotion process, which like any other tourney, creates many losers and one winner. This brings out the best and the worst in people. Some relish the competition and enjoy the test as an opportunity to shine. Some fear the process as an opportunity to fail or to have weakness discovered. Most fire service professionals of any rank are nervous and ambivalent about having to prove their merit in competition or assert themselves to be better than their peers. We see this in part because competition for individual honors runs counter to our ethos of teamwork, and in part because of the risk it poses for professional reputation.
A similar situation occurs at structure fires. We are all familiar with firefighters and officers who race hell-bent-for-leather to a working fire. Most of us have done so, and most probably still do. We might say we do so to save lives and property, but to the skeptical eye of the economist, what we’re doing is competing to be first get on scene and into the thick of the action. If we’re honest about it, we’ll admit the same thing and have probably said as much around the kitchen table. Nobody wants to be RIT or Safety. Everybody wants an active role, a shot at the glory.
For the most part, glory means the approval of our peers. Recognition in the local media is frequently avoided, and those who seek it out are often viewed with suspicion because doing so goes against our traditional image of firefighters as reluctant heroes. Also, like promotion, such activity tends to serve the individual, but not necessarily the team. By contrast, few of us will avoid departmental honors, or would shun a write-up in a trade publication like Firehouse magazine or the IAFF newsletter.
And there is no reason why we should. In a profession with as strong a culture as the fire service, peer recognition is an immensely powerful reward, something it’s natural and human to strive for. After all, peer recognition doesn’t make us better than our brother and sister firefighters – it means we’re one of them, that we know what we’re doing, do it well, and have earned our spot on the team. Full acceptance into the firefighting fraternity is the real prize at stake in hero tournament. This is much more in tune with our cultural ethos than the reward in the promotional tourney, and as a result, the competition for it is more intense. This is why freelancing remains a problem – one addressed but not solved by ICS.
Now when there are fewer fires, competition for firefighting opportunities increases – simple supply and demand. Greater competition means we take greater risks to win. We drive more aggressively, and get in fatal accidents. We penetrate further seeking potential rescues or the seat of the fire, get overextended or mis-oriented, and suffer collapses, flashovers, entrapment, and air supply exhaustion. Trying to outwork other companies we resist cycling to rehab, overstress and overstrain our bodies, and fall victim to heart attacks and all manner of fatigue-related injuries, major or minor. This shows us that addressing physical fitness will not, on its own, be enough to reduce line-of-duty casualties; at the same time, it shows us that it must be part of the solution. Now let’s return to the hero tournament.
Facing fewer fires, firefighters need to get to every one they can, and not just for the glory shot on the evening news, the medal and cake ceremony, the nickname, the improved chance of promotion, or any of that. We compete for the chance to fight fire because, like an athlete at his or her sport, it’s something we enjoy and enjoy doing well. We also recognize that to get good and stay good at our job, we need to perform that job. The hero tournament is not and never has been driven solely by vanity or ambition – but these elements exist and we need to recognize them just like we need to recognize the self-actualizing drive of professionalism. The same can be said for professional athletes.
But we’re still not done. So far, for the most part, I’ve used inclusive terms like “everybody” and “nobody” when referring the desire to be first-in, or the desire to avoid the less glamorous roles of RIT or Safety. But the simple fact of the matter is that universal terms are inaccurate. There are always some notorious slackers, those whose heart isn’t in the job. They remain because they are trapped by lack of viable opportunity, financial obligations, familial expectations, or who knows what. We put these people on the job, and for the most part we tolerate them. This doesn’t happen in professional sports. We like to say that we have that we have some of the best people in the world in the fire service, and that is true. The sad fact is that we have some the worst too. While these folks don’t compete in the hero tournament, they help drive it by soaking up valuable opportunities for those who’d like to compete.
This heightens casualties in three ways. First, it sharpens the scarcity problem. The scarcer the resource (structure fires), the greater the price we’ll pay or risk we’ll bear to access that resource. It doesn’t matter why opportunities are fewer, only that they are.
Second and more insidious, once active competitors are engaged on-scene, they’ll try to make the most of their opportunity. Among other things, this means keeping others on the sideline by hogging action to the greatest extent possible, We do so because no competitor wants to look like a slacker, or give a slacker any shot at a favorable comparison. Those competitors sidelined through no fault of their own will be looking for something to do, and will freelance if given the chance. They do so just to make clear that they are competitors, not slackers, even though they have no chance to win the tourney this time out, and are competing for second or third place. Together the cycle of job-hogging and free-lancing puts a significant demand on the IC, and is one reason why accountability is such a problem. Not that your crew or mine ever does these things – it’s those other guys.
Third and most insidious, as competing crews press their luck ever further, they do so backed up by those they’ve crowded out of the action. Most of these will be fellow competitors, but the odds are that the proportion of slackers is higher in reserve, if only because some competitors are already committed and manpower is limited. It also means that risk-taking on an actively deployed RIT team will be even greater.
Extreme risks by RIT teams are generally considered to be largely an emotional response to a colleague’s distress rather than a cool cost-benefit analysis, but economists are finding surprising evidence that we are unconsciously rational, even in unusual conditions. An activated RIT team is offered the greatest possible reward – saving one of our own – but does so against a backdrop of a slacker-filled reserve field, relatively speaking. RIT is therefore an all-or-nothing endeavor, which lends itself to highly risky behavior. This is one reason why RIT is a bad idea, but that is dealt with in elsewhere. It also helps explain high casualty rates among would-be rescuers.
Now it might seem that I am trying to have my cake and eat it too by first saying that a RIT assignment is avoided, and then saying that RIT offers the highest possible reward, which should make it highly sought after. This is not the case because of what finance people call expected value. The expected value of a RIT assignment is low – rescuing a trapped firefighter is a long shot, a low-probability occurrence. This is good, but because the likelihood of activation is slim, RIT assignment is not generally sought, despite its high potential pay-off.
We prefer the higher expected values of the more frequent, lower-yielding assignments like search or nozzle, and for good reason: the total pay-off is higher and compounds over time. The more often a firefighter is first in and gets a knock, the better his reputation. The more he does it, the more proficient he becomes, which keeps his skill progressing with his reputation up a positive spiral. Note that this is little more than fundamental brand management: high visibility plus high quality encourages high return. One thing to remember is that this works equally well with negatives. Once a less-than-stellar reputation is established, earned or not, it is hard to shake, which tends to limit tourney opportunities, resulting in a negative spiral called the set-up-to-fail syndrome.
