Of the hundreds of firefighters and fire chiefs I’ve met from across the country during my career, I can’t think of one who wasn’t interested in having a great culture in their fire department. I use the definition of culture as the unconscious beliefs, attitudes and assumptions that drive behavior (Schein, 1985), but the plain definition could be “the way we do things around here.”
While there are many ways to intentionally shape culture and numerous challenges to reinforcing it, focusing efforts on continual growth and learning can be a powerful driver toward a positive, sustainable, high-performance atmosphere in our fire departments.
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A useful framework for pursuing that goal is the “learning organization,” a workplace that emphasizes growth, training, development and adaptation. These organizations promote individual and team learning, a shared vision and open-minded thinking while emphasizing how individual parts connect within larger systems (Senge, 1990). When growth and learning guide a department’s vision, conversations and strategy, they can shape its culture and move members toward shared goals.
Departments can put these principles into action through consistent after-action reviews (AARs), which turn operational experience into shared learning.
Culture assessment
Before we try to implement change, it’s important to ask three questions to assess the current culture:
- What is it actually like here and why?
- What do we want it to be like here?
- How do we get to our desired reality? In other words, what combination of employee development and input, leadership competencies and systems/processes will create the environment where the culture we want can exist?
Knowing the answers to the first two questions will allow leadership teams to be more strategic and intentional about what actions they can take to answer the third.
1. What is it actually like here?
Fire department senior leadership cannot assume that because they once did the job, the culture has remained fixed in place as they experienced it at the kitchen table. In fact, culture shifts with each employee who enters and exits the organization. For us to know what the culture truly is, we must ask our employees in meaningful ways. Asking questions through surveys, focus groups, interviews, ride-alongs and conversations in the firehouse can be effective ways to understand the day-to-day line experience. The key is being prepared to act on the answers. If you don’t plan to act on the information, don’t ask for it.
One of our preferred methods for gathering feedback is an annual employee operational survey. We use vetted engagement questions to understand where the employee group is on various topics year over year. We then add several variable questions focused on aspects of our culture, operations and attitudes that warrant closer examination.
We use the findings to shape our strategic priorities and determine where to focus efforts in training, EMS, fire operations and administration. We then report back to the department on how we did the previous year.
The voice of the employee influences the direction we are heading.
2. What do we want it to be like here?
A department’s vision for its culture should reflect community expectations, employee needs and leadership priorities. Operational excellence, customer service, fiscal responsibility, employee health and wellness, and regulatory compliance are all part of that equation. While there will not be complete agreement on everything, we should follow themes that can help align these factors.
One of the themes that continues to be prominent for us is the stated desire of our workforce to be great at their jobs and be part of a department that is striving toward excellence. That desire precisely aligns with what leadership wants and what the community deserves. Our crews back up these statements every day, both with their work in our community and a commitment to consistent, ongoing training.
3. How do we get to our desired reality?
There are certainly many “right” answers for how fire departments can achieve the culture they want. For departments seeking greater engagement, renewed momentum or a clearer direction, continual growth and learning can provide a strong foundation.
In a learning culture, many, if not most, aspects of the job revolve around training, learning, growth and development. This differs from training only when it is convenient or required.
Learning cultures often see the following behaviors:
- Members are simultaneously engaged in development processes, such as a crew helping a probationary employee through onboarding at the same time as an aspiring engineer, captain or chief officer prepares for a new role.
- On-duty training is an expected and accepted function of the job, with the goal of improvement (not box-checking).
- Knowledge is cataloged and distributed through multiple mediums, and members know where to go to find it.
- There are multiple paths for career development.
- There is clear informal peer-to-peer learning.
- Employees attend conferences, seminars and similar engagements as they look to improve themselves — and then bring that knowledge back to the department.
AARs drive learning culture
Of all the ways to deliver educational content to firefighters, I find AARs among the most effective. For me, this has always been the fun part. I enjoy digging into what happened: what we found, what we did, and how our decisions and actions had an impact.
Leaders who facilitate AARs are using core leadership skills when they ask questions, guide discussion, coach their teams and help people reflect. These conversations can be difficult, but they create opportunities to practice accountability throughout the chain of command, beginning with the incident commander. You would be hard-pressed to find another medium that can deliver this many growth and learning opportunities in one sitting.
When used effectively, AARs can become a centerpiece of an organization-wide learning culture. While the standard AAR steps have been well documented for decades, there are three specific things that help me know we are using them to support a learning culture.
1. Personal and organizational accountability
A good friend and battalion chief likes to say that people like to do things, “except the hard parts.” With an AAR, the hard parts often appear when personal accountability is required. There’s simply no other way around it — and that’s a good thing. The intention of an AAR is to understand the factors that contributed to the outcome of the situation through a candid and honest conversation. If we don’t talk about decisions or actions that were less effective, we can’t reflect on them, dissect them, and understand how to move forward with greater clarity.
