This episode is about delaying decision-making. Or maybe it’s not. We really don’t know what to think of Falkland’s Law, but we have a good time not getting anywhere.By The CTP Group

We talk about it A LOT, but we’ve never really tried to define what we think leadership is. In this episode, we discuss various definitions of leadership; what we like and what we don’t like.By The CTP Group

Photo Credit: Cottonbro Studio Whenever you lose your way as a leader, you can always ask yourself, “What would Ted do?”By The CTP Group

In this episode, we dive into how firefighters’ decision-making process works, and how critically reliant that process is on experience. So, where are we missing opportunities to build experience and convert it to expertise? We’ve come up with a new concept called DIFOS that is a series of questions that can be asked to really examine how a decisio…

Bob (left) on the Appalachian Trail. In Part 3 of our interview we pick up where we left off and get into how we evaluate accidents in the fire service, what we might be able to learn about that process from the airline industry, how to remove dominoes, and we give Bob “The Questions.”By The CTP Group

Photo credit: Maarten Visser This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Bob is the first guest we’ve had to show up to the recording with a powerpoint presentation. And while that gave us a chuckle, it’s a presentation filled with concepts that blew us away…and it’s a presentation that he “threw to…

By The CTP Group

By The CTP Group

Former Birmingham Firefighter George Cowgill posted a very personal account of his time as a firefighter, and why he’s leaving that behind. If you’ve read it, you’re probably not surprised that it went viral, which is how we came across it. In this episode, we interview George (in Birmingham) by telephone as he discusses how he decided it was time …

Like the picture above, psychological contracts can be binding, circular, heavy, old, rusty, and sometimes broken. Before this episode, two of us hadn’t ever heard of a psychological contract, but apparently we all have them. What they really are, who you have them with, and whether or not it’s okay to break them are questions that aren’t so easily…

Fire is where the glory is. They call us firefighters, not building fighters. But fire isn’t really the enemy, is it? How well do you know your enemy?By The CTP Group

Murder holes, force multipliers, and obstacles. All of them are components leading to what very well may be a unified theory of firefighters.By The CTP Group

Spoiler Alert: we don’t really solve the pay problem. That would break a long-standing tradition on our podcast of not solving anything. But there are virtual arms races in some regions as departments raise salaries to compete for what seems to be an ever-shrinking pool of firefighters. Pay is one of those things that we’re all talking about, but w…

What happens when lightning doesn’t strike a house, and you don’t act like the other firefighters?By The CTP Group

And we wrap up our series on The Pathfinder with Part III, which picks up right where we left off at the end of Part II.By The CTP Group

We think that the Pathfinder concept is such an important one, that we actually recorded two separate episodes trying to get it right. But each episode went different directions, so they both ended up being valuable to the discussion.By The CTP Group

What do a fire recruit, a 70’s sitcom, and Walt Disney have to do with regret?By The CTP Group

Every organization has those persons who push the organization from the inside. They advocate passionately for change, but while they’re doing it they can cause discomfort for those around them. They challenge long-held assumptions. They champion new technologies and strategies. They hold up a beacon and ask everyone else to follow into unchartered…

This isn’t really an outtake; it’s just a short take on a topic that wasn’t really large enough to devote an entire episode to. Bill, all by his lonesome, talks into the mic about the paradox of The Ship of Theseus and what that means for organizational identity…and maybe all of us.By The CTP Group

A listener asked us: “At what point is a wrong decision actually worse than no decision at all?” It’s a great starting point for a roving conversation that gets into whether results matter in that calculus. We also rehash our earlier debate on the nature of luck in the fire service (Episode 082), what the role of intent is, how Pabel dissects an in…

The National Fire Academy is the home of the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial; hallowed ground for any firefighter. To borrow a phrase from President Lincoln at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, PA (just 12 miles north of the NFA), the memorial on the NFA campus reminds us “that from these honored dead we take in…

On June 6, 2021, Baldwin County Sheriff’s Deputy Bill Smith gave his life while saving others who got caught in a rip current off the Alabama shore. Two of our podcast crew (Shane and Bill V.) worked for Bill Smith for years before Bill retired as Deputy Chief of Operations for Dekalb County and went on to his second career in law enforcement. Rece…

As is the case with many of our episodes, we didn’t set out to make an episode about this. It actually was just a spirited conversation that we were having when we realized we should hit the record button. Is it better to be liked or respected? What is the relationship between the two? And what are the advantages of being liked, respected, or even …

How do we as firefighters deal with luck? How honest are we about what part luck plays in our successes? More specifically, how much do we count on the same luck at our next fire? That’s where we start anyway, and we don’t exactly see eye to eye about it in the beginning. But that discussion moves to a very open conversation about how we evaluate o…

You make the case that you’re the best person for the next step up; only you don’t get chosen. What do you do then? When does a natural amount of disappointment turn into an unhealthy perception of being slighted? How hard is it to get behind the person who got promoted instead of you? And what about those folks who choose to burn the organization …

For this episode, we talk with “backstep” Firefighter Austin Kohler, who is only a few years into his career in the fire service. We ask him what he enjoys about the job, and what he didn’t expect about it. And about halfway through, we give Austin the upper-hand and let him ask us questions like: How do you perfect your craft in a position without…