The exception that proves the rule is the city-wide rescue company found in our largest metropolitan areas. Because these more-or-less full time RIT companies respond city-wide, they are highly visible and have an activation rate high enough to make the expected value of assignment to them appealing. Likewise, because the expected value of these positions is high, the commitment to training among their members is high. Where the expected value of training is low, like vertical rescue in a small city on the plains, commitment to that training is low, but this is getting off track. The point is that city-wide rescue companies aside, because RIT is seldom activated, it doesn’t provide a good chance to win -- or even place well -- in the hero tournament. However, once activated, it provides the highest potential reward of any fireground activity. The statements are not contradictory, though they may appear so at first glance.
So, if you buy the idea that a hero tournament exists, the question is what can we do to moderate it -- assuming we want to? Despite our rhetoric, we seem to be satisfied with the status quo. So far, the evidence is that we are: we preach a lot, but we haven’t made any substantive changes. If we had, we’d have seen results. Instead, we’ve engaged in what’s known as Red Queen behavior, after the Alice-In-Wonderland character who runs faster and faster to just stay in place. Almost 40 years of technological improvement has helped us keep pace with changes in building construction and fire loads. Over the same span of time, only the development of ICS has offset the increasing intensity of the hero tournament, and it has just kept pace. To improve, we must change faster than the ground beneath us turns.
The Everyman Effect: Cultural Insurance Against Change, Part One
This essay is about a barrier to learning and progress that I call the Everyman Effect. To be accurate I should call it the Everyman Hero Effect but that’s a mouthful. Simply stated, the Everyman Effect is the idea that to our public, firefighters are approachable heroes – a sort of everyday, average-Joe super-hero – and that appreciation not only shields us from most criticism by discouraging it directly and indirectly, but by undermining any criticism that does arise. Nice as it is to be appreciated and protected, this gets in the way of our learning and development, personally and organizationally. Worse, because there are several contributors to this effect -- including the fire service itself -- this is a complex problem that’s not easy to sort out.
To aid understanding, you might think of the Everyman Effect as an over-protective mother who makes a sissy out of her best boy by zealously preventing most teasing and roughhousing, and accusing even legitimate competitors of being bullies. Whoa! Did I just compare the Fire Service to a sissy? Yes, from a hard-nosed economic perspective, I did. But if we’re going to learn, we’ll have to tolerate a little a name-calling because until we do so, we’ll never learn the difference between insult and an honest attempt at correction – think of your first day on the job. It’s either that, or retreat behind the broad, deep skirts of the Everyman Effect.
How does this excess protection arise and work against us? Basically, a confluence of interests from five primary stakeholders creates an environment that makes real criticism taboo. When that happens, learning stops and we cease to evolve at the structural level, becoming two hundred years of tradition unimpeded by progress – a 19th organization living in the 21st. The Everyman Effect is what creates and maintains this stable set of conditions, and our high structural loss rate is the result. Understand this effect, and we can begin to make the strategic changes necessary to reduce our LODD figures.
The five interest groups that contribute to this situation are the general public, elected officials, the media, the insurance industry, and the fire service itself. In Part One we’ll look at the first four in turn, beginning with the politicians. In Part Two we’ll tackle how the fire service contributes to the problem. Please understand that I’m speaking in generalities here. I’m not saying this is the exact way things always are -- just how they’re likely to be more often than not because that’s how the incentives are stacked for the players in this complex game.
As noted previously, the fire service provides insurance against catastrophe to the public, and in return it is the beneficiary of social good will. In other words, public trust and gratitude reciprocally insure the fire service against most criticism. Fire victims are grateful for having even a little of their precious junk saved. Neighbors are grateful that they were spared harm. Local politicians who make hay through strong budgetary support to their fire department are as vindicated when lives and property are saved as when they are lost: saves mean money well-spent; loss means not enough was spent. Fiscal conservatives aren’t quite as well-served: saves show their restraint contained needless spending but losses are much more problematic. This asymmetry is created by the Everyman Effect, and contributes not only to our monopolistic problems of high cost and idle capital, but to the creeping growth of government.
Along that line, politicians above the local level often view the fire service through rose-colored glasses, largely because of its visibility. They’re aware of the depth of public sentiment regarding our service and find it in their interest to use that to their advantage. That Firepac is as big and bipartisan as it is some evidence of this. Among other reasons, Republicans can support the fire service because it is a local part of national defense. Supporting a local fire department is a way for our representatives to give substance to fine words uttered in a far-off capital. It shows they care, and have enough clout to deliver, rather than being all hot air. Democrats can support us because the service is an active part of the social safety net. Also, because we’re part of homeland security, being fire-friendly is a congenial way for Dems to bolster their perennial soft spot without compromising civil liberties. As we’ll soon see, because of the vicarious power of the Everyman Effect, when a politician of any stripe secures funding for a local department, to some extent he or she does so for every constituent personally, not just in an impersonal public-use sense.
For their part, the media use the irregular and inherently dramatic nature of emergency response to spice their product for consumption. As a good news alternative to law enforcement events, and sexier than economic or political news, fire service stories are particularly welcome. Contrariwise, when the mythic good-guy fireman gets caught with his hand in some unseemly cookie jar, from setting fires to robbing the public till, the gossip is that much juicier. Nothing sells papers or 6pm airtime like a fallen hero, except perhaps a dead hero. The pageant of a fire service memorial is truly spectacular, contributing not only to the Everyman Effect, but the Hero Tournament too.
Significantly, the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF) has an annual media awards contest, revealing at least an instinctive awareness of the media’s role myth maintenance, as well as a business savvy that’s not afraid to use it. The Union isn’t alone – a leading industry journal publishes awards for valorous action every year. I’m not saying any of this is wrong. I am saying that it may have unintended consequences that are largely overlooked – like how it contributes to a harmful Everyman Effect.
