Weekly Scrap #340 - Phil Jose, Train wide… execute narrow.

Speaker 1: Front road gang, never do complain They rock up front A merry bunch of cun And we love them everyone After party roast always a joke No one brings it and that's okay because we love them all the s Front row, front row, crack a beer, lend your ear, it's that time for the scrapbook Corley: I get asked all the time, what is a vigilante? What does it mean to be a vigilante? And so to explain that, I'm just gonna kind of explain where the vigilantes came from. When I started the group, I honestly thought there was gonna be like 10 or 20 people who really like the scrap that would want to be part of the behind the scenes. helping pick out the guests and make the questions and things. And I'd never dreamed that the vigilantes would grow into what it has grown into. Over 700 like-minded souls. If you're a vigilante, you are never alone. We have members from across the country. We have members from across the globe. And it's just amazing what it's become. If you're in there, then you get to be in the Discord, and the Discord is where we do all of our Discussions and people go live and they talk and they ask questions and we have a channel for bitching and moaning for presenting classes. It's just it's amazing the fellowship that is involved in being a vigilante. And it's not just that, there's so many other benefits. You get access to the Vigilante only swag shop. You get the 15% discount on all merch from Firehouse Vigilance. You get the after parties. You get the Vigilante get togethers when we're all at the same place and we get together and we raise a glass and do a toast and have the vigilante creed. You get the vigilante coin when you hit your one year anniversary with your number. The fireaways, the forums. the archives, all those quarterly projects that are coming that you get to be a part of and get to be behind the scenes on, it's grown into something bigger than I ever imagined And I want people to know about, I want people to be a part of. If you're not a vigilante, why not? I don't know. I don't know how how big it could be. I don't know. I mean the vigilantes are are where the work is at.

Corley: They're the ones who are getting stuff done And it's phenomenal to be a part of it. I wanted to get on here and explain where it started, how it how it came to be, and ask you, if you're not a vigilante, why not? Go to Patreon. dot com slash the vigilantes. That's where you sign up. It is $5 a month. I mean it's you can't even get a cup of coffee for that anymore. Five bucks a month and you get to be a part of this unbelievable group Go to patreon. com, sign up, become a vigilante, and I will see you on the Discord. Hopefully we can keep it on topic. on task. Corley Moore, Firehouse Vigilance. It is weekly scrap number 340. My guest tonight is Phil Jose, retired as Deputy Chief after 30 years with Seattle Fire Department. He ran both the operations and training divisions, earned both Chief Officer of the Year and the Tom Brennan Training Achievement Award along the way. He's the author of multiple books for the Fire Service. His next book, War Gaming for the Fire Service, the decision and delivery of tactical decision games, is currently in negotiations with publishers. And war gaming is a lot of what we are going to be discussing this evening. Giving officers a way to build decision-making skills without waiting for their next big job. You can get a taste of that work now through his TDG series on fireengineering. com. Phil's been teaching at FDIC for two decades and is a regular contributor to Fire Engineering Magazine. He runs ignition point training Delivering the art of reading smoke and tactical decision making to departments across the country. If you are not excited, go get your blood pressure checked. Welcome, my brother Phil Jose, to the scrap for episode number 340.

Phil Jose: Thanks, Corley. I'm super happy to be here and to talk about you know anything related to training in fire department. it's still in my blood and I'm I hope to just continue to give back now in my retirement. but I'm having a lot of fun For sure. Corley: I'm excited to have you back on the scrap, but I've never had to have you on the scrap. And I was actually really jealous of Rob because I gave each guest host, I said, who do you want to have? And he said Phil Jose. I was like, damn it. Then that means I don't. So now I'm really happy that I get to do my interview with you. Although Rob did a killer job. You guys had the, yeah, it was awesome. Phil Jose: Yeah, and I mean eventually, you know, I just wondered, do you do I get a five timers jacket? Does Rob count for a full episode or is this like a Half or a three quarters. Corley: No, what we actually went through and said what counts. And me and Sam sat down and said what counts. And we if you're on the scrap, it counts as a full episode. So you are no, yeah, you're on your way

Phil Jose: Sounds good. Corley: Is there anything you want to add to the intro? I always like to ask because sometimes I forget things. Phil Jose: No, no, I think you you nailed it in there and I think we talked and I'm always willing to talk about reading smoke. I love that program. But we did talk about that mostly last time, I think. And then so yeah, whatever questions you have or the audience has, I know you you get a lot of stuff from the audience. I appreciate that They are the best winging it, man. Corley: No, and they are the best audience because they do send the best questions right down the pipe, usually right in the subject matter experts, the guests wheelhouse so that you can crush it. So I hope they are getting their questions ready and getting them into Sam. Sam is watching for your questions. So now I'll do the sponsors. We'll get those out of the way so that get those out of the way and we will have a blast. Everything in the fire service gets tested. Training, instincts, equipment. That's why SnapTite designs and builds its fire hose to perform no matter the challenge. Durability, packability, kink resistant. Every single line is tested before it leaves the factory, so you know you can count on it. And the last thing I'll talk about is Lyft coming up in less than a month. So if you're going to be there March 3rd, me, Sam, we're going to be live on location doing a scrap there. And Todd Edwards, Basil Ibrahim are going to be the guest. It's going to be exciting. Live audience in person asking questions. Live audience on the internet asking questions And this is the best part. When it's over, a live after party slash vigilante meetup never been done before. So I look forward to seeing you there. With that being said, sponsors are in the books and we're ready to start talking. And before we get to war games, I want to lead off with this. Because I'm so excited about the war gaming topic. But I want to talk about your training philosophy. Because the first thing I want to say is I think it's cool. I mean, cool as hell that you actually have a training philosophy. I'm willing to bet if you put firefighters to the test and ask them what their training philosophy was, you would get a lot of just blank stares.

Corley: Like, what are you talking? What's a training philosophy? But you put it in your email. You said Train wide, execute narrow. And I absolutely love that. So I want to dig into that just a little bit here as we kick things off. Phil Jose: Yeah, so I'm taking that from two people that hopefully your audience knows. The first one is John Boyd. Right, he he's the Oudaloop guy and and do you read any of any of his the biographies of him There's a great episode online where John Schmidt, who wrote Warfighting for the Marine Corps, talks about the development of that book and how John Boyd was instrumental in making it so effective. But He he have he's a very broad thinker, right? The more you know, the better off you are, and you gotta think about things in a very broad category. to Boyd's patterns of conflict briefing, you're talking about like 16 hours of the OODA loop, right? And it so it doesn't it doesn't neatly fit down into a very tight four for you know observe orient design act and you can break it down to something that simple but you're missing a lot of the detail and a lot of what he was talking about was a very broad understanding of even the culture of your enemy, right? So even the way that if you're fighting from people from Russia, you gotta understand the culture of that they're raised in and the culture of their military and like all these things impact the way they make decisions. So that's it I I don't think we need to get that broad, but you know he was he was a very broad thinker, right? And then X Key Narrow comes from Willie McCraven, who was President Obama's national security advisor, I think. He was a I he was in charge of the SEALs when they killed bin Laden and he was Navy SEAL all the way up. I think he kept his plank all the way through Admiral, which I don't think is a I don't think it's easy to keep to speak qualified and all that stuff when you're also running a pretty big show, right? And if you read his, he's got a book called Special Ops. That was his doctoral thesis. And he has this pyramid that starts with for an effective operation, you've got to start with a simple plan.

Phil Jose: And he hit that he analyzed a bunch of special forces successes and failures across multiple wars, looking at it from both enemy and friendly positions and what works and what doesn't, why operations failed, why they succeeded. and it starts with with making sure that the plan itself is simple. Anything that makes it more complicated increases the opportunity for failure. And so if if you if one example that we got we used in Seattle the my one of my favorite examples though is that it took us and we had the subject matter experts like Aaron Fields and like I mean we you know we we do get a lot of subject matter expertise in Seattle, right? But you know there was a whole crowd of people who wanted to eliminate the Y from our operation. So we you know we were consistently using the two and a half with a gated Y extending with inch and three quarter. They wanted to get rid of it and they convinced me it was a good idea. And you think it's not that much more complicated than just having a bell reducer instead of a gated Y But when you start doing training on a regular basis, I was just taking companies out myself and I I was a deputy at the time, so I'd have all the battalion chiefs run all the energy companies through these drills and it's like you know we're we're creating failure rates up to 20% with the Y and close to zero not zero but very very close to zero with the bell reducer And you go, like look man, like I don't know which one of these you think is gonna be more effective. And that's on the training ground, Corley

Corley: Right, it just without the without the other factors, right? The most controlled yeah. Phil Jose: And then I could I could track a couple buildings that I think we lost. We like like Like we legitimately lost structures or significantly impacted fire operations because the open butt of the Y either got left open or kicked open or flipped open when it charged or some other version one of them I had a crew in a hallway trying to make a hallway And they went to open the line just at the same time the second crew went to charge their line off of the same Y, and they had no pressure right because all all of it's going into the empty host. Right. So they actually shut down and backed out to this to the step to the doorway, like they closed the doorway to the hallway And they're in the you know, they're in the like they're checking like, oh no, our our pressure's good now. Well yeah, of course it's good now. Right? The other line's charged. Right. Now it's got the back pressure to go. And and so that's just one example of like it it's not very much more complicated, but anytime you're doing anything You should be doing it in the most simple way that you can figure out how to do it. Okay. Anything that makes it more complicated increases the opportunity for failure.

