Part 3 ( Lessons and Best Practices) Chapter 18: Lessons for First Responders Flashcards
A number of lessons came from research outside of emergency services such as
Military, medicine, nuclear power, and aviation
Lesson 1) Responders with poor SA can still have a good outcome, if only by luck.
They make good decisions (by luck) while operating with flawed SA and never know their SA was flawed in the first place
Lesson 2) A decision made with good SA can still have a bad outocme
Not every bad outcome can be linked with SA. Emergency services work in a highly unpredictable environment when unexpected bad things can happen that can lead to bad outcomes
Lesson 3) Maintaining SA requires a physical, mental, and emotional commitment to paying attention
Paying attention means capturing the clues/cues and applying Level 1, 2, and 3 SA. It means being consciously aware you’re taking all the necessary steps to develop and maintain your SA. Are you meta-aware? Are you paying attention to the big picture? Are you checking up to make sure you’re not losing SA
Lesson 4) What you should pay attention to is not always intuitive or obvious.
This requires a commander to be alert for subtle clues/cues that help build strong SA. Your primal instinct tells you that things that are moving and things that are close to your are dangerous which can take your attention away. Your primal instinct also draws your attention to loud noises, bright lights, and fast moving things
Lesson 5) Responders rarely realize they’re losing their SA until it’s too late -until that catastrophic incident or near-miss occurs
Realizing the loss of SA is not uncommon, but you may not always know it. It’s plausible to surmise that for some, the intuitive gut feeling becomes so overwhelming that it serves as their alarm system.
Lesson 6) It’s critically important to be able to form mental models of both the past and the future
Rarely is an emergency incident static; rather, the incident conditions are dynamic and rapidly changing. Taking a rear-view mirror approach of the incident is critical to forming SA of what took place prior to arrival. This helps draw on tacit knowledge and develop a plan of action
It can be extremely challenging for ____ to extract accurate and timely information from civilian callers who are upset.
dispatchers
A critical question is: Can my resources overwhelm the incident, slow down, and eventually stop the progression of undesirable events. If the answer is yes, an offensive operation can be deployed. If the answer is no, then
a defensive operations should be deployed until sufficient resources arrive on scene
If you deploy offensively when you are _______, you’re taking grave chances with the lives of the responders in your charge
under-resourced
Forming a mental model for predicting FUTURE events entails asking yourself 3 essential questions:
1) Where is the incident headed?
2) How long will it take to get there?
3) Can the resources I have at this moment change the course of the incident in a favorable way without jeopardizing any lives
Those most at risk are the ones who believe every incident can be managed with ______ ______. This is simply not true
aggressive tactics
In your mental model, you should envision what a ___ ____ would look like. This prediction of the future becomes the expectation against which you compare your progress
successful outcome
The leadership principle taught by Steven Covey from his best seller “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” is:
Begin with the end in mind
If things are not going well, they wont align and this should set off major alarm bells in your head. The alarm may come as explicit (______) knowledge that things aren’t going well or more subtly as a gut feeling - your intuition (_________) alerting you that what is happening doesn’t match your tacit knowledge ( mental library of training and experiences)
conscious knowledge, unconscious knowledge