Like the media, the insurance industry has a vested economic interest in the fire service. This is not restricted to the fire protection market, but the health care market too. As noted earlier, fire departments (public or private) simultaneously work for the insurance industry and the public good by addressing a market failure. Among other things, this relieves the insurance industry of the need to provide response services while creating a stable environment in which a market for insurance can thrive. Because fire service stability is key to its continued viability, the insurance industry is a strong force for the status quo.
This isn’t all bad (or all good), but when it comes to the health care segment of insurance industry, this relationship is less healthy, at least for the taxpaying public. An example from personal experience illustrates this. Many times every year my department provides emergency fire response to a nearby health care clinic. This facility is staffed by doctors and nurses -- health care professionals with a higher level of medical training than most firefighter-EMTs. Even so, we respond for any kind of acute care need. Why?
Two reasons stand out: cost reduction and liability protection. Having the fire department respond saves both the hospital and its insurance arm the cost of keeping a crash cart available, or keeping clinic staff well-trained in anything but routine care for chronic and low-grade problems. It also allows them to run their ambulance service as lean – and therefore as profitably – as possible. They get away with this only because the fire department can and does provide emergency care until a far-flung ambulance arrives. In other words, timely coverage by the fire department shields the hospital and its HMO from a liability suit alleging inadequate response. Because the hospital and HMO are insured on the public dollar through the fire department, this relationship has been long overlooked – except by firefighters who grouse a little about wasting time on garbage calls that doctors can and should handle. But they don’t grouse loudly because they know intuitively that jobs are at stake.
The largest player in this insurance game, the general public, is only too happy to have its larger-than-life expectations confirmed by the media. It thrills to tales of bravery, and rescue, and fire service daring-do; it weeps at noble sacrifice; it longs for the legendary camaraderie of the smoke-eating, death-defying brotherhood; and when its trust is betrayed by malfeasance, it is as likely to laugh in sympathy as righteously rail against this abuse. And then there’s peace-of-mind: we all want to believe that we’re well protected. Anything else is just too scary, especially with terrorists on the loose. This is no jest. It is essential that we feel safe enough to conduct the business of daily life if we’re to avoid national economic ruin. President Bush said as much after 9/11.
But there is a deeper reason that the public and its politicians need the myth of a heroic fire service that both help the media conjure. We-the-public need this myth not just to feel safe or for entertainment, but because we need to see our better angels in action. We need concrete examples of human nobility in order to more fully believe in and act on our own capacity for courage and goodness. This is the higher standard our leaders aim for when they summon fire service members to be exemplars and role models. But the we-the-public also need to see our exemplars brought low, in order to keep our loftiest aspirations accessible. This often gets missed, which is unfortunate because this is where the power of the myth lies.
You see, if only heroes can do good, and we’re not heroes, then we can’t do good and life becomes grim. But we see firefighters on our streets and in our shops. We know they are people just like us. If that guy, the firefighter who lives on the corner can be a hero, we can too. If he can do good, so can we. If the hero on the corner sometimes trips, our stumbles are excusable too. Every now and then, these unspoken beliefs are confirmed when some day laborer, businessman, or even ex-con saves the baby after the fire truck crashed en route or was held up in traffic.
According to Christian tradition, human-born Jesus brought divinity to man, redeeming him. The same sort of thing is going on here.
This is the root of the Everyman Effect, why it’s so powerful and so hard to mention, much less challenge, as it approaches the sacred. Once the we-the-public have granted ourselves this almost-holy identity with our saintly firefighters, any but surface criticism of the fire service becomes difficult because doing so means chastising our heroes and ourselves on something close to a spiritual level. That’s an immensely strong incentive against criticism. At heart, the Everyman Effect revolves around this deep, classic conflict-of-interest. The result is that we fail to learn from our mistakes because we’re scarcely aware we’ve made any. Those who dare to point them out are often be vilified because they threaten taboo.
Except for undeniable LODD figures, what criticism we hear (or offer) internally tends to come in vague language, and lets us off by treating symptoms, not underlying causes or incentive structures. Those casualty figures bother us because they can’t be ignored. But due to the interference of Everyman Effect, they can’t be adequately explained either as none are allowed to peer behind the rood screen.
To conclude Part One I’d like to address something that has probably been bothering most readers: my assertion of the myth of a heroic fire service. I’m not saying that firefighters don’t routinely save the day. I know there are instances every day of what legitimately earns the titles of sacrifice and heroism. What I am saying is that the larger part of our work that gets labeled “heroic” doesn’t actually rise to that level.
Instead, these interest groups we’ve just discussed inflate our performance for their own reasons. From an economic perspective, it doesn’t matter if this is largely unintentional and due to human nature. What matters for us is what follows from it. I think we all know this to be true. If it weren’t, when questioned about an event, we wouldn’t so frequently and so honestly tell the media that “It’s all in day’s work. I’m no hero. I was just doing my job.”
Most firefighters, I believe, are pretty well grounded and have no desire to exaggerate their performance (at least outside of the firehouse). We know that we cheapen real effort when we let lesser actions get blown out of proportion, especially by those with commercial motives. On the other hand, I’ve heard an interview where the hero-of-the-day told the reporter that he did feel lucky to have been part of a extraordinary save because it gave him the chance to live up to expectations. I think that was honest too. We certainly have a right to be proud of our profession and our best performance, no denying it. But rights bring obligations, and one of them is take credit only where and when its due.
If our heroism has been distorted, we’re obliged to separate fact from fiction and set the record straight. Further, if we’ve unknowingly contributed to hyperbole, we have an obligation to face that unflattering, embarrassing fact once we learn of it. If we don’t, we set ourselves up for a fall – that which pride goeth before. We’re good at staying humble on-scene because we practice it often. What we haven’t often done is take a wider view, and be more humble and less mythic about the service we rightly take such pride in. Helping us do so is one tricky goal of this essay.