Corley: And you were seeing you were seeing like an 18% reduction I'm guerrilla mathing it. 18%, 18%, 19% reduction in error rate when you went just to a bell reducer over the gated Y Phil Jose: Yeah, not not even counting Corley that it's faster. It's to use a bell reducer instead of a gated wi is something, you know, across a couple of hundred evolutions is probably like averaging somewhere around 37 seconds faster. And I don't know about you, but I think applying water to the sea of the fire as fast as possible is a relatively important part of being an effective fire department. Corley: I love it. No, that's Already, stuff I hadn't even thought about. That's really I got questions coming on this topic, so I'm gonna throw some at you already out the gate. Usually I get going more into the war game stuff, but Luke wants to know, at Luke wants to know, do you think there is a tendency towards making things more complex even when the benefits slash returns are negligible? Phil Jose: Oh, I think that's absolutely true, right? I mean there's a reason, was it Occam's razor, right? The most simple solution is probably correct. There's a reason that's been around for you know centuries. I don't know where how long ago that that came from, but there's a reason that that applies across nature and everything we do but people like things that are complicated you know Even simple things like fire station designs for operating spec and layout. Like look, man, I've been a lot of places. You know, if you have two inch and three-quarter pre-connects and one, two and a half that are, you know, whatever, however simple it can be. But if you're a department that trains half of your people once a week, which is what typically I would say volunteer agencies get, right? They get roughly half of their people once a week.

Corley: On the train night. Phil Jose: Yeah, you do not need 15 different hose loads on your engine. Because you need to be good at one. Right? And if you think about the instant core and the two and a half, the technical skills to stretch them are the same. Right. There it's a different size of hose and if we were doing very, very long stretches, we could worry about the weight. But essentially anything less than 400 feet that the size of the host doesn't matter. It's only the length that matters, right? And so the skill set is the same. So can we be very, very, very good at doing doing this now do we want to in training do we want to learn how to go around corners and obstacles and be lined up on the door and do all those sorts of things on a regular basis across a wide variety of approaches to buildings? Yes. Do we want to be able to stretch and up stretch and charge inside stairwells? Yes. inside dirty hallways. Yes, right? But it's the same hose stretch. It's just in a different environment. So You're training in that what that one thing in that wide variety so that once it's time to execute, you've seen it before Yeah. It's not you're not making it up. You're not trying to figure out how to do it on the stairwell. You're not trying to figure out how to do it with smoke. I mean I don't you don't want to do it be doing it in a dirty hallway where the smoke is down to the ground But if you got some laminar thin light-gray smoke just hanging up there because the compartment door is closed, then I would say that's probably a reasonable stairwell or a reasonable hallway to stress dry in. But if you've never done it with your mask on, if you've never done it, you know, sort of hunkering down a little bit, then that would be new to you. And there's no reason for it to be new to you because Instead of doing that doing that one type of stretch a bunch of different ways, you've got 15 different stretches off the rig. You got a hundred footer, a hundred and fifty footer, a two hundred footer, a two like like wow man, like let's need to be that complicated.

Corley: No, I love it. Phil Jose: And it I think it's true across all professions too that people like to complicate things because then they can be the expert at something. Corley: I was gonna say is that usually from the top the instructor down because A they're bored with teaching basics or B because they want to their ego needs to impress everybody with their knowledge and Or is that too is that too broad of a brush to slap on a picture? Phil Jose: But I but I wouldn't I don't I mean I don't think it has to be egocentric though Corley. I can remember we were doing bailout training And I was I was a lead instructor, right? So I was captain, bunch of lieutenants, and we're bringing companies in and one of the one of the Work stations was bailouts. Like they just teach it, then bailout, bailout, bailout until your time is over, right? Everybody get four or five or six or seven repetitions. you know, we had it set up with a a belay and the whole shooting match, right? Right. Well, we had we had we had three approved methods that we had run through the safety division and like it's a big organization Like you know, you're working in a place like Seattle, you know, there's a lot of people that want to have their hands in that pie, especially when it's something brand new like teaching bailouts, because we all of a sudden we got personal ropes, right? They were hooked up to the mask back, everybody had them, and we were training people how to use them. They weren't even on the they weren't even on the SCBA yet. That's how new this was And so we have three methods of of hooking an anchor inside the building, you know, using a halligan tool in the corner and things like that. So there's these three methods. Well te instructors who taught the thing 15, 20, 30 times, they get bored with teaching it and their knowledge of it is so deep that they forget that the students that day is their first time. Right, right. So instead of focusing on the three and getting a massive number of repetitions on the three, they go, well, you're pretty good at that one Try this new one that we just figured out yesterday or whatever. Right.

Phil Jose: Their intent is good. But they they forget that that the person, the other person doesn't hasn't hasn't done 400 of these. Right. Like the instructor. Because the instructors are doing them every single time they get a chance. Right? They're they're messing around at lunch and Like, you know, all the companies leave and you gotta wait for a new set of companies to come in. That's like an hour and a half. So it's not even malignant. Corley: I mean I would say malicious, it's not even the right word, but it's not even egocentrical. It's just it's just forgetting that the student is coming at it from the student's level. Phil Jose: Yeah, and and they're brand news. The curse of knowing, right? you know it so well that you just you You forget that that person doesn't need any more ways to do it. They need more reps at these three. Pick the way that they do it the worst and have them do that one again No, that's two or three or four more times, right? So they build the m the they so that when it's the worst day in the world and they have to bail out of a window They're not trying to remember one of seven ways, right? And even the three ways are pretty distinct, right? You had one where the anchor was like in the corner of the window One where there would you like used a tool to get around a a stud in a wall. I can't remember what the third one was though, but they were each of those was pretty distinct.

Corley: Pretty distinct. Phil Jose: Yeah. Corley: Nice Phil Jose: And so the instructors trying to do the instructors, I think they're trying to do the right thing, Corley. That's my baseline. Firefighters, fire officers, people responding to emergencies, they're trying to do the right thing all the time. Nobody ever is going, hey, you know what, we really want to send somebody to the hospital. Corley: Right. So we established Phil is optimist. We got that established. Okay. I love it. Scott Hoke coming at you says, I like this question. Just like you can over-complicate training, do you believe you can oversimplify training to be equally as ineffective. Is there an opposite end of the spectrum? Phil Jose: It's a great question. Corley: Yeah, I wanted to get yeah, I kind of wanted to see what you thought of it because I'm not sure. I to me it's KISS, K-I-S-S. And I don't know if yeah, I wonder. Phil Jose: I I would say that if if if you bring if you have somebody who's who's really good at his skill. Like they like like you can just you can just stop the ring and go stretch a line and they get I mean it's like ingrained you know what you're looking for is the Is the cognitive memory to be so deeply grooved in their head that they don't use any cognitive load to do that skill? Right? That's called column muscle memory.

Corley: Yeah. Phil Jose: But it's not your muscles remembering, it's just that you have a really a really nice groove in your brain to do that skill and it doesn't take any cognitive level. Corley: Is that the unconscious competence that's Essentially, yeah. Phil Jose: So you're when you're stretching, you can be looking at the building, you can be assessing the structure. Like you can when you're carrying a ladder, you're and you're putting it up, you're not thinking about putting the ladder up, you're thinking Thinking about its placement. You know, there's there's a lot of other things that you can do. More cognitive bandwidth available for the task besides the immediate And so then that's when I'd say, yeah, you that's then doing that one again is probably too simple for that person. Make that more competent. Give them an obstacle to go around. Give them something they gotta think about. Put a put it, you know, establish a wire overhead like the but yeah make it more challenging right and this that would be a great time I think to institute failure right to say okay Yeah, guess what? Your hose just burst through like as soon as it charges go hey just burst shut it down get just redo it right like so that you go oh you're not going oh my hose doesn't work right or hey man your nozzle's clocked like okay you have to recover right one of the what you're talking about there right is is introducing friction. Like friction exists on the fire ground, right? That's that comes from Klauschwitz and all that kind of stuff. But you have this friction on the fire ground that's constant And one of the great things that the fire that firefighters are really, really good at is overcoming friction. So once people get a really tight groove on any task You just want to increase the friction so that they can they see it from a different way. I mean, four stores with one wedge and put two wedges in Right? you know those sorts of things where so you're not you're not making it more complicated just to make it complicated. You're strategically introducing friction into their work. So they've already had to deal with friction in their work. Right. You don't want the first time somebody like in Seattle, right, there's a I mean I'm sure that most places, right, there's a foot valve on the hydrant that if it's closed, the hydrant won't work Well if if you've never ever in your life opened a you learned that in a book they talked about it in drill school and you've been in the company for 10 years If you've never opened a hydrant and had it come up empty and then had to go to the foot bow to get it open, if you've never ever done that, you very easily could forget it on the fire Right, but if you've done it once, you're probably gonna remember, right?