The book Leadership On The Line says a plan “is no more than today’s best guess.” So why do some in our profession get so attached to their plan that they can’t see when their plan has lost all chance to succeed? In this episode, we sit down with Louie Bruno to talk about planning and preparation. Louie’s experiences in Technical Rescue for the las…

What you’re about to hear wasn’t really ever intended to be an episode. It was a side conversation that took place during a recording session in December 2019 that we just happened to record. We sat on it for over a year, but we’ve decided it’s something others should hear. It’s about what to do with a great idea before you try to implement it, and…

(Then) Lt. Colonel Hal Moore during the Battle of Ia Drang, 1965 in Vietnam. We’re issuing all of our listeners a challenge in 2021. It’s only nine minutes long, but the effects could last for many years to come if you’re willing to take us up on it.By The CTP Group

We’ll wager there isn’t a firefighter in the fire service who isn’t an advocate of training. But when you call that training “higher education” you start to get somewhat mixed reactions. Make higher education a prerequisite for some promotions, and now you’ve probably got some real disagreement. What’s the correct balance between experience, traini…

How do you figure out if someone is good for your team? Good for the organization? Good for you as a leader? What does it mean to build a diverse team, and how can different skillsets, talents, and perspectives be beneficial? Can they fill in the gaps that the team has, or that you don’t fill yourself? And when does it become unhealthy? When do dif…

Photo by Konrad M from FreeImages When you don’t agree with a decision made above you, is it wrong to let people know you don’t agree? For this Ten Rounds we discuss whether telling those you are supervising that you don’t agree with something undermines authority or whether it actually helps you get that thing done. Then, as is the nature of these…

No matter how hard we try to avoid them, screw-ups are going to happen. When they happen, we shouldn’t avoid acknowledging them. Don’t wear them like a badge of honor, but own them nonetheless. You’ve already paid the price for the lesson; you might as well get the benefit of learning from it. In this episode, we go over some of our own personal bi…

Photo by Gábor Suhajda on FreeImages At the end of our last recording session we only had twenty minutes left to record, which isn’t enough for a full episode. So Hatch suggested we do Ten Rounds. It’s simple: any one of us can talk for two minutes uninterrupted on any topic we want. When the bell ends that round, someone else can either continue o…

We all should be doing a size-up as we approach any scene. And if you’ve got other units responding with you, someone is ultimately going to be required to give some of what you’re seeing and thinking over the radio. So how important is the size-up? How good are you at giving them? How important are the words you choose to describe what you’re seei…

In this episode, we sit down with Attorney Lance LoRusso to discuss the dangers of something almost all firefighters engage in: social media. And you can’t talk about social media without talking about the legal ramifications of firefighters taking pictures and video on scene. Even if you don’t post the pictures, you might be surprised where those …

There is a central concept that runs throughout Pete Blaber’s The Mission, The Men, and Me: that you should always listen to the boots on the ground. We really like that idea. Colin Powell said something similar when he described his “bias was toward the guys in the field.” But we also recognize some wiggle room within the concept, which prompted u…

This episode is the second part to our conversation with Todd Edwards. We pick back up where we left off last time: with Todd’s view on how to approach the problem of underperforming firefighters in your station. Granted, if you’re good at rehabilitating firefighters, you usually get sent more “projects,” and as Todd explains, it can begin to seem …

The illusion of a perfect fire is a tempting one, but it’s also just that: an illusion. In the first part of our discussion with Todd Edwards, we talk about the “perfect fire,” the nature of evaluating our performance at every fire, and Todd’s approach that there are at least three things on every fire that we did well. And when we turn our attenti…

Payton Owens came to the fire service, left, grew an impressive beard, and then came back again. When he left the department, he had some pretty serious stuff going on in his personal life, but he freely admits: he had become pretty disgruntled with the job. Payton got gruntled and came back. His reasons for returning and his perspective are a larg…

A short side discussion from one of our recording sessions about what’s at the nature of success when operating on the fireground: adaptability.By The CTP Group

This quick discussion was born out of an article called “Command NOT Control” by Eric Saylors. Not all of us had read the article, and Shane and Pabel (who did read it) aren’t sure if they agree with it or not. Just when the discussion might be getting going, our appointed time to interview Chris Wessels sneaks up on us, and he’s calling in. We mig…

When we sat down to talk with Chief Chris Wessels, we had a specific topic in mind that we thought we would cover. But what happens so often with the best conversations happened here; the conversation itself led us to places where we didn’t think we were going to go. In this episode, we speak with Chief Wessels about respect inside the firehouse, m…

This audiobook was a project of Combustible to produce an audiobook version of one of the most important documents in fire service history.By The CTP Group

This audiobook was a project of Combustible to produce an audiobook version of one of the most important documents in fire service history.By The CTP Group

This audiobook was a project of Combustible to produce an audiobook version of one of the most important documents in fire service history.By The CTP Group

This audiobook was a project of Combustible to produce an audiobook version of one of the most important documents in fire service history.By The CTP Group

This audiobook was a project of Combustible to produce an audiobook version of one of the most important documents in fire service history.By The CTP Group

This audiobook was a project of Combustible to produce an audiobook version of one of the most important documents in fire service history.By The CTP Group

This audiobook was a project of Combustible to produce an audiobook version of one of the most important documents in fire service history.By The CTP Group