Photo Credit: Cottonbro Studio Whenever you lose your way as a leader, you can always ask yourself, “What would Ted do ..read more

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 ..read more

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 together” the day before. There’s a lot here, and we barely scratched the surface on some of it, but we really dig into purposeful non-compliance in Part 2. We also discuss getting everyone dialed in on paying attention on scene, as well as teaching a ..read more

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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 to go ..read more

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 answered, but we give it the ol’ Combustible try ..read more

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 ..read more

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

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 we haven’t talked about. So, we took a stab at it ..read more