Effective Disruption in Fire Service Leadership

Disruptor (noun): a) someone who throws into disorder; b) someone who successfully challenges established business practices by using an innovation, such as a new technology, to fundamentally change the nature of an industry.

The fire service needs effective disruptor leaders. More accurately, the fire service must promote into leadership the effective disruptors who are in the ranks. Which of the two disruptor definitions do we need? The toxic disruptive firefighter who takes every opportunity to throw the fire station into disorder at the first hint of change or the effective disruptor firefighter who challenges established tactics, techniques and procedures by promoting new innovations (technology or knowledge) with the intent of improving the service that the public receives and the safety for our personnel?

Questioning the need for disruption

In a vacuum, the question is easy to answer. Where the rubber meets the road (aka every day in the fire station), it becomes more complicated.

The fire service needs a learned disruptor leader to be effective. It needs someone who follows directions, understands the “why” behind the latest paperwork demand and has the internal fortitude to push back on a new policy when the result could be harmful to the firefighter and/or the public. The fire service needs people who studied for the engineer’s exam and can pass the captain’s assessment center but also absorbed information from enough non-fire service academic and industry resources that “the way we always have done it” isn’t a good enough reason to keep doing it.

Redefining the purpose of the disruptor

Whether you call that effective disruptor position “willful contrarian” or “lead unlearner,” the purpose of this person is to point out where inefficiencies in the organization exist. Unlike the first definition of a disruptor, the goal of pointing out these inefficiencies is to improve the quality of fire department operations for public benefit while improving teamwork and station morale. The only limit is the imagination of the effective disruptor.

Using curiosity and imagination to seek new solutions requires a different kind of courage than that which is required to run into a burning building: the courage to unlearn. In the Star Wars franchise, Luke Skywalker is challenged by his instructor Yoda to “unlearn what you have learned.” We must meet this same challenge, because that’s the only pathway for new information, practices, and concepts to permeate the minds and culture of the fire service.

Unlearning in practice

The purposeful unlearning of old procedures and implementation of new ones has occurred since the first fire bucket brigades were created. Can you imagine being the person who went to the town meeting 150 years ago and had the audacity to suggest that buckets should be replaced with a system of underground pipes with pressurized water? It’s likely that the carpenter who had the bucket-building contract was a highly influential person who held sway over those decisions. Yet, who could argue 150 years later that we should still be using those antiquated, inefficient, technologically inferior buckets?

Effective disruptor leader as a change agent

Change is something that firefighters hate equally as much as the way that things are. To whom can the fire service turn when advances in techniques and training must keep up with technology? Who can lead the decision-makers by translating complicated (and localized) fire-speak into data-driven, financially impactful requests that leave the governing body members thinking, “How can we not fund that budget proposal?”

It’s those people who have dedicated their life to the fire service and then turn away from all that they know to consider what they don’t yet know. This critical piece only can be filled by a curious mind who has a heart of service and who chooses education over anecdotes, whole articles over summaries, relationship-building over silo-creating and the well-being of others over self-promotion. This is the effective disruptor leader.

Qualities of the effective disruptor leader

Effective disruptor leaders aren’t afraid of upending the status quo. They happily will push away tried-and-true techniques when those are overmatched by emerging technology. They choose to unlearn the bad habits that impatience and stubbornness instilled in them, replacing those habits with ones that are more efficient and safer and reduce damage. They are able to apply unlearning broadly, even to topics in which they are subject matter experts. They realize that being an expert is useless if the situation around them changes and their expertise no longer applies.

Effective disruption implementation

It is key that the exploration of what can be improved is done every day. Whether hot, cold, rainy or snowy outside, training must occur in an environment where it’s safe to fail at the new technique.

Matt Hasby, who is a former Navy SEAL officer and currently is leadership consultant with Echelon Front, reminds us to not waste failure. In the fire service, this means that trying the next evolution of how to accomplish a goal is necessary for finding the future series of tactics, techniques and procedures.

When questioned about failure, Thomas Edison famously retorted, “I have not failed but found 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb.” This adventurous perspective of being willing to fail in practice is the only way that true learning can occur in the fire service without risking lives. Once firefighters discover 500 ways to not force a new locking system, they open themselves up to finding the effective new technique on the 501st try. Then, it’s time to practice, refine and share that knowledge with their crew. On the day that the firefighter encounters the new locking system on a door to a building that has smoke pouring out, they will do so with the confidence that they are using the method that has been practiced and refined to excellent effectiveness.

Effective disruptor leaders avoid staying the same

Effective disruptor leaders resist the temptation of remaining in an echo chamber, so they can bring in new thoughts, beliefs and information. Further, they leverage those new perspectives into beneficial contrarianism. Contrarians, similar to disruptors, suffer from negative connotations. However, the benefit of both is that they force open the team’s collective mind to discover how to solve new problems as well as what improvements to current procedures can increase operational efficiency.

Effective disruptor leaders aren’t haphazard in their exploration of processes, failures and triumphs, because they do so by taking small, iterative steps to create indicators that the problem is getting better or worse. When a small step leads to a problem worsening, it’s much easier to reverse direction and seek another solution. When the small iterative step makes the problem better, they already began to create momentum that inspires further exploration, leads to successes and increases team morale.

Time as a disruptor

Time is a critical element that often is overlooked. Traditionally, firefighters worked 30 years for the same organization, maintaining their generational tactics, techniques and procedures until they retired. However, technology, society and public expectations demand that the fire service adapts to emerging problems within weeks or months, not years or generations. The public doesn’t care that 20 years ago, fire personnel were trained to handle their emergency in a certain way. They only want us to respond quickly, assess the scene accurately and apply the most effective solution.

Modeling business disruption

The business world is familiar with the concept of disruption. It continually looks for challenges that fall into one of four categories: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA). The fire department is a part of the government, and the government is a uniquely positioned business, one that’s focused on the bottom line to determine what the right allocations are for the resources that taxpayers trust us to use for their public benefit. We owe it to the public to continually improve our tactics and efficiency and to find the new best way to mitigate the emergencies for which they call us.

Public expectations

The fire service needs effective disruptor leaders. It needs leaders who are willing to examine current practices and dispassionately evaluate whether they still work based on changes in the people and technologies that are involved.

If there are improvements that must be made, the public expects members of the fire department to use taxpayers’ limited financial resources to find the best methods and equipment to solve those emergencies, to sharpen tactics, techniques and procedures daily, and to be flexible enough to react to emerging threats at the same speed that those threats evolve.

Only those disruptor leaders who put service and safety above all other selfish choices are able to make those positive changes that benefit our fire personnel, increase trust in the fire department and fulfill the duty that we all swore to uphold.