The Everyman Effect: Cultural Insurance Against Change, Part Two
Welcome back, brave soul. In Part Two we come to what might be the most difficult piece of our puzzle – the fire service’s own contribution to the stultifying, enervating Everyman Effect. One problem and part of the power of this phenomenon is that it’s not wholly imposed on us by outside forces. As firefighters and human beings, we benefit from this protection, and contribute to it both directly and indirectly, in a variety of ways that may not be immediately obvious. After all those big words, I’d like to cite Fire Chief Rick Lasky, and quote from the Preface to his book, “Pride and Ownership”:
…there are Fortune 500 companies that would kill for the marketing advantage the American fire service has, and that’s mainly due to the fact that the public trusts us. They trust us with everything. At a time when the American family is struggling with divorce, abuse, and a lot of other problems, the fire service continues to serve as a role model…
…The reality is that some people are not cut out for the fire service…But that’s OK because it’s not for just anybody. It’s for those who commit to core values such as Pride, Honor, and Integrity.”
I couldn’t agree more -- or better state the case for the Everyman Effect. It’s not that the Fire Service is exempt from all these problems – we suffer divorce and all the rest too – but because of its trust in us, our public overlooks all that and makes us their heroes. In doing so, they absolve us from our missteps.
This is a big part of the Everyman Effect, but not quite all of it. I think the quote above implies the rest: that to some extent we do the same. In other words, we also see ourselves as heroes and forgive our own mistakes, at least in part. If we didn’t adopt this mythic perspective, we couldn’t consider our service to be a role model for larger society. Our willingness to do so is admirable, and is an expression of pride in ourselves and our service. But pride has its risks, and contributing to the Everyman Effect is one of them. Such is life for imperfect people in an imperfect world. But accepting that imperfection doesn’t mean we can disregard it, because playing into our own mythology has consequences, not all of which are beneficial.
Let’ look closely at the Firefighter Hero myth. Briefly, it is a myth only because the likelihood of action truly deserving of the heroism label is small. As noted in Part 1, firefighters of every rank are frequently and honestly media-shy, and tend to avoid being anointed as heroes. This isn’t false modesty because we know that most of time what gets called heroism was just us doing our job – the fancy words are others tending to their own interests. Also, firefighters are smart enough to be wary of being put on a pedestal. The problem, of course, is that this tends to build the pedestal taller because earnest humility is taken as more evidence of our heroic nature.
We’ll take being called “role models” and “heroes” from someone like Chief Lasky because he’s one of us. He understands both our human frailty, and what can honestly be called termed heroic. We also understand that part of what he’s doing by using those words is challenging us to live up to a higher standard. But we’re reluctant to accept the same from outside sources because it’s a lot to bear. Like great athletes, we tend to see ourselves less as societal role models than private citizens, “just ball players”. If we didn’t, we’d be stuffed shirts, egomaniacs – especially when we face fewer fires every year. So we do our best to strike a balance, something that’s increasingly difficult when we’re constantly being flattered.
Even so, our reluctance to accept unearned laurels is precisely what shows all this hero talk to be myth – i.e. exaggerated sentiment not without basis, just more than can rightly be claimed. Economically, when we modestly clam up in front of the camera or reporter, we make information about what we did scarce, and that drives up its value. Addressing that scarcity with a little embellishment and poetic license, a reporter creates value by providing a supply to fill demand. We see this all the time. Furthermore, in a world so full of problems that they’re celebrated on TV shows like Jerry Springer’s, and bad news is hard to avoid no matter which news channel you prefer, lots of people are looking for a little good. When they find it, they make the most of it, and inevitably inflate it. This compounds our problem.
Our common-sense, instinctive response is to tone down such adulation because we know if we let it go unchecked, expectations will rise unsustainably. As the default responders in times of crisis, we can’t afford to let that happen – effective emergency management hinges on setting reasonable expectations. We also know we’re only human, and while we appreciate a well-earned compliment, we know that we cheapen superior performance if we let it be blown out of proportion. This is especially true if the hyping is done for commercial reasons. Despite (or even because of) this intelligent self-restraint, public demand for hero figures tends to create an inflationary spiral that continually boosts public estimation of the fire service. This is the basis of the marketing advantage Chief Lasky calls to our attention. It is also a large part of the Hero element in the Everyman Hero Effect because it inevitably affects how we view ourselves by predisposing us to adopt a mythic perspective. The road to somewhere unpleasant is indeed well-paved.
Another contributor to the Hero element is our exclusiveness, for scarcity creates value, and value draws buyers. We make buying into the myth of our heroism even more attractive by limiting first-hand access to our ranks, something we achieve through the metaphor of brotherhood. Yes, we’re a family, but paradoxically, we’re a sort of open one. This is a family you can choose to enter. By emphasizing the idea that our profession is more a calling than a trade, and by leaving the path to acceptance somewhat undefined and obscure, we try to encourage the idea that aspirants must somehow earn their way in. We do so hoping that this will foster the proper mindset and keep the unsuited from applying, but we hope in vain.
This strategy hasn’t proven successful because it is one thing to hope for A and build for B. After all, a civil service exam and a nominal probationary period aren’t strong or effective screens, nor is paid training a high bar. Danger or no, plenty of folks will endure more than they otherwise would to join our ranks when the payoff is social hero status. We see this far too often. So instead of creating an effective screen, by following this strategy we’ve created an element of mystery that attracts more, not fewer people to our doors, fit for the profession or not.
We’ve also created sizeable financial incentives (secure employment; good wages, pension, and benefits; congenial work schedule) that draw and hold even more false positives. Ironically, the Everyman Effect has aided us in bargaining those incentives, but that’s beside the point. The point is that to the public, we’re all equally heroic, whether star or slug. No matter how well or poorly an individual meets the demands of our profession, good and bad alike benefit from positive public perception once they’re in the door. This happens because the public trusts us to select only those most fit for the job. Economically, this is a free-rider problem. It’s one that Chief Lasky recognizes, and one we constantly and rightly despair of because to the extent we admit false positives to our ranks, we betray the public trust. Fortunately, we can directly address this with some basic structural changes to our intake process.
The final part of the mythic Hero element is cultural and arises from the emphasis on bloodline and brotherhood in fire service literature. By extolling how sons follow fathers or uncles into the profession, and by citing the noble, fraternal virtues of duty-honor-courage, we stir up all sorts of literary-historical echoes, making ourselves into an heroic elite. We may not mean to do so, but rhetoric has a power of its own. Like something out of a saga, rhetoric is a two-edged sword that can wound its wielder. That the word “elite” makes us uncomfortable attests to that.
