Two topics offered for County Chiefs seminar March 5
Presented by Chief Gasaway, 30 year veteran and NFA Instructor
Chief Gasaway hosts the Leader's Toolbox on Firehouse.com
Topic 1
Mental management of emergencies: understanding situation awareness and decision making under stress.
Since the inception of the national firefighter near miss reporting system in 2005, the leading contributing factors to near miss-events have not been related to equipment or procedures or training. The leading contributing factors are related to situation awareness and decision making. Likewise, the line-of-duty death investigation reports by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health continually identifies issues with situation awareness and decision making as leading contributing factors and casualty events.
Organizations with state-of-the-art apparatus, sound procedures and quality equipment are still killing dozens of firefighters annually at emergency scenes. If we are going to reduce emergency responder casualty incidents, we must first improve the ability of our responders to develop and maintain strong situation awareness and to understand how to make decisions under stress. This program focuses on improving the understanding of situation awareness and decision making. The program explores and discusses:
• 6 ways decision-making can be impacted by physical and mental stress.
• 7 step process for how experts make decisions in stress, dynamic, rapidly changing environments;
• 4 essential components to making decisions under stress.
• 4 levels of competency in the development of expertise including tips for how to accelerate the development of expert level performance.
• How decision-making is influenced by pattern matching, mental modeling, sense making in information chunking.
• 3 levels of situation awareness including how to develop and maintain each.
• Best practices for developing and maintaining situation awareness and high stress, high consequence situations.
NOTE: this is not a strategy and tactics class. This program focuses on the process of forming and maintaining effective situation awareness to facilitate decision-making under stress.
Topic 2
Easy come, easy go: the challenges of emergency scene situation awareness
This program is based on the findings of the presenters doctoral research on fire ground command decision-making. As Dr. Gassaway will explain, in his review of hundreds of near-miss reports, case studies, line-of-duty death reports and videos he continually found himself being frustrated because there were so many clues, indicators and signs that the incident was going to end in disaster. But for some reason, the personnel operating at the incident scene could not see it coming.
Dr. Gasaway's research sought to understand the barriers that challenge situation awareness at emergency scenes. This program focuses on leading barriers to situation awareness at emergency scenes by exploring and discussing:
• How situation awareness can be impacted by staffing, communications, workload management, human factors, command location, organizational culture and more!
• 5 critical command mistakes you can avoid.
• 10 best practices for command decision-makers.
NOTE: this is not a strategy and tactics class. This program focuses on the barriers that challenge emergency responder situation awareness and decision making the program is based on the presenters doctoral research and the challenges faced by commanders at residential dwelling fires. However, the lessons are, quite literal, universal to anyone who works in a high stress, high consequence decision-making environment.
Chief Richard B. Gasaway Biography
Chief Richard B. Gassaway entered the fire service in 1979 and has served as firefighter, paramedic, Lieut., Capt., assistant chief and fire chief and six fire and EMS agencies in West Virginia, Ojai oh and Minnesota.
After completing his 30 year fire service career, chief Gasaway founded the Center for the advancement of situation awareness and decision making, and organization dedicated to improving how individuals, teams and organizations make decisions in stressful environments.
Chief Gasaway holds bachelors, Masters and doctoral degrees in finance, economics, business administration and leadership. He is a resident faculty member at the national fire Academy and is an instructor in the executive development program for the Maryland fire and rescue Institute. He is a graduate of the national fire Academy's executive fire officer program and is an accredited chief fire officer to the commission for public safety excellence.
As a professional speaker and author, Dr. Gasaway has contributed to more than 130 books, book chapters and journal articles on topics related to leadership, safety and decision-making. His best-selling book, fire ground command decision-making, serves as a popular read for developing inexperienced incident commanders. High energy, humor filled presentations are a favorite with emergency service providers.