Phil Jose: So at least to check if I had a company officer earlier in my career, like we'd be out testing hydrants He'd go, he'd go, hey, test these 10 in a row and I'll jump ahead. Right? He'd give me the little cards, you know, 146 A Street and 247 B Street, etc. Right. I'm walking around, you know, just doing the hydrant checks. Sure. Well it He'd have the driver take him to like the eighth or tenth one that I was gonna do and he'd shut the foot valve off. Right? So when I got there, I'm like, oh my god, the hybrid doesn't work, you know, and I'm opening the foot valve and like It doesn't take very many repetitions of that particular skill. Corley: To lock it into your brain so you it's part of your algorithm. It's part of your algorithm from that point forward. So let me ask you, is it really come down to the level of complexity as determined by the level of competency that the student possesses and you need to be plugged into that so you can gauge and properly assess? Phil Jose: Yeah, but I think that there there there we might be losing sight of the of the sort of the overarching thing there. It's like Is the thing that you're doing is the method that you're using to do the thing that this as simple as it can be

Corley: Right. Okay. Phil Jose: Right. Right. And yeah, once you have experts, once people start to build skills, once You know what, you know, yeah, make it make it harder, make it more complicated, make it more difficult so that they have experience in things that are more difficult But let's not lose sight of the fact that we don't want to introduce complexity into a system. We want the system itself to be as simple. how's possible. Right. I mean we could take you know you can take it all the way back to fire station designs. How long does it take to get from a bunk room to the apparatus bay And that that time should be as short as possible. And how long does it take to get from the beanery or the kitchen to the apparatus bay? And that should be as short as possible. you know, the sometimes people, you know, the you can in even apparatus is another one, you know, If you can have an apparatus that sets down when you get to the location and you do not have to step up and down on the tailboard to pull hose or to do work That's less complicated because when you step up onto and step off of a tailboard, there's a certain number of injuries and ankle twists and things that are going to come with that. There's no reason to introduce that into your fire ground if you can spec an apparatus that doesn't require you to step up on it

Corley: No, it makes sense. And again, like you said, losing sight of the forest or the tree. I'm not sure which one, but yeah, absolutely. I love it. let me see. There was one other one I saw in here I wanted to ask you Because I want to get to war gaming and the tactical decision making experience. I want to look here. I saw it a minute ago. I'm trying to find it. Maybe not. Fireman Piv. Yeah. Is there a single training? It's Fireman Piv, Kyle Pivra all coming at you. And this was on your training philosophy. And he said, is there a single training philosophy that is useful across the board from recruit all the way up to senior man? Phil Jose: I you know the probably the easiest thing there is to just master the basics of the of the of what you're assigned to do right now. you know, thinking out of the box, you got to be able to think in the box where you can think out of the box, right? And as you master skill sets, then pursue the next skill set and recognize that ever everything we do has a skill set that's required. You know, being a company officer has a different skill set. You know, a lot of those are going to be mental skills, not necessarily physical skills, but if you're in a truck, it's a different skill set than if you're in a engine if you have to do both or you get the opportunity to do both then you need to I mean that's a lot of things to maintain a high level of technical competence Right. I mean think about a an F-1 pit crew, like if you're the Jack Man, that's what you do Yeah. You don't also do tire changes and fill fuel tanks and right like you're not doing all you're you're doing that one thing so that they can get you know four tires and a full tank of gas in 2. 6 seconds. And that's the way it is. And so if you whatever it is that your your endeavor is now master the basics of that area of function so that you can so that your so that your mental load to do whatever task it is is open so you can Notice what's happening, you can think about what's happening, you can recognize the people operating around you, you can hear what's going on on the radio.

Phil Jose: There's a lot of stuff going on beyond just the physical skills of putting up a ladder, forcing a door, stretching and operating a line. And you know the the being good at those things individually and the next level, right? When you're a proby You better be good at getting out of drill school. Corley: That's very important. That's the first obstacle for sure. Phil Jose: So you don't you don't need to worry about size ups and and you know like pre-fire plans or whatever, right? Like, you know, I'm just saying like in Seattle, like we're not spending a lot of time on size. That's for probies. We used to we used to include in recruit school, we used to include driving school We don't even do that anymore because that's a profession within a profession. Right? So why are we training recruits to pump? Like they're not gonna they're not gonna pump for at least a year. We got time to teach them that. Let's teach them how to stretch hose and force doors and put up ladders and search hallways. Like let's teach them that stuff Because they can be doing that stuff on day one. Corley: Right. And you're saying there is a wide variety of skills that people need to know. You're not saying be like the Jack Man. and only focus on the jack skill. You're not saying that.

Speaker 1: No. Corley: You're not saying single master. You're saying identify those basics, those basic blocking and tackling if we're talking about football. and master those, whatever those may be in your department, because there are people that man quints, man ladders, man engines, cross staff them, and you got to know the full gamut. But master those is what you're saying. Yes? Phil Jose: Yeah, identify what those are and master those skills. And master both the physical skills and the kindness skills. And you know there's but so can it be too simple i don't know is it too i would i just always ask is it too complicated Can we make it more simple? If we make it more simple and we train on it more and we do it more, then we're gonna be better at it. And and you know there was a lot of things that I was training on for a long time that we were terrible at And then I was terrible at. And then I taught people terribly. Terribly, right? Because I just didn't know any better. You know, but as you grow, as you move, as the profession, as you As you have people who focus on a single task and create some really strong basic methodologies in that task, you know, gap set force, somebody came up with that. Right? I don't know who that was, but I've heard a lot, right? and so yeah, just Figure out what the basics are and focus on those. And if you decide that you want to do the next thing, that's fine too. Figure out what those skills are and add those to your repertoire and make You know, that's what one of the things I think that makes firefighting so great is like you know my knowledge base is an inch wide and a mile deep. I don't know a lot of things about a lot of other things And certainly I'm losing I'm losing the I'm not on the tip of the spear. I'm not my knife edge is not sharp if I was to go back to that technical stuff, but You know, I I think it was pretty reasonable at the time I was doing it on a res regular basis.

Corley: Right on. No, makes it makes sense. Now I want to move, I'm going to pivot towards Because there's a lot of questions on, you know, people are asking about different staffing models and what if you only have two on the engine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And and what Phil is saying is identify those things that are your basics, whatever your basics may look like. And that's a wide variety of things across the American Fire Service. across the many different volunteer combination career staffing models that exist, but identify them and be good at them. And so I'm paraphrasing Phil there, but I'm going to move on to war fighting because Man, I'm excited about the topic. And I want you to, I'll just lead off with a very broad question, which is explain tactical decision games or the war gaming. I keep saying war fighting, I'm sorry, war gaming, and why they are beneficial. And that's a very broad, you know, launching pad for you. Phil Jose: Yeah, so tactical decision games are really just if they're base, they're a pen and pencil exercise. Take a whiteboard in the fire station beenery and you know draw a street on it with an intersection hydrants if you got them. and draw a two-story house and put a fire in a bedroom and say hey you're gonna be first in and what are you gonna do? And you want to practice the skills like doing radio is one of the skill sets. So Corey, I think that people are people sometimes think that's an easy skill set, but thinking of transmitting thinking of what the message is and transmitting it in a cohesive act timely relevant accurate way without being overly verbore verbose is is a skill and you have to practice it. So you're first in, here's assign your crew, assign the next crew. Now let's talk about it. And you can go everything from, you know, I have I have an exercise I do with just apparatus positioning. Like you don't you only know that it's a two-story house mid-block But let's talk about where we're going to position the apparatus, how we're going to stretch the supply host, what each member of the crew is going to do Because some there there's some very simple things that if you don't think about it, like the if the in Seattle typically the first engine would go to the the building, right?

Phil Jose: The the the house that's on fire. Well there's positioning within that. Like do you if you know the direction the truck's coming from Do you stop short? Do you pull past? How far do you pull past? What's the based on the size of the house? What's the maximum distance? What's the standard distance you'd like to pull past? Something like 10 the tailboard tenant to fifteen feet past the far side of the house, right? That's sort of a standard working range. But given the size of the house, what's the maximum that you control pass is still have your standard pre-connect length hit every every corner of the building on the maximum floor, right? Those sorts of things And then if you think about the second engine, do they do they if they're let's let's have them stop at the hydrant, but do they turn onto the block? Well now their tailboard is pointed away from the first engine. Right, so to get the hose between the two rigs now becomes more complicated than if instead of pulling onto the block behind, they pulled they pulled on the on the neck on the street so that they were 90 degrees to the to the stretch. Now the hose coming off the rig instead of having to go 180 to go to the front, it only has to come 90 To get down the street to the first and engine, right? So where are they gonna position? How are they gonna position? Why are they gonna position that way What are the different ways that we can work that out? And then to move into that mix, put the truck. Like where where do you want to position the truck? If you have a truck apparatus like we did in Seattle, so this is something we want to. have a way that we do things and that is it's not going to be the same because all we have to do is change the arrival order And it complicates the decision making there. And these are those are about the most simple decisions you can think of for arriving at a fire scene. I I'm just telling you, like you if you change up the arrival order and and we're in in the instructor doesn't do it. You just you just have the people who were there, the the one company or two companies or whoever draw on a they just draw they go here's how I'm gonna do it they solve the they solve the problem for themselves and then one of those solutions gets put up on the board that everybody can see and then you ask questions To get them to explain their reasoning behind why they put the rig there.

Phil Jose: People will often say, yeah, I'm gonna put position the rig just past the billing. Okay, how far past the billing Well about 30 feet. Why 30 feet? Like why is that like you're I understand you're estimating, but give me the rationale beneath that, right? So there's all this tacit knowledge that they have in their head that they're using to make these decisions, but they're they it's you have to sort of draw it out of them. They're not great to say, oh But once you get the the sense down of so whoever's running the thing can't just have a solution in their head that they're They're saying, oh, you parked that rig in the wrong place because I want to park it over here. Like you don't get to pick, man. The person who's solving the problem gets to pick Corley: How let me let me let me dig in real quick here because there's a lot of information coming on this, a lot, right? And and and and almost like we talked about earlier to you, it's very this is yeah, it doesn't take anything. But are you doing this in a like you set this up, you have the whiteboard. You have a do you use a YouTube video? Do you use a steel picture? What what typically what do you like to use?