It is equally important to highlight the things that worked. This allows more of the department to learn how to appropriately manage that situation and increases the likelihood positive steps will be repeated.
For this model to be successful, leaders must model accountability by speaking plainly about the things they did well and things they might want to do differently next time. This openness gives others permission to speak in a similar manner and is essential for an honest learning culture to exist.
Leaders must then create space for everyone involved to accept responsibility for their part in the outcome. Accountability means willingly acknowledging your role in the incident and taking ownership of the actions or omissions that contributed to the outcome.
The U.S. Fire Administration has stated it is not necessary to assign fault or assign blame in the AAR setting (FEMA, 2015). The goal is to understand how decisions made under time and information constraints affected the incident’s critical factors. If there was a delay in the water supply, we all get to own our part in the communication and execution of that assignment. Was there a pre-assignment, or was the crew waiting for direct IC communication? Were there obstructions at the hydrant? Was there an unclear policy that contributed? Once we understand root causes, we can assess what actions we should take next time to reduce or eliminate any potential delays.
Accountability up and down the chain must come with a level of trust that we are there to learn and grow toward better outcomes. Backbiting, gossiping and tearing people down will severely hamper your ability to build accountability into your culture.
Normalizing personal and team accountability during an AAR can supercharge accountability in other areas of the department and can be a powerful element of a greater learning culture.
2. Experiential learning
Learning cultures place a high priority on learning from calls and experiences — experiential learning (Kolb, 1984). However, there tends to be an assumption that simply having the experience equates to learning from it, and that is not necessarily true. The experiential learning cycle includes four stages that help turn experience into new knowledge:
- Experiencing: We engage in a concrete experience. This could be a fire call, major medical incident or special rescue. This is not experiential learning by itself.
- Reflecting: After the experience, we reflect on what happened and how it felt. What went well, what was tough, and what actions and decisions did we make? This reflection should be occurring in the initial phases of the AAR.
- Thinking: We make sense of why things happened the way they did, and we take existing ideas and challenge them through new experiences. We think about and analyze the event through the lens of everyone present to create conclusions and theories we can test. We could decide we want to try splitting our crew in different scenarios, performing window searches in a new cadence or expanding the role of the forward deployed chief. This is the crucial step where knowledge can start being created through experience. The reason AARs are so powerful is they do not have to be our own physical experience we are learning from; we can borrow an experience from another crew and still learn the same lessons.
- Acting/experimenting: We test our theories. In emergency services, this is typically done on the drill field or in safe environments because there can be a high failure rate trying tactics for the first time. Once we determine that we want to adopt a new tactic or theory, we need to get enough reps and reinforcement to move that skill from novice mode to advanced or expert level. A lesson cannot really be said to have been learned if the error is repeated.
3. Continual training feedback loop
For many departments with multiple distinct shifts and hundreds of personnel, crews routinely respond to significant events that employees on different shifts have no idea even occurred. It’s frustrating when crucial learning opportunities come out of those events, including significant safety points, and we repeat mistakes across the department because we could not effectively teach the lessons of the first incident to those who were not present.
Departments can address this gap by building systems that capture lessons and distribute them through multiple learning formats. We want everyone to understand how we identified and managed that basement fire, or why we chose to shelter residents in place instead of evacuating them. This helps turn a firefighter’s declarative knowledge (understanding facts and information) into procedural knowledge (knowing how and why to do something) (Anderson & Lebiere, 2014). AARs for local events add an extra layer of relevance because we know the buildings, the people and the context, making it easier to absorb the information.
At least three times a year, we distribute an AAR for each company officer to review with the crew. This facilitates an opportunity for battalion chiefs and captains to have conversations with their crews about the lessons learned in the AAR and how they apply. Ideally, crews would follow the experiential learning pathway and create knowledge for themselves, forming theories based on the lessons from the AAR and experimenting with those theories.
Final thoughts
When assessing your department in the context of Learning Organization principles, there will likely be some areas where you have achieved mastery and other areas where you are just starting to develop. Continued development is the point. The mistake is assuming the department has learned enough and allowing it to settle into its comfort zone. When growth and development become cultural expectations at the individual, team and department levels, improvement can continue across the organization. Conducting AARs consistently and sharing their lessons broadly can anchor that effort.
REFERENCES
Anderson, J. R., & Lebiere, C. (2014). The atomic components of thought (p. 5). Psychology Press.
FEMA, U.S. Fire Administration. (2015, June). Operational lessons learned in disaster response.
FEMA, Emergency Management Institute. (2015, October 2). IS‑552: Public Works and Emergency Management [Training course].
Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall.
Schein, E. H. (1985). Organizational culture and leadership. Jossey‑Bass.
Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday/Currency.
