For nearly 20 years I have served as a volunteer firefighter. Over those two decades I have experienced a great deal of meaningful work in countless operations, but also recurring moments that weighed on me. In parallel with firefighting service, I built my entire professional career up to today. I worked intensively on topics like safety, human factors, organizational culture and structure, resilience, and so on, and turned these topics into my profession. Over the years my view of people and organizations has continuously changed and developed, including in connection with the institution of the fire service. I want to share part of those reflections in this article.
It has struck me repeatedly that automatic alarms connected to fire detection systems (FDS) get labelled as “false alarms”. Firefighters amble casually into the fire station; it’s “just an FDS alarm”. While changing in the station, a colleague says “this is just a false alarm anyway”; the drive to the scene isn’t urgent because it’s “just an FDS alarm”. The examples are many.
In this article I want to look at the topics of mental picture, situational awareness, and confirmation bias, using FDS alarms as the example. I will show the danger of a false mental picture and present some first approaches to addressing it.
Some statistics to start with
How large is the share of automatic alarms from fire detection systems? To answer this, I did a short analysis of the operations data publicly available on the website of the Dübendorf – Wangen-Brüttisellen fire service. All operations are recorded there and publicly accessible. I analyzed the years 2018-2020. Of 649 operations, 130 were FDS alarms – about 20%, with the annual percentages ranging between 16% and 23%. These figures did not match my own sense of it, so I also evaluated “my” alarms over the same period. Of 159 alarm calls I received, 57 were FDS alarms, which is 36%. Either way, the numbers show that FDS alarms make up a dominant part of firefighting work.
It can also be said that these are usually operations where the all-clear can be given quickly. On the one hand, they are often technical malfunctions of the detection system; on the other hand, the systems fulfil their purpose and raise an alarm early, typically about small events – burnt toast in the staff room, an overheated water boiler, a small fire in an electrical distribution cabinet, and so on. However, we also keep encountering FDS alarms behind which events lie that can become genuinely dangerous for us firefighters.
Our mental picture and our situational awareness
But why all the fuss about a small thing? Because it is a dangerous small thing, the kind that can lead to accidents – in the worst case with fatal consequences. In countless accident investigation reports from all kinds of fields you can read that the cause lay in a missing or insufficient situational awareness (“lack of situational awareness”). That means indicators of the impending accident were essentially there, but the actors didn’t discover them or didn’t perceive them as such. Unfortunately, this is where most investigations end, without asking the really relevant question: why?
How we approach an operation shapes our situational awareness during it. On the drive to the scene we “paint” our mental picture of the operation ahead. Once that mental picture is painted, we consciously and unconsciously look for cues that confirm it. So if we go into the operation with the mental picture “false alarm”, we unconsciously look for signs that confirm a false alarm. More importantly: we unconsciously filter out signs that don’t match our mental picture. This confirmation bias is something we can hardly escape. If thick black smoke is already coming out of a building, that’s less of a problem, because we perceive the obvious danger immediately. But in a fire operation, many dangers are not obvious. They hide behind doors, or they are gases that can’t be seen or smelled. If we unconsciously filter these signs out, we may put ourselves in mortal danger with a false situational awareness.
The role of the organization
The mental picture a person takes into a firefighting operation isn’t determined solely by that person. We are all shaped by the organization, or rather by the organizational culture – how we as a collective deal with such situations. This handling shows itself in existing processes, in the language used in communication (internal and external), in the leadership behaviour of supervisors, in the behaviour of colleagues, and so on. Does the organization commit itself to a strong safety culture and weight cultural aspects sufficiently?
High Reliability Organizations (HRO) lead by example. These organizations are very aware of exactly these hidden dangers in their system and actively address them. High Reliability Organizations operate according to five principles:
- Preoccupation with failure
- Reluctance to simplify interpretations
- Sensitivity to operations
- Commitment to resilience
- Deference to expertise
Taking the “false alarm” example, this practice violates the second principle, the reluctance to simplify interpretations. The mental picture that arises from this simplification doesn’t necessarily match reality, and in the worst case can prove fatal.
So how can a fire service organization reduce or minimize this risk? Initial, immediate measures could be:
- Clearly defined and documented procedure for (FDS) alarms
- Specific sensitisation of firefighters to the “false alarm” topic
- Language guidelines for internal and external communication
- Consistently pointing out the language guidelines and their background to firefighters who use the term “false alarm”
These are of course only first, targeted measures. As mentioned above, organizational culture, which is not adequately changed by these measures alone, plays an important role. To improve safety sustainably, the topics of high-reliability organization and safety culture have to be tackled comprehensively.
Conclusion
The mental picture with which we go into an operation every day significantly influences our situational awareness and thus our actions in the operation. In the – fortunately rare – extreme case it can decide between life and death. But the mental picture is not solely a matter for each individual firefighter; it is shaped substantially by the surroundings and the organizational culture. Here the organization can and must take its directional role to sustainably improve the safety of its members. The High Reliability Organization model offers one possible approach.