Phil Jose: I would say yes to all those. So you can do everything but from just drawing Okay with your markers to having a picture like or or just drawing the scene and saying, you know, here's where our house is on this block, right? And then have a picture of a house that you Stick to the board. So okay, you're pulling in right now and bang, this is what you see. What do you do? Corley: And you start with radio traffic initially, like yeah, radio traffic and orders, right? Phil Jose: It so if if giving radio is part of the part of what the person does which most of my training was company officer training right you know the second half of my career right so talking on the radio is important and giving orders is important. So let's say you're giving directives to the second engine. You you have a thing that you want them to do. But once you give the order They actually get to choose what they do based on what they interpret your order to be. So one of one of the areas that there's almost whenever I work with the fire department, there's almost always some disconnect between what the first arriving engine officer, the order that they give, and what they think is going to happen. And what this if I just take I say to the second and just say based on his order, you tell me what you're gonna do And sometimes those are tight, but sometimes they're not that tight.

Corley: Very ambiguous. Phil Jose: Right? And so we need that to be tight. Sure. We need either to satisfy the language, and so it's a at its base, it's a pen and pencil exercise. maybe use a whiteboard. You could if you got a if you got a A TV right there, sure. Just use any first end fireground video, right? And say when when they see the video, this is when you're arriving at the location You can brief them ahead of time, right? So you're trying to set you you want to the briefing part, you want them to have the information that they would normally have. Corley: Normally have. Phil Jose: Yeah, so if I took any address in your district, you would probably have a pretty good idea oh this oh that neighborhood is a house houses that were built between nineteen sixty and nineteen seventy five there's a mix of one and two story houses there's hybrids every five feet right it's the bird streets like you know they're all named from birds or they're all named from trees or like that sort of thing like there's a there's a fairly big piece of tacit knowledge that you would have just from the address of the building that you're going to or the area of the city, that sort of thing. So what what you want to do is get them in the mindset that they are going to this fire And then when they show up, yeah, you can just draw a fire in your building with a red marker. You could put a picture up there. You can steal a cover of Fire Engineering Magazine and say, bam, throw it on the table. Here's the fire that you're arriving. So when they arrive at, you give them some time, maybe 30 seconds, maybe a minute, to do each person develops their own plan. Right? Whether they're all company officers or not, they if if you're if you're saying, hey, each person developed a plan for this problem Then you pick one of those people and say, okay, tell me your plan. Like give me your give me your size up, give me your orders for the second unit. And then we put that plan on the board and we just talk about it. What are the strengths of the plan? What are the weaknesses of the plan? What are the things about your plan that I don't understand?

Phil Jose: Tell me why the rig is parked here. Tell me why the second engine is positioned like this. Tell me the thinking that underlies this. And then, you know, after, you know, when it when you feel that discussion start to wane, you just wipe the board off, go to some other person that's in the room and have them start right from the beginning. as if they just arrived at the event. And then everybody's getting some radio time, everybody's having to think you know, you you find these times when people gave orders and then they weren't the outcome was not what they expected. True, sure. That gives us that gives us some stuff to work on. Like not necessarily in the TDG, although it wouldn't be bad to say, hey, like, okay, rephrase your order. Based on what he what happened, let's go back and have you give that order again. Think about how you're gonna phrase it so that you get the outcome that you want without making it a novella. Because right it can't it can't be fifty it can't be two minutes long. Corley: It's gotta be Hopefully, hopefully not story time, right. Phil Jose: So we're we're we're illuminating tacit knowledge, right? We're revealing tacit knowledge that people have.

Corley: were trans they are doing this in front of each other everybody peers all the peers are in there talking about it in front of each other was that now now that's something that can be terrifying to people who haven't done it And how do you overcome that? Is it strictly something you have to put the sets and reps in to build the trust? Or I mean coming in as an outside instructor is probably a little easier because you get to be the authority. But I'm talking about if someone wanted to try and implement this in their department Go ahead. Phil Jose: Yeah, so and that's what the book's really about. So it's it's the book sort of explains the process that you have to go through and you have to you have to start at your level, you have to start with people that you already have relationships with. I recommend finding one or two other people who are interested in pursuing training in this manner. And yeah you're gonna have it's As you know, and probably most of the most of your audience has some experience training people, right? You have to be able to manage a group. You have to be able to get people to to trust what you say, to to if you they they have to bel they have to believe that you have their best interests at heart, right? Some of the One of the things I'm doing right now is like correlating the skills to be a good facilitator, to be a good teacher, right? A good teacher who isn't just saying the answer to the test question is A, right?

Corley: Like when you see this question, mark down this. Phil Jose: Yeah, you're actually trying to develop the way that people think, the way they decide. Like you're you're actively engaging, you know. with them in a way that that is going to produce better outcomes from their from the from their brain, right? Not just from their physical skills. Although there there's some areas of physical skills you can do this too. Those skills to be able to do that are they cross over almost directly to everything that a leadership program would say you know, trustworthy forward thinking, able to hold two different ideas in your head at the same time. Okay. you know, treating people with dignity and respect, being open to new ideas, like These skills transfer over pretty dramatically. So yeah, start with a simple exercise, but put people on the hot seat. It's okay if people feel pressure. Why? Because that's part of what we do on the fire ground is feel pressure. And you don't have to, you what you capture beautifully, Corley is that they're gonna feel pressure. This idea that you have to artificially create pressure, like you put people in front of their peers, like they already feel pressure. And if you put people in a group where they don't know anybody Like, you know, I have students from a bunch of different agencies and maybe there's a few of their peers there. Like they're they they don't want to be the first one out of the gate. And if if you're like what I'm doing like a full eight hour day, like if I s if I smash a person on the first exercise If I just smash them into the ground because I want to demonstrate my ego, like nobody else is going to participate all this.

Speaker 1: Destroy the rest of the day. Phil Jose: It's going to be a long, long day, right? So yeah, but I I don't want to minimize, and there there's a lot of language in the that talks about how you how you do this and and you this is a skill set right so we talked before about like you have to develop this skill set And if you have somebody else to develop it with you or even a small team of people, what's going to happen if you get good at doing tactical decision games? is you're going to produce excellence. You're going to produce excellent training and people are going to seek you out. Now you may not get ever get any official recognition. The bosses may never come on board. Just do good work, man. Just keep doing good work. And if but you have to recognize that you know it might be hard. Not believe it or not, not every place that every firefighter works has a highly supportive forward thinking, open and dynamic culture that is looking for change. Like some some firefighters don't Don't work there. You know? In some fire departments there's a little bit of punitive leadership. There's all these sorts of things. Well then don't ask that guy to support your plan But if you're if you have an opportunity to deliver training, just become make tactical decision games part of that package and try to be good at them. And trust me, there's a reason these things have been around, right? There's a reason these things have been around for centuries. Right? It's not because they're ineffective, but they it is a difficult skill set to learn and particularly if you're within an agency that does not have the right leadership philosophy to support you.

Corley: Sure. No. And and I think you describe most people th feel like you describe their fire department, but I got a question right on right in what we're talking about here, and it comes from Rob Effen Fisher. He's celebrating his new career, and he took Jody out for dinner tonight. And so he's not watching live, which he, you know, he actually sent me this question or sent Sam this question so that I would make sure to ask it. He wants to know how can tactical decision games Be used as a mentorship tool to intentionally transfer tactical judgment, pattern recognition, and decision-making experience from senior officers to the next generation before they ever sit in the command seat. Phil Jose: Yeah, and that's that's really what tactical decision games are built for, right? So what Rob is describing in there is tacit knowledge, the things that experts have That they don't even realize they have, right? they don't they they make decisions at incident scenes or in tough situations based on their training and their experience. And everybody, that's what everybody does, right? Now if they have more training and more experience and they've they are a student of the game and they put in their time and do these sorts of things, then what you're looking for is ways to extract Extract the information from the 25-year driver, like you know, we we have a group of drivers, we give them a tactical decision game, you know, the thing is run by drivers You're you take, you know, your 25-year guy goes, no, I understand why I mean I I I I support the plan that you put on the board and I understand why you think it will work and it will probably work most of the time but here's some areas where i've seen this sort of endeavor fail And so you go, and then everybody else in the room goes, bam, right? They're just like like their their ears are open because that that expertise is hard-earned. Right? No, absolutely. So but the instructor has to give the instructor can't can't be the the one going oh that's a terrible plan. Let's get a different plan, right? Wait, right. Even when you get terrible plans on the board, there's a skill set.