Discomfort with elitism not all bad as we support a constitutional democracy founded (among other reasons) to make who your parents were less important than what you could do. But being elite isn’t all bad either, any more than the elite-ness of the Army Rangers is bad. The point here is that there may be some problems with how we refer to ourselves that we haven’t considered before. Those interested might investigate the literature on critical decision making and how our mental models (formed with words) affect our behavior. Also, read Joseph Campbell’s works on heroism and myth, and consider how the Everyman Effect might be our fatal flaw, one that causes a hundred tragedies a year. Am I saying we’re wrong to celebrate a history of family participation or a brotherhood of arms? Absolutely not. But I am saying that as we do so, we might be doing other things too, things we neither thought of nor intended. These things are worthy of sober consideration, but the skirts of the Everyman Effect shade them from view, leaving us only half the picture.
Of course, good news about the fire service is only ever half the picture. The other part – the bad news -- is what shrinks the Heroic Firefighter into an approachable Everyman figure. To see that, it helps to consider today’s firefighter as a Chaucerian Mike Fink character out of legend or even cartoon. Whether it’s the fat, friendly fireman collecting charity money in a boot, the handsome athlete competing in ESPN’s Firefighter’s Challenge, or the fellows on the front page who got caught drinking, gambling, and whoring in the firehouse, everybody loves the firefighter because everybody could be one. After all, admission to our raucous, heroic ranks is only a civil service exam away. This makes not just our triumphs, but our foibles and losses too, those of the public. It is this comic, secular piece of the puzzle that works together with the spiritual element we discussed last time to create the identifying power of the Everyman Effect, the cultural insurance policy that shelters the US Fire Service from the forces of change.
Summing up, we might say that the Everyman Effect is a social sort of virtual reality, one that uses self-interest to turn the general public into vicarious firefighters. Because they identify with us and trust us, members of the public are doubly hesitant to criticize us. As a result of this privileged position, we hear few complaints and bear a relatively small portion of the costs of our mistakes, as most are forgiven. Over-protected, our skin has grown pretty thin, so we tend to over-react to even mild criticism, with little regard for its merit. This harsh response chills constructive criticism even further, especially that which comes from within.
In turn, this limits not only what can be said, but what can be done, rendering us powerless to address any problem whose cause falls outside of our relatively narrow cultural bounds for civil discourse. It’s a classic negative spiral, a feedback loop. This is nothing to be proud of, but it’s only human. Fortunately, the power to change is within our grasp. We can remedy the situation by taking greater ownership of our structure and making it new again. To do so, we have to be willing to consider some new words, ideas, and even metaphors. This might be a challenge for a service more comfortable with changing its equipment than its rhetoric, but we’ve done everything we can with the former, and our problems remain. Silly as it sounds, updating our philosophy may be the key to progress.
The Everyman Effect: Cultural Insurance Against Change, Part Three
At this point you may be thinking that it is all well and good to be aware of the Everyman Effect, but so what? Where’s the pragmatic, cash-in-hand value? We know that the interests of five groups unintentionally conspire to create this effect. We know that to politicians we’re a useful tool; to the insurance industry we’re a cost-shield; to the media we’re hot product; and to the public we’re community pillar, spiritual touchstone, and comic relief all at once. We know that for ourselves, the Everyman Effect operates as both a shield of gratitude and an engine of pride – rightfully so on both counts. But what does this awareness do for us?
Well, we also heard that life beneath that shield isn’t as healthy as it could be – too much sunshine is blocked, and that has inhibited our growth. Protected from the winds of change, we’ve lived in a stable environment for a long time, and now the costs of that comfort are becoming too high to bear. Having decided that 100 or so lives a year are more than we’ll willingly pay, and knowing these other things we’ve learned, it’s time to step beyond the friendly confines of the Everyman Effect.
The answer to the opening question is that the value of this exercise lies in how it reduces uncertainty and increases our freedom to act. Knowledge of the dark side of where we’ve been helps foster the courage and ability to dare moving somewhere better. Intelligent risk is rewarded. We can stand pat, doing the same old things and hoping for a better result. Some call that insanity. If we go that route, we’ll keep losing value, like money in a closet shoebox. Sure, we can pick it up and sniff it from time to time, remembering all we did to acquire it. But if we dare to invest it, we’ll not only get more of it, we won’t lose any value to inflation and mice.
True, investment brings both risk and cost. But we’re talking about prudent risk, not betting the stack on the roulette wheel or Number 5 pony. As we already learned when we discussed commonality, what applies elsewhere applies to the fire service too, at least as far as economics and management are concerned. So if the wider world has a long record of benefitting through investment, why are we still rat-holing and getting left behind? Because life under the Everyman Effect is so cozy, that’s why – at least in part.
One thing the Everyman Effect blinds us to is that individual citizens are infrequent consumers of emergency services, so aren’t equipped to judge service quality . Unfortunately, this isn’t seen as a signal that external auditing might be more helpful than internal consensus when it comes to keeping standards high, especially given the local monopoly we enjoy. Instead, if infrequent consumption is noted at all, it is employed as defense against criticism. “Trust us”, say fire professionals, and for reasons already given, the public, the media, and the politicians render that tribute. So we see that public uncertainty is another factor that helps makes criticism of the fire service largely taboo. This is true both inside the service and without because it threatens our real psychological and economic needs to feel safe – something we touched on in Part 1. Like the false-positive hires mentioned earlier, this shows up as the monopoly fault of low quality.
Tying this in to the idea of investment and its risks, the recent financial crisis on Wall Street provides a cautionary example of what we might face if we don’t step out from hothouse atmosphere of the Everyman Effect. Due in large part to internal controls (bond raters being paid by bond brokers, etc), similar conditions existed on Wall Street in the run-up to the collapse as exist for our service today. There, seasoned Wall Street professionals referred to consensus standards and said “We can’t fail because we’ve insured our insurance, and protected losses against loss through credit default swaps and other vehicles we all agree are safe.”
Here in the fire service we might say “We all agree that we need more firefighters for improve safety, because more bodies let us staff larger RITs.” This only insures our insurance. Until we make some structural changes, more bodies on the fireground only means more bodies in harm’s way. Besides, after the Phoenix study, its clear that staffing an effective RIT is prohibitively expensive. We simply can’t afford to idle that much human capital in strategic reserve. So it’s time to come to grips with what that study tells us: we must change the way we do business.
