It’s safe to say that we can move on from the debate of whether firefighter safety and aggressive firefighting can coexist. According to the 2025 What Firefighters Want survey, 95% of respondents agree that they can indeed coexist; in fact, they need to coexist. Additionally, 97% reported that they consider themselves to be safe firefighters, and the vast majority of those also perceive themselves as aggressive firefighters. Common sense has prevailed!
Controlling the controllables, like mastery of PPE, efficient emergency responses that don’t add undue harm to our crews or the public, and adhering to health and fitness standards would allow us to operate more aggressively and thus effectively on the fireground. It keeps us safer and makes us better at serving our communities.
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Progress depends on us moving beyond the tired binary question of whether safe and aggressive coexist and instead seeing them as integrated and inseparable. We train to make risk/benefit decisions when it matters most. We also train to gain competence and confidence to increase our odds of success and safety. A hyper-focused safety culture without competence is ineffective and violates the oath we all swore to. Sheer aggressiveness, regardless of safety, is reckless and a violation of that same oath.
We all signed up for an inherently dangerous job and to sacrifice for others. If we’re doing that job correctly, it will be unsafe at times, but not all the time. Sometimes, we’ll do everything right, and bad things still happen. Sometimes we do everything wrong and get away with it. The latter is controllable, and where we should focus.
The accountability gap
In the survey, respondents overwhelmingly self-reported being safe: They’re wearing their seatbelts, properly wearing their PPE and making good tactical decisions. Plus, 91% say their department demonstrates a strong commitment to safety. By our own accounts, we already meet the standard, and our organizations do as well. However, only 54% say their department disciplines members for unsafe behavior.
Despite this eye-opening data point, discipline likely isn’t what is missing. Discipline has its place, but discipline is reactionary.
The aviation industry is a leader in safety and risk management, with many parallels to public safety, and one worthy of being modeled. Aviation safety experts have long defined safety culture as how people behave when no one is watching (Gendi et. al., 2024). Discipline only works when someone is watching, and it’s often too late. Accountability sets the culture and governs behavior when no one is watching.
Discipline alone, in the punitive context, doesn’t increase fireground effectiveness or safety. In fact, discipline alone creates fear-based cultures that can slow operations and paralyze operators, preventing them from making the nuanced split-second decisions that can mean the difference between life and death for civilians and their crews.
It seems we have an accountability gap. Many of us are failing to hold one another, and ourselves, to the standard we just claimed to meet. Like everything, this starts at the top and the buck stops with the organization and leadership, but it’s the day-to-day choices that make the biggest impact and can be fatal. We are all responsible for setting and adhering to the standard.
The habit becomes the standard
In her book, The Challenger Launch Decision, Diane Vaughan defines normalization of deviance as, “the gradual process through which unacceptable practice or standards become acceptable.” We aren’t building rocket ships at NASA, but the impact is the same. When we don’t adhere to the standards we say we do, and we don’t get lucky like we have previously, people are injured or die. This isn’t an attempt to be dramatic; it’s just facts.
Most of the time, we have a choice, and, as Gordon Graham says, “if it is predictable, it is preventable.” Why, then, do we continue to make the same mistakes over and over again? If you study NIOSH LODD reports, it’s clear we’re not finding new ways to die. Do we just assume it won’t happen to us?
Here’s what this looks like in the real world:
- We wear seat belts in our personal vehicles, yet somehow our industry still struggles with this during emergent responses in a 40-ton ladder truck — despite policies in place.
- We know what can cause cancer but then choose not to wear our SCBA during overhaul or while we’re venting a roof — despite the policies in place.
- We show up for fire alarms without our gear on and ill-prepared to make the rescue when it’s the “real thing.”
- We fail to enforce health and fitness standards when the leading cause of on-duty deaths continues to be medical in nature.
The list of controllable choices we make that don’t make sense goes on and on. This is the normalization of deviance on display every single day, likely at varying levels in every single fire department across the United States.
This is how cultures are created — but not the good kind.
Normalization of deviance doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s learned behavior. The young, impressionable firefighter didn’t learn it that way in the academy. But they’ll adapt quickly to what they see, and that’s on all of us. Accountability is the antidote, and it needs to happen at all levels, from the individual firefighter and their company officers to the fire chief and the organization’s leadership. The officer who sees it and says nothing is complicit.
How to establish accountability
The fire service doesn’t lack ideas. We’re full of people calling out what’s wrong with it. What we lack is leadership that can execute, both at the formal and informal levels.
Closing the accountability gap doesn’t happen with a new rule or policy. It takes courage and consistency. It means keeping our priorities straight and putting those we swore to serve first. It also means taking care of our own, staying safe by controlling what we can, and being professionals when no one’s watching.
It doesn’t happen instantly, and the small things add up. With this in mind, here are a few ideas for naturally establishing accountability and trust within your crews and organizations:
- Show humility and personal accountability first: We must look inward before holding others accountable. Firefighters are intelligent and can see through hypocrisy and inauthenticity. Admitting our mistakes openly builds trust and capital, especially as formal leaders. When leadership acknowledges being wrong, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. Everything else on this list depends on it.
- Reinforce good behavior publicly: Accountability isn’t only about catching what’s wrong. Reinforce the standard by publicly acknowledging what people do right, especially the seemingly simple things. Bad normalizes. So does good behavior.
- Correct in the moment: Have the courage to correct actions and inactions when they happen, especially on the training ground and around the station. The longer the gap between the behavior and the correction, the more normalized the behavior has become. The training ground is the lowest consequence environment we have. If we don’t hold the standard there, we certainly won’t hold it when it matters most.
- Encourage honesty in after-action reviews: We’ve all probably been part of after-action reviews that either brushed over critical lessons and turned into back-patting sessions, or the opposite, where they were fear-ridden and overly critical, just to remind people who is in charge. The latter results in cover-ups and over-justifications. The key is creating an environment where people feel safe and want to improve. When the environment is right, self-accountability takes off and is contagious. More often than not, you will have to stop firefighters from one-upping each other with self-deprecation. You’ll see people engaged in the process, rather than just crafting after-the-fact stories. Self-accountability leads to team accountability and a culture of improvement.
- Set the expectation early: The best way to encourage a culture of accountability is to set expectations before they are needed. This isn’t done autocratically. Good leaders model the behaviors they expect, and they hold them as a team. Standards should be clear and consistent, with no room for interpretation about what’s expected or acceptable. One practical tool for doing this proactively is the premortem, a concept developed by Gary Klein from his research on decision-making in high-stakes, high-reliability environments. Before training evolutions or high-risk operations, ask the group to brainstorm what could go wrong and what we’ll do about it. It builds the habit of proactive accountability and engages the entire team in the mission.
It’s bigger than us
The fire service doesn’t have a safety problem or an aggressiveness problem. We have an accountability problem, and we all have opportunities daily to close the gap. Closing that gap doesn’t require a new one-size-fits-all safety policy or a new group of underground evangelists. It just takes smart thinking firefighters and leaders courageous enough to do the right thing every day, especially when nobody is watching.
REFERENCES
Gendi, M., Marcham, C.L. & O’Toole, M.F. (2024, Oct.). Assessing safety culture: Lessons from the aviation industry. Professional Safety, 69(10), 26-34.
Klein, G. (2007). Performing a project premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9), 18-19.
Vaughan, D. (1996). The challenger launch decision: Risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA. University of Chicago Press.