Corley: That was one of my next questions. Is what happens when someone Someone throws out one that's that's a I'll let you finish your point, but I do want to follow up on that. Phil Jose: Yeah. Yeah. So that's the that's the skill set you're looking to develop is the ability to know When when someone gives an answer or talks about something, for you to be able to go, tell me more about that. That sounds very interesting. And the the quandary comes because we're so it's not just our training, but our training is I'll just talk about fire department training right here's here's our top here's our learning object here's our five learning objectives if I get a group of drivers in the room And we start talking about driver stuff, and they tell, they say something, I go, ah man, that that's interesting. I don't care if it's one of the learning objectives Right. If I'm extracting gold, I don't I don't care if it's on the map. Right. Right. Right. It just doesn't matter. And but but instructors, especially instructors who who been in and around rigid systems like they go, oh my god, we're we're not three minutes in and we've only covered one learning objective. Like So like did did are you extracting gold? Yes, then the learning objectives are not that they don't matter Right now, is it a different type of training? Yes. But can we can we get that expertise out of people and into the next group and then create a tighter pattern of operations across the entire organization. You can if you have the right leadership and the right positions across the entire organization. Sure, sure. Can you can you can you create a an environment near where you operate that your crew understands when I say X, I mean X. Don't interpret it as Y. I was I was working with one of the I had a guy in one of my TDGs. He started doing TDGs on his own in his organization. It's a fire department organization that goes vertical a lot, a lot of apartment buildings in their city. And within about a week they discovered that they had 30 different ways of talking about like six or seven different evolutions for how to go vertical. Well you take 30 ways of talking about seven different things.

Phil Jose: You got two over 200 Way to complicate, right? So within a couple of months, they was like, okay, what are the three ways we're gonna do this? And what are we gonna call it? Right? So you it it's it's One of the things that's hard is to say, oh, look at all these things that can happen. But you have to start by Reading something about TDGs. Now my book's not even out there, but there's stuff online about how to facilitate what there's there's one, there's a book called It's by John Schmidt. It's military TDGs, but it's look man, it's a map and some icons on a map, and then there's some objectives. It's it's not hard for a fire service trainer to live at that and go okay oh I can make this a fire ground right instead of tanks and and troops I can put in engines and trucks and you know I figure it out right and you're gonna be terrible at it Right? You're really, really, really gonna suck when you first start. Okay, get better. Right? But but you gotta start. No. And the old the only way to get better is to both design tactical decision games. and deliver tactical decision games. And then with any luck, you have somebody else that's going to be around that is willing to watch you deliver them and then give you learn from what you do. And give you feedback on your methodology. Nice. And that's you if you can do that with one or two people in a station or between two stations on the same shift, you can get started and you don't need anybody's permission. You don't have to ask anybody, you don't need any resources from anybody, you just get started.

Corley: No, that's beautiful. No, and yeah, there's so much to unpack in that answer that I want to touch on, hey, objective-based training. Do you think a lot of times that the instructor's so unsure of what they're being I don't want to say forced, but what they're tasked with teaching that they just have to rely on a curriculum's objectives and and if it gets outside of that, they're just like, okay, I don't know what to do. Phil Jose: Yeah, but that's a different type. I would say that's a different type of training. Yeah. Corley: So if I'm training We're not talking about T VGs, yeah. Just the just the just the objective-based and then and I was talking about that extracting the gold And when the when the gold comes along and they're like, wait, I don't know what to do with this because we're not on the plan right now. Phil Jose: Yeah, and and if you're if you're teaching doctrine, right, if if the people have to leave the course and know that A, B, C, D, E, and they have to know that information, even if it's new tactical information. Like if if you're like our department changed the way that we did baseball buyers We we used to go in on the floor above, go down the stairs, we started attack at grade, right? From the seaside door or through the windows or whatever in the basement, like direct attack on the fire in the basement, not going in floor one. and down the stairs. When we first started when we when that decision got made, which was a lot of angst and you know hand holding and all that stuff But once the man upstairs decided this is the direction we're going to go, the first thing is to go in and go, hey, we're changing the way we do basement fires. And here's how we're going to do them Right? I'm not we're not ask we're not asking for your opinion about this method versus that method. We're saying here's our doctrine to saying this is the way we're gonna do business

Corley: Right. Phil Jose: Yeah, so like okay, we're gonna move forward. So we we start with that, and then we start doing some TDGs that are directed, like, hey, we're exercising this policy. So people know going in that that that the radio stuff is going to be different for them and they're going to have to practice it and they're going to have to say they're going to direct attack on the basement instead of going in 4-1, right? Like, like you're you're you're training to the policy, right? But at some point in time, you gotta just let them show up at a house fire that happens to also be a basement fire. And instead of going, okay, we want you to follow the policy, just let them do their thing. And then If it's not according to the directives, then the first thing is why? You have to be curious. Like they they might have a very, very compelling reason that they did the action that they took. They may have not identified it as a basement part Corley: Sure. Phil Jose: And by doing that, if in fact they they've just gone oh if they just go oh I don't agree with that policy so I'm not gonna follow it right we have a we have a different problem on our sure sure Okay. But if we go in there going, hey, you know, if if I put people under time pressure and emotional pressure, the decisions that they're gonna make I should anticipate that they would make the same exact decision on the fire ground at 3 o'clock in the morning given the same set of circumstances. They're directly correlated. Right. And so then I gotta figure out why. Now if if it sometimes I'll just go, oh my god, I forgot. I haven't been to a basement fire since last year when we had that training and I just forgot. Okay, just back, just back it up. Have them start over. Eras the whiteboard, start over, back to the foot valve. Right back through it again.

Corley: Right, we're right back to the foot valve on the hydrant. Phil Jose: Yep, yep, they d they just don't they they just went right you know and who knows like you know maybe they have maybe they You know, maybe they were gone on maternity and paternity leave for three months while you were doing that training and they never got the I mean they read the memo, but they never got the no anything but lock it in Right. And so it you but you have to come out out with that curiosity. And I'm not saying that you'll never end up with somebody who is just highly agenda driven and difficult and hard to manage. But again, we're back to the leadership skills necessary to be a good instructor. And and Corley have also done this where I mean we did Chiefs Mayday training and you want to talk about pressure. We We debriefed the chief. So when we were doing the training, we had between eight and twelve company officers there to function to run the you know to run the event, right, to talk on the radio and And answer the radio and sort of give that realism, even though we were just using sims, we were using real people to answer on the radio and to check in at the command post and to do those sorts of things. Well, we are debriefing the Chiefs with the company officers in the road, right? So when they're explaining their and and they were honestly when we first started doing mainday training, very often they were not very successful. Well they didn't have any reps, man. Right, right. Like in honestly, The chief officers did have some of them, not not very many of them, but some of them had a real problem with that They're like, hey, I cannot my people cannot see me fail. And it's like, look, man, your people are seeing you try to get better And if you come at it with the right approach, now we also we did two debriefs. One were we had two scenarios. So one we would have the company officers in there And we only had a couple of people that were doing those debriefs, and I was one of them. and we were careful to to not get too deep into some of the nitty-gritty just for those purposes.

Phil Jose: But when it when when we did the second evolution we sent all the company officers home Then we would get really deep into some stuff and and hurt people's feelings and look at like we're we're the chief officers in this organization. If you're gonna get your feelings hurt because You had a bad a bad episode of training at Mayday training. I don't know how to deal I don't know how to to make you feel better other than You have to get better. Right. That's all that matters. Are you going to even marginally improve from this? Or are you gonna are you gonna go, hey, that's not for me and I'm not gonna participate? Well Okay, then you're not gonna then when you have a Mayday, you're not gonna be very good at it. Right. And nobody and nobody's getting enough sets. I mean maybe maybe a couple FDNY guys are getting actual sets and reps at Maydays, but thank God the rest of us aren't. Corley: No, it's true. Yeah. Phil Jose: There's one thing you don't want to have a lot of real-world reps on, is that all the stuff that you're asking though, Coraline, all these things that people are asking, these are all areas that require leadership traits, some ability to be delicate, but an inquisitive mind who's willing to ask questions and say okay when I first start doing this it's not gonna be easy but it's going to be valuable right it's going to be valuable training and the better I get at it the more valuable it becomes. Because you get sets and reps at designing a tactical decision game and delivering a tactical decision game. And so y you'll get better.

Corley: No, and I it's like the first time it was Arkansas and I've talked about you before we went live, I talked about this briefly because I came to you and I was like, man, I got I got because I've I'd been invited to to attend some your YouTube training And I was like, man, I have this great plan I really want to talk to you about. And I said, I want to do this with my crews. I want to take them in there. And if they make this choice, then I then I put up these set of pictures. And I then if they make this choice, it goes this direction. And then this happens And you were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes, pump the brakes. And you told me, you gave me some of the best advice ever. You said just just get a picture, you know, and just start with what are you gonna do? And just have the discussion. And we didn't talk about it long, so you didn't you didn't get to go into great depth, but just that that brief, I can still remember the Mexican restaurant we were sitting at when you gave me that advice. And just that brief interaction completely changed the war gaming that we're that we did from that point forward. I didn't even call it that at the time, but just the tactical decision scenarios and completely changed it. And because I was trying to do these elaborate algorithm, everything, every every complexity. That was it. I have a question coming at you from Young Officers on Fire. I'm assuming it's R S, Ryan Sellick. And he says, Chief Jose, regarding decision making, how do you switch from a recognized pattern in your RPD to a surprise variable? Maybe a variable you don't have a slide for. And how do we train for that

Phil Jose: Yeah, and that's part of part of that's a train wide, right? But you're never you're never gonna get all the variables in there And so if you look at RPD, there's actually so that's all Gary Klein stuff, and if I'm sure most of most if not all of your audience is familiar with that, but Let's just clarify that for some reason. What's RPD? Well recognition prime decision making comes from your client. So what you want to create is a very a very broad group of things that you can simple match. So the first thing in Gary's arsenal is the simple match. where The situation exactly matches what you do on a daily basis. And so there's it's very, very easy to understand what the decisions are and you implement them very, very quickly to a high degree of confidence And then there's the next one would be so we can use the same example, right? So standard is standard house fire, two bedrooms on fire on floor number two. Instant three quarter line through the front door, no problem. Right? You've got the staffing to do it. Like if you had less staffing, maybe it would be an exterior attack, but whatever, whatever that simple problem is, right? Sure, sure and so then we can say, okay, what's the next thing? Is when the the next one is when I come up with a match in my head. So every time you come up, every time you see a problem in in your mind in tenths of seconds that you don't even recognize, you're matching the problem to a to a pattern solution And if you have a nice clean match, then you just implement. Don't think about it. It just you just go. But if they're just slightly off kilter, right? So let's say the a similar fire, the building is the same. The similar file you get there you think inch and three quarter, but then you go that's probably I'll stretch at two and a half Right, so so it the the pattern wasn't quite there, so you just changed you just changed a little bit about the plan and every time you look at that Your mind tries to make the match. Is it close enough? Is it close enough to be effective? Because it's you know once you get past simple match, it's never going to be perfect Right.