Today, our best intentions to improve safety fail to produce the results we desire because, well-meant as they are, they miss the mark. They do so because we’re not putting two and two together. We don’t do that because the cultural blinders imposed by an immensely Everyman Effect limits what we’re allowed to think about and clouds alternatives from view. The result is a failure of imagination that leaves us preaching to the choir about things we all agree on, but whose causes we haven’t quite identified. If we had rooted out those causes, our problems would be long-solved. This is part and parcel of human nature, what economists call “bounded rationality” and “risk aversion” and what psychologists and business researchers see as “cognitive biases”. It’s not that we aren’t trying – it’s that there are a lot of powerful, overlapping forces that restrict our view of the situation. In short, it’s hard to read smoke when you’re standing in it.
To use a familiar example, consider how most of those in your department who really need to be reading the trade journals often seem more concerned with Ebay or ESPN. Contrarily, any firefighter who’s attended discretionary training, especially leadership training, has noticed a conspicuous absence of “weak links” among the classmates and wide agreement on the course material. Both are signs that the Everyman Effect is operating because there is no learning without risk. Obviously the firehouse slackers risk nothing and learn nothing. Unfortunately, through no personal fault of their own, the same is true of our best due to doctrinal conformity in our classrooms. If we’re asking fewer hard questions than saying Amens, we’re taking catechism not learning through the give and take of argument. Comforting as that ritual can be, and necessary as it is to a shared understanding, our doctrine is coming up short. Again, if it wasn’t, all the efforts by so many good people over the years would have cracked the casualty nut. If you’re leery about the Everyman Effect, please consider this evidence of its existence and operation.
We can preach to each other til we’re blue, and all this prescription just echoes under the Everyman Effect’s dome. Like voices in a packed gym, the resultant jumble causes little but headache and confusion because of the number of competing demands we make on our listening ability. This can tie those truly dedicated to the profession in knots. This is the result of a real, moral dilemma created by the Everyman Effect, one that makes varying from the current script professional suicide. It’s either conform or leave the profession – and no one dedicated enough to be bothered at heart is going to anything but stand and deliver. But we don’t have anything to deliver other than what we know isn’t working – so to avoid despair and do something, we say the same thing louder and more often. This is another instance of sympathetic feedback that inflames a problem.
Breaking new ground is professional suicide for two reasons. First, regardless of rank, the more senior you are, the more you have invested in our current structure and its supporting ideas. You’re loyal to them and believe in them because they’ve served you well. You want to pass them on intact to the next generation in order to take good care of both the new people and the profession you devoted your life to. This means the problem must lie elsewhere.
If it doesn’t, all your work has been for naught, and that’s distressing to the point of despair, a real existential nightmare. To avoid that classic sunk cost effect, we all stick to our guns and ostracize any who rock the boat. Since the fire service is a small fraternity, and an internally regulated one, everybody knows the score and can easily calculate the prohibitive expense of being labeled a maverick. This has worried me enough that I’ve sat on these ideas for seven years now – not quite half of my career. I offer them now only because I feel close enough to retirement to be reasonably safe. But I don’t expect to come out unscathed. In fact, I half-expect I’ll be forced out – but that’s the cost of credibility.
This uncertainty filters down to our junior members who do, contrary to popular opinion, respect their elders. Their respect is demonstrated by their emulation of us. This is the way both groups want it, and the way we teach it. There is nothing wrong with this situation – its human nature, so is inevitable. In fact, this sort of mentoring may be the best way to pass on truly salient information. This is precisely why the younger firefighters pick up on our unease too. They sense that we know things aren’t quite right and something must be done -- though we haven’t figured out precisely what -- even if we don’t articulate it.
This, I think, more than anything, is the larger part of the generational complaint I hear today. I don’t buy that the new guys are somehow lacking, and more so than was ever previously the case. Not only were we once the new guys, but the old have been complaining about the young in the same way since Socrates, and probably before. There is something wrong with our new hires, however, but beyond their unease about our unease, that problem is not generational. (The fact is that, as we always have, we hire good people every day. The problem is that we put just as many dud rounds and dinosaurs-in-diapers on with them. But that’s beside the point here.) Until we sort our structural problems out and are able to give clear direction once again, we’ll feel generational tension. We’ll feel it because the junior guys just want to know what our professional limits and expectations are so they know what to emulate, i.e. where to invest with confidence, economically speaking.
The second, related reason that challenging conventional wisdom is professional suicide is because it strikes at our cultural belief in our own heroism: we can do it all, we can have things both ways if we try hard enough, and nobody tries like a firefighter. A little more encouragement is all we need, so let’s put another rally on the training schedule. There is no shame that we think like this. The Everyman Effect is awesomely powerful, and there are plenty of historical examples that others have thought likewise. Take the French generals in World War 1 who based their doctrine of esprit des corps on Bergson’s idea of élan vital. Committed to that, they neglected the lessons of the American Civil and carried 18th century strategies and tactics into the 20th, ignoring relevant changes and continuing to insist on a certain style of leadership, fervent encouragement, ever more soldiers, and over-the-top charges into no-man’s land until they could no longer tolerate the casualties. And the beat goes on.
If we’re serious and accurate when we say we must change our culture to improve our casualty statistics – and I believe we are -- we have to begin to use new words and ideas because that’s how we transmit culture. This may sound silly, but the Revolution that launched this country began in ideas long before it began in battle. In the end, it’s what we believe in that we act on and fight for – ideas like Integrity, Fairness, Honesty, and Freedom. As I’ve tried to show, because we act on our values, economic analysis is a useful way to find that new vocabulary. But this means we must be willing to take some hard criticism and shed some ideas that have outlived their usefulness no matter how comfortable they may be, for there is nothing gentle about the dismal science – something I also warned of at the outset.
So where do we go from here? In my final piece on the Everyman Effect, we’ll do two things. First, we’ll explore an example of the competing demands I mentioned above using RIT and false-positive hires, ideas I’ve already raised. We’ll do this not just to provide some welcome evidence, but to hear what the RIT data is telling us. Second, we’ll consider a political perspective, to try to understand how things look outside of the Everyman Effect’s influence. After that we’ll consider a way to improve our hiring process – an idea already raised here. To finish our tune-up we’ll look at a couple more rationales for change, and the idea of service ethic. That should give us the muscle and momentum necessary to tackle an even bigger monster, the Hero Tournament, something that may well be the primary cause of our many-headed casualty problem.
