You don't know, what you don't know

I'm in the middle of a heavy research cycle.  I go through phases where I just let information flood in and then ruminate on it for weeks to years before the light bulb over my head turns on and I say, "Got it... here is how it all ties together."  This week though a couple of things landed in my lap all at the same time.  First, there was an excellent video, featuing Kathryn Schulz about the very human act of being wrong.



Then I started reading Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales.  I am still working on it but I was struck but a key point: We rarely interact with the world the way it is really occurring but with our perception of the world.

Our ability to "know" what is going on revolves around our expected mental picture of what is happening around us.  We simplify exceeding complex systems to a level where we can frame them for our understanding... EVEN IF WE ARE WRONG.  A fact that Gonzales comes back to over and over again is that those who find themselves in trouble (life and limb threatening events) often did not anticipate that they could find themselves in that kind of trouble.  They assumed everything would be okay, or worse they planned for a minor problem and in having a contingency plan for that minor issue they assumed they could handle ANY problem.  I have seen very little planning in the fire service for CATASTROPHIC failures.

Frank Brannigan said it for years, "Every sailor in the U.S. Navy is trained to abandon ship," how many of us are training on making a tactical retreat from a building?  How many of us are training our folks where mid-fire attack they air horns start sounding and they have to get out Now?

I've drawn parallels to our trade and that of members of elite military units before.  One of the things that makes the small unit tactics of the US Navy SEALs so effective is that their mission planning drives into dozens of "what if" scenarios for every possible contingency and failure point.  They examine their options if they find themselves in contact with the enemy during insertion, if they find themselves in contact when extracting, if they lose radio contact with their support elements, if they become separated during a movement or when in contact with the enemy and dozens of other small and large failures.  What this does is set up a mental model that ENCOURAGES mental AGILITY.

So, does your mission planning take into consideration all the possible failure points, or just enough minor ones to give you a false sense of confidence?  Do you use SOME those hundreds of hours you spend in the fire house working out with your partner, your company, and your battalion what to do when things go wrong?  It's an old military maxim that no plan survives first contact with the enemy; we need to figure out before we ever get on the Engine or Truck plans B, C, and D if we want to give our personnel the mental agility to adjust for a rapidly deteriorating situation.