Phil Jose: But then let's say you get to the next part and you go, I don't have enough water to do something about this problem in the in the next minute or so, like the amount of water I have is not sufficient to this problem. Right. I've never been to something like this. Then it believe it or not, you're gonna make it up. You're gonna go well, let's try DECA. Like you know, and then you're gonna try it because like You can't, that's the best option you can think of right now. And it may or may not work. Like it's It that's that's the interesting thing when you get start to get to outlier so so first by doing tactical decision games on a regular basis you're gonna to build the the number of patterns that people have so they they're less likely to encompass outliers. But then when you f when you have an outlier, you still have to make a decision. And you you do the best you can and then you're gonna iterate, right? So you're gonna And if you go, whoa, that's not working, okay, let's figure out what is going to work. And so But you have to take action, right? I mean the the best story I've ever heard of this in the Fire Pearl was I was watching and I wish I could remember the guy's name is first in at the Boston Marathon bomb And hopefully your audience understands like being on the backside of the Yerkey's Dotson curve where you know you're just overwhelmed and you can't make decisions. Right? Well, we do talk about breath control and some of those things to bring you back into the ability. Well he he talks about coming around the corner and like No nobody's ever seen that. There's no nobody's ever seen that. And there's a he talks about in his class, he talks about a period of time where he could not he could not decide what to do. He just couldn't decide what to do. Now was it tenths of seconds? Was it seconds? Like who who knows for sure? But eventually said, well, let's do this, right? So they start solving the problem. They start solving the problem and they have a lot of resources, so you know other decision makers and more help and and you start getting better at solving the problem, right?

Phil Jose: And so was the ex was the first action the exact best action at the time? No. And that's that's that's another piece of the puzzle, and we can get into that next. But I one of the first fires I went to was a battalion chief. It was terrible. It was the north end of the city, I was in the south end. the there was a legitimate hazmat going on at the university. They were evacuating a dormitory So, you know, a a huge number of assets out there. The the deputy was out there, like all the supporting cast of characters, and this area where we had the house fire was a reasonably close proximity. So none of the first companies were even available. Like they they hadn't even done move-ups yet. That's how close these two events happened. Right. So When but when the first arriving engine's got an acting officer who is was in our assistant, like he's doing the best he can, but he was not an acting officer who had taken the test, was getting ready for promotion, had prepared. He just happened to be riding up that day. He didn't even like acting and s but he had to because he was the senior man that wasn't the driver. Right. That's the system as it used to be. And he did the best he could, but by the time I got there there were like it was a it was a shit show, Corley. Right, right. There were no resources ordered, all the resources were deployed, and we were losing badly. And like I was there for like a minute and a half and I was like, I have to abandon the building. I have to abandon the building. Like there's like people aren't answered, they they sent us on the wrong radio channel to begin with, and everybody was supposed to switch. Like it's just a litany, right, of errors. And they're just errors, though there's nobody's doing anything malicious. It's like I have to aband I have to abandon the building. There's no choice in my mind. I can't I cannot think of a way to solve this problem. I just can't I can't think of a way. If I have resources, maybe I could think away but I had resources available so then I pop the abandoned building and the first thing that happens after the radio tones go down from the abandoned building effort and the air horns are still going off is hey we have emergency button activation okay like I hope it's not real.

Phil Jose: Because I have there's nothing at all, but it's like yeah. There's nothing I can do about it. And So, I mean that was one of the things that was like, holy shit, maybe chief officers should have some maybe training. You know, crazy of me to think that, but that's the genesis of the training that we're gonna do. Corley: That's where it came from, right Right. Phil Jose: But the reality is you're you're going to do the best you can and recognize that that it may be an outlier. And re in some of these outlier events The fire department, your only role there is to separate tragedy from abject failure. If it can only be a tragedy, then we'll consider that a success. And we very rarely have abject failures in the fire surface. Because we have so many good people doing so much good work with the right mental with the they're they're trying to do the right thing. Corley: Right. They prevent the tragedy. Phil Jose: Yes Right? And so you're gonna intervene as positively as possible, but you just there's there's zero you want your your matches to be close And that's why you want to train wide and you want to understand all these things, but the reality is that the situation can just be outside of your area of expertise. Right.

Corley: Now do you think TDGs are the best way to improve your RPD, your Rolodex? Oh outside of actual experience Of course. I mean the actual fires. Phil Jose: Yeah, and I wouldn't even say that I would say a well-run TDG is better than a fire without any Reflection. Oh, okay. Okay. If if you just it maybe there's very, very few people in the American Fire Service that are going to enough fires. that without some sort of reflection about what you did, how it worked, what did you see, what did you hear, like some of that those reflection skills that you'll build by doing TDGs that, you know, I I I can't tell you, you know, is it did you learn much? I don't know. Right? You learned what you learned, but did you learn what anybody else learned from that fire? Because there was a lot of learning that happened for sure. And certainly real ex real experience is the best teacher A close second is TGs. I mean I've had I've Even when you're not great at it. Assuming that you're not poking people in the eye on purpose, they're gonna be good you can get better. but yeah I I think I I wouldn't be surprised if the the crossover is Two or three weeks later, if you saw that same situation that you saw that you experienced in the TDG, your mind will not remember it as training, it will remember it as real from before You'll implement based on the fact that you your mind believes that you've been to this fire before because this you've seen it before You may not have actually seen it before, but that's what all training is, right? Is is just getting you to the first implementation of whatever skill it is And then you go, okay, I have one, I have one rep. And and there's some situations, you know, the further the further you get up in the decision-making hierarchy of an organization, the more Stuff that you're gonna get to that you that you have no experience in right or very little experience in you know and so that that ability to go okay This'll probably work. Let's try this. Right. Right. And and that's what, like honestly, as a chief officer, that's what like you talk about like our this this is where subject matter experts become just invaluable.

Phil Jose: Like when I would go to rope rescues, I need the I need the head of the rescue to tell me what his plan is I have zero idea whether it's gonna work, but I can I can tell you that he's got a plan and he's gonna implement it. And typically my my officers are when they're briefing the plan to me. are giving me the plan B. They're saying, hey, we think this is going to work best, but if it starts at work, we're going to do this. Cool, go to work. Right? Now you go Do I understand everything about what they're gonna do? No, not a chance. Why? Because they're subject matter experts. Right. Same with the Hazmat plan. Like look, Chief, here's here's our plan. Okay You are a subject matter expert and you just told me what the plan is. Great. I'm in support of your plan. I might have a question or two, not very often that I would, because I'm I'm getting enough experience going to the training with those people. people to understand that they they develop good plans. Right. And and I have experience with them developing good plans. So I don't have to make a plan because they know how to make it.

Corley: And it's that trust and that relationship from those sets and reps. And I love that. So I'm gonna encapsulate something here and see if you approve of what I'm saying. The TDGs doing them is their own value because you get better at them. Yep. And I was gonna say something. I got the main benefit comes from I I don't want to put it that main benefit, but a huge benefit comes from reviewing the tactical decision game after it's over or the decisions that we're talking about even before it's over, but the review is where a lot of the value comes from Phil Jose: Yeah, so that would be the guided reflection, right? So we put we we describe, we brief the problem, we have people solve the problem individually. then they one person sort of gives their plans for us to put on the board and then we reflect on it. We have guided reflection. We talk about it. What are the strengths of the plan? What are the weaknesses of the plan? What will be the things that we see or hear that will tell us that this plan is working What are the things that we can identify that will tell us this plan is not working? What are the most likely areas where this plan will fail? What are the markers of success? Like You know, one of the things like for for when an anti company goes through a door, I want to see the line moving. Moving, yeah, bumping forward. It has to move. Oh yeah. Right? But i if it's if it's sitting still and things aren't getting better, we're not winning.