The Everyman Effect: Cultural Insurance Against Change, Part Four of Four
To begin the final chapter on the Everyman Effect, I’d like to touch on a couple of thought I raised in the previous one. First, I’d like to point out that just because the French generals I spoke of last time changed their ideas about how to conduct war, they didn’t stop fighting or disband their armies. The same is true of the fire service. We may have to change, but the profession will remain. We don’t have to worry about that. We’ll always need soldiers, and we’ll always need firefighters too, both doing pretty much what their predecessors have done, but going about it differently, using different structures, tactics and tools. Tradition will endure. Some lesser parts may be jettisoned, but the essentials will remain. Facing change, we can all take solace in that.
Now please consider second idea that was raised last time: doctrine. Not long ago in a trade magazine – I forget which – one of our leaders was talking about the need for fire service members to pursue their doctoral degrees, specifically to update and/or provide new fire service doctrine. While I see his point, I’m still not sure I agree. Even though I didn’t start on my master’s degree until I was 38, with 8 years on the job, even though I paid for it using the GI Bill (just before those benefits expired), even though I was admitted on conditional basis because of a mediocre undergrad career (hadn’t found my calling), and even though I chose the job-relevant, applied field of labor relations, I still take grief for being “a college boy”.
This makes me leery of more school. I don’t need it for professional advancement, or even professional development: the skills of a PhD are not those needed by any fire officer, even a chief. Also, another degree won’t show that I can think for myself – its just a piece of paper, and I know of some lackluster performers who have one. I say this, and I’m both a fan of education and the son of high school shop teacher with a PhD, a man who was the first in his family to go to college. Finally, earning a doctorate is a lot of work for small if any gain, at least inside the fire service. Having only a master’s degree, I’ve been told I lack credentials, that I need a PhD to be taken seriously and to shut up until I get one. But if I had that scrap of paper, I’d be dismissed just as fast as one of those egghead PhDs who have no common sense. So while I see my fellow author’s point about advanced education and generally endorse the idea that our service could benefit from it, from my own self-interested (and I hope, practical) perspective, I think we ought to take good ideas wherever we find them.
We have a long history, even a proud tradition, of disregarding paper credentials in the fire service, so I don’t know that in the future we should pin our hopes on and take our cues from only those of our own with advanced degrees. Instead, we should develop the critical thinking skills of our officer corps generally, because that’s where the rubber meets the road. If this results in a few PhDs in our ranks, so much the better. But let’s not get the cart before the horse. It’s those officers, after all, who are really creating living, breathing doctrine. The fire administrator with a PhD is only penning policy. The difference between the two is mythic. It’s the difference between what we truly believe and act on, and what we say we should do.
Now I didn’t bring that up just to air a personal gripe. There is some method to my madness. As with other ideas raised in earlier essays, our traditional distrust of education will come into play again, later. I do this for a couple of reasons. First, I hope it shows how complex and interconnected all these ideas are. That’s important because it helps explain why we haven’t figured the casualty problem out by now – we’ve been wandering in the maze of general systems theory. Second, by weaving ideas like monopoly faults and commonality into our discussion of the Everyman Effect, I hope to show that my thinking is reasonably self-consistent, that it follows logically, with integrity of its own, and that I’m not just cherry-picking convenient economic concepts. But right now this aside on education helps us transition to another case where we’re trying to have things both ways, one that’s affected by the Everyman Effect: RIT.
A Rapid Intervention Team (RIT) is one of those things that looks simple, but isn’t – kind of like economics. Like economics, RIT is all about supply and demand, so there’s a lot under that hood -- enough that we’ll revisit it twice more, but right now let’s look at what the numbers are telling us. According to the Phoenix study, we need a dozen firefighters standing by outside for every one that’s at risk inside, if the RIT is to be effective. No one can afford such staffing, fiscally or from a public perception standpoint. In short, the costs of all that idle capital outweigh its benefits.
This is where the Hero part of the Everyman (Hero) Effect comes in because we translate that to mean that we’re doing an impossibly dangerous job where a certain amount of sacrifice is necessary – no life is worth an empty building, but that tragedy is still going to happen – it’s the nature of the job. In other words, we’re accepting a high structural loss rate as the cost of doing business. But in our next breath, we reverse course, condemn excess casualties, and call for more staffing to improve safety. We can’t have it both ways. But we also know we can both reduce casualties and avoid large RITs and their costs because our European brothers do just that.
I can’t say the solution to this riddle is to adopt a European model because, frankly, I don’t know enough about structures and operations over there. It’s my understanding, however, that most of those countries have comprehensive national fire service standards and considerably more professional education. There may even be EU fire & life safety standards, or some in the works. Undoubtedly, national standards are one piece of the puzzle because if fire burns the same everywhere, there’s no reason but tradition to train and operate otherwise. A century and a half after the railroads adopted standard tracks, a decade after the development of an Apple/Windows interface, and we still have competing, non-interchangeable airpacks – as if SCBA compatibility was unimportant to us.
This is disgraceful, and almost tangential, but ties back to the Everyman Effect at two points. The first, which we’ve already touched, is external oversight, for with the development of national standards comes independent verification and credentialing, almost inevitably. External oversight is important because it counteracts the hypnotic power of an Everyman Effect that tells us everything is OK as it is, except that we need to try harder to be the heroes everyone expects us to be. After all, heroes don’t complain about gear, they improvise, adapt, and overcome. That’s part of what makes them heroic.
The second point where national standards intersects the Everyman Effect is professional education. Dr Denis Leary, Superintendent of the National Fire Academy, has long called for development of such standards not just for equipment and apparatus, but for personnel too. Again, if fire burns the same everywhere, it’s management – both preventive and reactive – can and probably should be uniform too. As far as I know, we have many good minds working on that project right now, but the way forward is fraught with self-interest and red tape. Even so, one way out from under the Everyman Effect is through improved professional education, national standards or no.
