"I'm telling everybody!"

This weekend I had one of the most engaging – stunning, breathtaking - experiences of my life, so far. I have tried to weave it into a leadership lesson, but those attempts amounted to a pile of hooey, well beneath the intellect of our readership.  So, this blog post mostly amounts to Show and Tell.

On Saturday I joined the Eden Prairie Fire Department in a live burn exercise, which put me in an actual burning building, doing firefighter-like things in the company of real firefighters.   It was overwhelming, and nearly indescribable. I was told it would be very dark, very smoky, and exceedingly - indeed, infernally -hot. It was.   But for the presence of my teammates, I would have felt like a roasting turkey (albeit a turkey in protective clothes, wearing 20-30 minutes worth of safe air, and with thousands of gallons of water at our disposal). I was amazed by how quickly rooms filled with smoke, and how easy it would be to become lost or disoriented.  I looked at a couple of the set fires with an infrared camera and thermometer, and was stunned by the vertical temperature gradients as the fires built, from a few hundred degrees (turkey temperatures) near the floor to more than twice as hot at the ceiling: knock-down, pass-out-whatever-you’re-wearing hot.  With water, came steam.  Lots of steam. I understand why kneeling and crawling are important firefighting skills.   The training sessions were extremely well-run, and intellectually I knew I was safe.  Safe wasn’t always how I felt, however. Mostly, though, it was fascinating to watch how fire behaves in a building, and how firefighting techniques really work.  The hardware was way cool, too. 

If - heaven forbid - you ever find yourself in the burning building,  grab your loved ones and leave, low and fast.  The smoke was astonishing and obviously deadly.

I’ve had the privilege of working with the officer corps of the EPFD for about a year now, essentially working to develop leadership skills within the context of a very well-run, successful, primarily paid, on-call (what used to be called “volunteer”) fire department. I’m not just saying that because they’re a client or because they let me play with their toys, either.    (They were remarkably generous and welcoming in all aspects of the exercise, for which I am profoundly grateful. Beyond that, though, the EPFD is most assuredly a class act.)

In all of the Hill Center’s Public Safety engagements, we talk about the limits of command as a mode of communication.  On a training ground, and even more on a live incident scene, we see the flip side of that discussion, in the necessity for effective command.   In a time-critical, high-risk situation, command is the only way to achieve coordinated, reliable group action. However, it is also worth noting that commands work because of common understanding, underlying respect, and trust. A team can respond to a brief, uttered phrase with a complex set of actions only if that team's work together is characterized by mutual understanding, shared knowledge, and common expectations. The team will respond effectively only if they trust and respect the commander. They will put themselves in those positions only if they trust the command structure and the organization.  And, perhaps most important, the team will go beyond a given command to pursue its intent – and will provide the needed information back to the commander – only if a commensurate level of trust and respect has been developed in advance. 

It was a pleasure to see command and cooperation in action, and to see a healthy blend of responsiveness, initiative, communication, and enthusiasm across the board.   And, did I mention that I got to go in to an actual fire?

The exercise concluded by burning the building to the ground.   I was by no means the only participant to be photographed in front of the burning building, but I might have been sporting the cheesiest grin. My brother Josh captioned the photo as, “The World’s Worst Firefighter.”