Corley: Yeah, no, that's I don't know if I learned that in your class or not, but that's something that's always I want to see the line moving, I want to watch the roof line Phil Jose: But but if you if you've never been a chief officer and you've never been in in charge of something like that, you've never been in a position to watch that occur Right? And you can see from lines operating on the ground whether or not whether or not they're open or closed. Like or they're they're working, you know, like you can you can tell now you also will see things happen in the smoke itself if they're being effective but Their effectiveness is not tied to whether they're operating. They could be operating ineffectively. Corley: Sure. Phil Jose: Or they could be not operating Right, all those things are true, and you gotta have some ideas in your head about when you're on the fire ground, Like I said a company to do a forcible entry on this on the Charlie side I can have a little clock in my head about and not not a stopwatch but some sort of idea later like Why didn't I hear from them yet? Sure. Shouldn't those doors be open by now? Like and then that reads into the company officer, right? Like, hey Why aren't you you know like call them on the radio like hey how's it going back there? Well we're having trouble Okay we'll talk about this later but maybe as soon as you recognize you were having trouble you could have told Let me know yeah Right? And and it's not because they're it's because they're they're working so hard to do the right thing. But if if they haven't experienced a situation where they get a chance where they get a chance with some psychological safety and somebody's not going to beat him upside the head to go, hey, I I really struggled on a door like that. How how do we solve that problem? It's like, well One of the ways would be we're gonna do doors more too. Sometimes you're just gonna have hard doors. Right. And when you have a hard door and it's slowing you down more than you think it should Let let the next level in the chain of command know because there's a lot a lot might be riding on getting that door open

Corley: No, absolutely. No, no, you're good. I said the expectation you have up front, a lot could be hinged on thinking and that assumption that that's that door is now open Phil Jose: Yeah, and and you have to develop those skills and that's one of the hard things as you move like I have to have a pretty good working knowledge of how doors get opened. Right? I have to develop that when I'm the person opening doors. And then I have to be able to translate that to some sort of time element when I move to the next level. And the only way to do that is to be on the training ground watching people do those things and participating in that drill So that I'm I'm building in my skill set the clock that it takes to understand if I assign a company to floor three to flow a hose line What's a reasonable amount of time and I'm not talking about a stopwatch again? I'm talking about understanding the rhythm and flow of your organization because if I send a company to do it, that's four people for me. But if ye if somebody else sent a company to do it, that would be two people for them. And that's gonna take a different amount of time And if I mean we we started at some point just saying, hey, like if we're gonna sign if we're gonna sign a a two and a half, we're gonna put two companies on it. Why? Because we don't want it to slow down We want fast advancement on the fire. And the way you do that is not to put two lines in operation with one crew each, is to put the right size lining in operation with the right number of people on it. But you only you only start finding these things out by exercising the ideas, the understanding and go wait a minute that's a really cool idea would be one thing but another side of that would be like that doesn't make very much sense to me like you're saying that you want to pull 100 feet past a house fire Let's go out on the street and see what's gonna happen when we do that. Like let's mark off 100B and like let's see if we can still reach with our pre-connect the two story houses that are in this neighborhood.

Phil Jose: It's a hundred feet. This house is set back, you know, 35 or 40 feet from the street. Like inside the house, that's only going to give us 70 feet of hose. Corley: Is that enough? Right. Phil Jose: Right? Like what we're talking about? Estimating stretches. Okay, well maybe this person just needs a little more development on like which we can do that outside of this TDG. I can just I can just what they're saying doesn't make sense to me. I'm I may not even ask them in that group I might go, hey, let's talk about that later. Let's let's let's let's let me come and individually see like What were you thinking there? Like explain that to me a little more in depth because you might have something that I don't understand or you you might have an incomplete picture of how the how we're operating as a team. Right? And those are all parts of the process that I mean I keep saying there's all these angles and and that's true. There there just is all these angles, but You can't see all the angles until you're in the machine. Corley: Right, right. One more question coming at you. kind of on I like this. it's Sam Smith Framer. He wants to know, is there a good program that can be used to take photos of my first do and add fire conditions to the photo? I feel like I have seen some. Do you have any recommendations or do you use anything like that?

Phil Jose: Yeah, I mean the so now what we're talking about is simple versus complex. And so Yes, like I think there's some you share like I at this point I don't actually even know what the programs are other than their names. Like I don't know which ones are free, which ones cost which ones have like i used to know all that stuff but if i'm gonna use a fire if i use a fire for a tactical decision game i fire fire online a picture or a video. I think you're hard pressed to say my houses, the houses in my district are so unique. that I cannot find a a fire in a house that's similar to the one that's at 426 Eisenhower Boulevard in my district, right? Like it's not and so Yes, I I think those tools exist. And with the stuff that I'm doing on Fire Engineering. com, we're using Fire Studio 4 There's a guy named Ted Mee. That's what he does. He's probably the best at that at that sim thing in the whole world, right? And he creates good sims, but sims are time suckers. They suck time that you could be using to actually deliver training to and and the buildings are not that unique. The fires are not that unique. They do not have to be exact matches. They just have to be close enough. Close enough to be effective. Right. And so I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying like you're you're I would say that the the sims very easily run down the idea of complexity. Because other than the I honestly even even when I'm doing chief officers in very complex situations The complexity of the decisions that have to get made is not a direct corollary to the complexity of the simulation software that you have. I can create very complex decisions for chief officers with eight seconds of video of a fire ground if I if I design the game properly If there's people already deployed to the hazard area, if there's if there's things happening before they arrive, which chief officers do, but I can do the same to company officers I can give them a very complex problem that if a company officer is deploying their company, giving orders to the second arriving engine and the first arriving ladder company, I'm going to tell you there's a lot of decisions getting made.

Phil Jose: And there's a lot of understanding there. And I would rather do that 40 times than once where we go, okay, these are the decisions you made. Now here's what the fire looks like subsequent to that. Now what's the next like getting to the next level of decision to me is going to provide a lot less value than starting with company officers for sure, than just having a new sim or a new scenario with a new building and a new person who gets to be first in I'd rather get 40, 100, like whatever that number is in relation to the amount of time it might make to build one sim. Corley: that you're gonna learn to control through multiple multiple stages and decision trees and everything. Yeah. And and the the value from the guided reflection on those hundred you know, is is yeah. And so, man, brother, we've covered a lot and a lot of great questions from the audience. When do you hope or propose or or plan for your book to be available for purchase. And I know there's a lot that's not in your control, but what's your what's your hope Phil Jose: Well, I would say the the book itself is basically done. I mean, I'm I'm sure there's editorial work that has to get done. I've I've sent it through my own series of peer reviewers and Because of of the network I have for the I have a a pretty significant group of people who are willing to read I can imagine feedback on that, right? So right now the the hold up is can we come to contract language with a publisher that is fair and equitable on both sides. And I I I'm not I'm not too worried that they're gonna money on it. But I do want to have some can some control of the messaging. And so I would hope, and as you know Corley, once you once you even get the book to where you say it's it's publishable, you're still talking about Six, eight, ten, twelve months. Oh yeah.

Corley: Oh yeah. Phil Jose: If we if if I can if I can get a contract anytime in the near future, I would hope that it would be ready by FDIC27. And hopefully earlier than that I've tried to keep the thing tight. It I tried to make it not a tone, right? So that'll be And once I didn't really want to announce it. I I started writing it probably eight or ten times before I got to this one where I was able to to get organized enough in my thinking to create a product that I think is going to be successful at helping individuals. Right. And so yeah, so if it's if it's 12 to 14 months from now, I'll be a super happy camper. and yeah. Corley: Blueful. Blue I can talk, I promise. Beautiful. So That takes me to book or books that you think firefighters should be reading. One of my favorite questions I ask, you've already mentioned Clauschwitz, you mentioned Gary Klein, and so I know Boyd. but book or books that you think firefighters should be reading doesn't have to be firefighter related, but I love asking this question. Phil Jose: Yeah, and if if you're even thinking about doing TDGs, I would read a book called On Being Certain

Corley: And being certain, okay. Phil Jose: Yeah, and and it explains like that like e You think you know things that you don't know and you might be very, very certain about them, but there's a like it explains how your brain works with all those sorts of things. And one of the things that you will have to give up or create, you will have to develop in yourself is is ability to understand, like, look figure out what what they're thinking. That's that's what's important in a tactical decision game. But I honestly think like not only have I read the book a couple times but I've given it away for a number of times too. Speaker 1: Okay, okay. Phil Jose: And not because I think people have ego problems or whatever. I've just found it very, very valuable in understanding that There's been a lot of times in my life, Corley, believe it or not, there's I've been wrong a couple of times. Yeah, truly. Truly, I've been wrong once or twice. And so on being certain, I think will help. To me, it's just a especially like if you're in public service. You know, having coming at things with a questioning with a questioning mindset I think is intrinsic to what we do

Corley: No, I love it. And the curiosity you mentioned earlier, you know, and how important that is to the TDG and the success of the TDG is the ability to say, remain curious. When when they say something off the wall and not just correct them into what you you know your paradigm and actually learn, you know, hopefully everybody learns from it. Like you said, getting together with your peers and staying curious is is a is a tough skill set Yeah. I love that. All right, which that takes us to one of my favorite things we do, and that is the five questions for firefighters. I don't remember which ones Rob got to ask you, so this is all new to me anyway. But this is the five questions for firefighters version 5. 0. There are no correct answers. There are only your opinions. And the points are arbitrary, passed out by me, with the help of the audience. So, Phil Joes, are you ready for the five questions for firefighters? Number one, you can do anything in the world except be a firefighter. What would you choose to be? Phil Jose: Oh man. I think I'd have to do something like a fighter pilot. Yeah. I might be too big to fit in that chat. You know, F1, F1 F1 pilot like driver F1 driver would be pretty cool too. Yeah. I could go for that Fighter pilot? Pick something hard. I mean is there prof is there is there professional snowboarding? I guess we can maybe do that I don't know.