Where do RIT, vocational education, and the Everyman Effect collide? I found the nexus at Fireground Officers School. There, for a week, senior line and chief officers from a major metropolitan department and those of its larger suburbs mentored junior officers from across the state. Students come from large departments and small, and everything in between, career, volunteer, and POC. I found the experience immensely rewarding, as both a new officer and workplace observer. One thing these officers spoke of at some length bears scrutiny here for it points the way forward. They stated and led discussion on the proposition that two good, well-trained firefighters were better and more productive than four slackers. Just a few minutes later, however, they were equally clear that insufficient staffing was plaguing the fire service today – that we needed more people to do the job safely. They cited the Phoenix RIT study in support.
Now think about that. If two good firefighters are more productive than four poor firefighters, our problem isn’t staffing, is it? The problem is screening because we could cut out the slackers and get the same results with less to manage both on-scene and in the house. If we replace the two slackers with two stars, we more than double our productivity because according to the experts, two stars aren’t as good as four slugs, they’re better. And this is no business school twaddle. This was the consensus opinion of half a dozen seasoned officers, and concurred with by not only a class of new officers, but by a class of command officer students too, who shared the instructors with us.
Its also important to remember that unless you’re interested in international comparisons, nobody says our job isn’t getting done reasonably well right now, when we all agree that we were saddled with more dud rounds than we’d like. Therefore, it’s not that we don’t have enough firefighters today, its that we don’t have enough good ones to do the job as well as we can or desire. The good ones we have get the job done while carrying the slackers’ dead weight. Think how much performance could improve if we’d screen better, and reduce the percentage of false-positives!
So why is it that these leaders of our profession didn’t hear their own words? Why is it that minutes after they spoke about the advantages of two stars to four slugs, they turned their own words upside down, and called for greater staffing to improve safety? You guessed it – the Everyman Effect. This is a clear example of how that bane limits our thinking. When the best and brightest in our profession don’t hear their own words, or think them through, we have a serious problem. Now I’m reasonably certain that if given the chance, these men would say they want both – higher quality firefighters across the board, and more of them. But I don’t believe I’ve taken anything out of context. They were very clear, and expected their words to be taken at face value – which I did. As an opponent of the Everyman Effect, I won’t let them have thing both ways. Ethically, I can’t.
If these words are true – and I believe they are – we don’t need higher staffing. The math we just laid out, and there’s no justification for the expense, especially under present economic conditions. The take-home lesson is a tested staple of service firm management: to improve efficiency, improve workforce quality. It’s that simple. Economically, greater efficiency through better screening reduces all the faults of monopoly – high cost, low quality, and idle capital, as I hope you can see.
There is evidence that we can improve the quality of our workforce by a 2:1 ratio – GM did it at their Fremont, CA plant in the 80’s. They did so through a process of wholesale cultural change, importantly one that included senior workers. That is, GM didn’t change that plant’s culture by changing its workforce wholesale, but by challenging the workers it had to do better and giving them the means and managerial support to do so. The challenge our monopolistic fire service faces is that like GM we believe we have the best workforce in the world, but unlike GM we have no Toyota to make us prove it. Or shame us into recognition that current standards aren’t what they should be with a blow to our pride in side-by-side comparison (unless we look at Europe, maybe, the same way GM looked to Japan). Instead, we have an Everyman Effect that reinforces our belief in ourselves, and the public’s trust in us, making us unassailable and impervious to change.
There is much more to say about that Fremont plant, but that must wait until we discuss physical fitness. Now, let’s recall that just before we explored this example I stated that professional education – not screening – was one way out of the Everyman Effect. That’s true. For example, if we better train our officers in critical thinking skills, they’ll be less likely to make the same, unintentional missteps that my instructors did, but that’s small potatoes. The strategic solution, the big fix which we’ll discuss next time, is to use professional education as an effective screening device, one much better than anything we use today.
Finally, one last problem we face in combating the Everyman Effect is that because of it, we’re so used to deflecting accolades that anything but applause is seen as an attack. Rather than respond rationally, we tend to turn defensive. This is only human – it’s what we do when faced with a threat or an unfamiliar situation -- but it’s not very productive. In fact, this is just one of the cognitive traps that the Everyman Effect prepares for us with deadly precision, but exploring them is a project in itself. Now, let’s just consider the common example of an unfriendly politician.
Yes, that politician arguing against fire service funding may be out to score some cheap points, but he or she may also be making a principled, heartfelt argument. It may be that this statesperson is trying to honestly balance competing demands by asking if we really need a Cadillac fire insurance plan when Chevy-style will do. Significantly, what is Chevy from our self-interested perspective may be Cadillac to others. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t stand up for ourselves and our service. But as we do so, we should also be aware of the privileged position that the Everyman Effect entitles us to as we go about it. This might help us see critics less as enemies to be decried than as potential allies.
For example, the hated bean-counting bureaucrat or elected official might be seen as a friend in our effort to provide the best service as safely and cost-effectively as possible. If none of us want high casualties or higher taxes, that’s something we must face. Being frugal is no more fun than going on a diet, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes resent the spouse that questioned us about a second helping or unnecessary snack. That doesn’t make our spouse an enemy so much as a friend concerned about our long-term well-being. The same might be said of the Safety Officer at the emergency scene – or even a junior Lt with a business degree who believes that a strategy of resource limitation is a necessary to effectively manage a monopoly like ours. With it, we have a spur to innovate. Without it, we quickly become fat cats – and resent any who point that out.
To conclude, the Everyman Effect is a real and terribly powerful force that has long gone unappreciated, almost unmarked. It is a systemic threat that we can never eliminate, only manage. We might compare it to AIDS or cancer – a beneficial body process gone dangerously out of control. Difficult and many-headed as this problem is, we can learn to handle it better. As with disease, the first and most important step toward doing so is awareness. Raising that awareness was my goal, and I apologize if in the process I caused offense. That was never my intention. All I can say is these thoughts are offered constructively, that I hope they stimulate dialogue, and that I stand behind every word. Difficult as this may have been, I’m confident that few will choose to hide behind the skirts of the Everyman Effect once they see it for what it is. I hope not, because the next economic bully we’ll take on is the Hero Tournament. As I said last time, that’s a very tough customer, one I believe to be the primary driver of our excessively high casualty rate.