Corley: I've got three answers. I'm just trying to figure out which one's your answer. Phil Jose: Yeah, I'd go for the you might as well go all the way to the fire pilot, man. Corley: I love it. Okay Fighter pilot max points. Easy max points. Phil Jose: But like eight, like in A6, like not one of those close combat deals. Corley: Intruder. Phil Jose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Corley: I love it. I love it. Number two, that's max points by the way. One for one. Fighter pilot max points. Number one, and that might be not I mean that might be the number one answer given by non that like by firefighters when they can't be firefighters So I don't know if Top Gun just runs, you know, the movie 1980 86, 84, 86. Anyway, runs in our blood. number two, it's Job Town. It's time. You're in route and responding. You think of the scene from backdraft where he slaps that cassette tape into that cassette deck. What song are you playing while in route? Phil Jose: Corey, this is good last time I talked about only rush, but I'm gonna tell you there's a band called High Fade, and you could play any for anything from the They're out of out of the UK and they're they're playing funk at a level that you cannot you just cannot comprehend the level at which they're playing funk, it is like it's it's they're they're so entertaining.

Corley: Do you have a song? Now the reason I asked for specificity specif So yeah, specifics is because there's a Spotify playlist and your song will be added. Phil Jose: Oh man, I'll have to send you which song. Literally, they're so new. They're playing small clubs They're I mean they're they're coming on a tour this summer, but they're they're playing like Numos in Seattle, which I think holds two hundred and fifty Corley: people. Okay. Phil Jose: yeah, so they're they're just who knows if they'll make it, but I discovered then there's there's a lot of I'm really have discovered this idea of new grunge which of course Grunge came from Seattle. this particular band just really caught my eye and I actually don't know the names of the songs because I just hear them in the background. I'm not like Nobody I don't have it there's not the disc jockey days where the dish and here's a new track from High Fade called right you're like unless you're looking at the screen when the music's playing, you got no idea what the name of the song is. Corley: High Fade is the band out of the UK and they're a new type of funk. All right. Number three, this a cold weekend at the station. Checks are done. Training is done. Cook is Cooking's done, it's in the crock pot. Everything's done for the day. So you're not being lazy, but you're in the day room. You're clicking through the TV, and there's that movie. And it don't matter where you click and it's there. You could be halfway through it, three quarters, but no matter what, wherever it's at, you finish that movie every time. What is that movie for you?

Phil Jose: 300. Corley: Oh, nice. Phil Jose: Yeah, especially that this Esparta scene, you know, like if you can get if you can get into the movie before that, that's pretty early in the film, right? But the other one is like the the we'll fight in the shade or oh you know I got this my knee my knee's got this injury I'd love to just but I can't get down on one knee for him It's a lot of good stuff in that movie. It's campy, but yeah, it's a good movie. Corley: No, I love 300, man. And the and the yeah, Thermopylae. Thermopylae, right? Yes Number four, max points for cold weekend and 300. Number four, on the clock. This is on the clock. If you go over no max points, if you go Talk after, anyway, one minute to answer your found for, I'm losing my articulation. Your people you would put on your Mount Rushmore. Phil Jose: Yeah, I put I put Tommy Brennan on there. you know, I consider him a personal friend and mentor. He he did a lot to help me when I first started going to FDIC and I'd already read all stuff, right? Like, you know, he was a god to me, but he was such a great man and so humble and Man, he asked good questions. John Norman's John Norman's gotta be on there, you know, the the the state of play is because I'm gonna I'm gonna throw Dave Rhodes up there. I think what he's doing right now. you know, my my heart tugs at me and says to put to say Bobby, but I I have to sort of go new generation and go. I think they've is doing David is doing good things with a mag and the culture and all sorts of things. And I I'm not I mean not to Bobby Didden because he he could easily be that Yeah, but the fourth one, I gotta put that future firefighter up there. I I think that the direction that we're going as as a as a industry is like got nothing but a bright future. I just anybody who says the firefighters of today are lesser than is it's in my mind it's just not painted

Corley: attention. Not paying attention. Phil Jose: And I I think that there's some there's gonna be some future state where I I think this you got one job that is not gonna be taken over by AI There's no way there you talk about trying to make things simple. Like there like you you cannot complex your way out of pushing the hallway or going through a window, you just can't do it, man. You gotta there's gotta be a human being doing that thing. And that human being is going to get better and better as the as our ability to train them, to develop them to give them the the mental and physical skills that they need to be successful. I just think the the fire service is just headed in such a great place. Corley: I love it. Future firefighter Tommy Brennan, John Norman, David Rhodes, and the future firefighter. That's the Mount Rushmore of the fire service, according to Phil Joe's, which takes us to the final question: Heavy fire and searchable space. Would you rather be assigned to the nozzle or first in on the VES? Phil Jose: I'm not a VES guy there. There's no. Like all my time on the truck, which I I spend a fair amount of time on trucks, but the the searching to me is just like the as fast as possible. Like I just I I don't think that there's any way around it. The the from the if we presume that those people are incapacitated when we arrive, we know that medically we have four minutes to get them to defend. care. Four minutes is not you are never, no fire department is ever gonna get to a consistent four minute primary search complete. It's just it's too tight a time frame And but I don't I don't think because we can't be perfect that we can't be excellent. And so if we can make that 420 or 5 minutes or 520 like Maybe there's a few that we can get out of there before four minutes up. We can make a difference and we don't actually know when that clock starts. We don't know if it started before we got here or 30 seconds after whatever. I just there's the the the idea of the search culture I think there is some risk if we go too far to not not having enough control of or knowledge of fire behavior as as a backstop to that activity.

Phil Jose: But again, you want to talk about decisions that you could train people to make how do you make the decision to break the glass? What are are you on the fire floor? Are you on the floor above? Are you is the door open? Is the door closed? Is the engine stretching or are they already in? Like there's a lot, like there's a lot of a lot of VEIS training, I would say that I've both participated in and seen There is not a decision-making element. People go launch mode from the time they leave the apparatus till they're in the window. And there are conditions under which you should probably not break the window. Corley: Yes. Phil Jose: Because when you break the window, man, it's on. I mean, top among those would be if it's a hoarder. Like you're not going to get in the window and you're not going to close the door. Corley: Right. Phil Jose: Like do something else that's going to help you search that place better. Right. But the the idea that there's not a decision to be made. Corley: No, it's a valid, it's a super valid point. And how how How awesome is it? Right on the topic we're talking about to take that to tactical decision games and play out a tactical decision game, not just first arriving officer, but first arriving officer Give the order for a V E IS on the, you know, the backside window and now go to that officer and say, okay, what are you gonna do? Talk a story.

Phil Jose: And that's the kind of thing that is relatively simple to combine some of the decision-making, the cues pieces, when the person gets to the window Whatever the window is that you have in your training facility, put a picture next to it of what the fire window actually looks like that they're supposed to be VEISing and have them use that photo. And it doesn't have to be full size, right? Use that photo for them to decide whether or not to break the window. But there has to be an active decision. And if you're training people to do that skill, to, to take, to take that tactic without making a decision. You're setting them up to to have failure. Right. And sometimes it's just a matter of, you know, you don't have to take the window just because you got there. Right. If the engine companies almost got if you're on the floor above and the doors open and the engine company's not smashing the fire The the smoke moves at roughly 30 miles an hour to that window if that if that flow path is You're creating that unidirectional, yeah. Yeah, and 30 miles an hour is 44 feet a second Right. And so how long does it take to clear the window, get in the room, and get the door closed? And do you have enough time? So So that yeah, it's a good bridge for sure. But that there's a decision to be made there that should be trained.

Corley: And leave it to Phil Joe's to turn the fifth question into a tactical decision game live on the air and absolutely max points for that answer and that officially put 340 scraps in the books. Phil Jose. Thank you for sharing your evening with us. And if someone wants to reach out and get a hold of you, find out more information, book a class, etc. What's the best way to do that Phil Jose: Well, my website's ignitionpointtraining. com. I want to set your mind on fire, brother. And so Phil at ignitionpointtraining. com is where you can reach me and I'm pretty easy I've got YouTube page you can find me there do a reads well well over a hundred videos on there I got no audience like you Corley but there's some good training available for some phenomenal training man I one of my they can They can find me. I'm not that hard to find. Corley: One of my senior men would send me Phil Joe's videos all the time and say, hey, what do you think of this? What do you think of this? And I would love to have those conversations with It was awesome. And you've sparked so many conversations across the American Fire Service, across the world's fire service. And your impact is huge. All right. Housekeeping Go to patreon. com slash the vigilantes. Discord is up and running. Very active. If you are looking for a place to connect with like-minded souls, go become a vigilante. I had I had someone email me a question today and I just I said hey go put this in the Discord on Vigilanti and get some advice from a lot of smart people and it's just a great place to get information, share resources, and find people who feel like you do and get that support that you need. Sam will be posting the link for the after party, which is the one of the coolest parts of being a vigilante, is you get to go to the after party, which Phil has graciously said he will come and get roasted at. Because that's what we do is we roast the guest at the after party each and every week. And if you know how much the roast goes on, you know. besides that, next week coming up on the scrap, one of the most requested guests.

Corley: BC Chris Watson. And I'm excited. And then two weeks from today, it is the return of one of my most influential mentors, the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Fooly Involved Mark Von Oppen. So you know I am excited and I want you guys to show up with your questions. As always, enough jabbering from me. Let's get to the after party. Thank you once again, Phil Joes, for an unbelievably informative scrap. Phil Jose: Thank you, Corley. Appreciate the opportunity. Corley: It was a blast. Audience, you know I love you each and every week. You show up, you bring the questions, and you absolutely Drive the scrap forward. Remember, mutts don't scrap. I hope the tones stay silent unless it is burning. This job will never be safe. So stay smart out there.