Photo by Steve Baer | FireDog Photos
The fire service may not have a shortage of solutions. It may have a problem understanding what it’s actually trying to solve
We build programs, launch initiatives, distribute surveys, track participation and study the numbers that come back. When the results fall short, we adjust the delivery, revise the messaging or develop another resource. The assumption is usually that the solution needs improvement. Far less often do we stop and consider whether we identified the right problem in the first place.
That distinction matters because the problem we can see is rarely the whole problem. A firefighter goes off work. Another leaves the department. Someone stops participating, becomes difficult to reach or begins struggling at home. We can record the outcome and place it inside a category, but the category tells us almost nothing about where it began. The real story may involve years of interrupted sleep, accumulated calls, financial pressure, poor leadership, a failing marriage, unresolved grief or the gradual loss of the mental bandwidth needed to manage one more thing.
Metrics can tell us what firefighters are doing. They can’t explain why they’re doing it. A spreadsheet can show absenteeism, turnover, sick time, program use or survey participation. It can’t read hesitation, frustration, body language or the pause before someone gives the answer they believe is expected of them. Numbers matter, but they become dangerous when we confuse what can be counted with what has been understood.
Looking Beyond the Data
Surveys carry the same limitation. Every survey is built around the questions we already know to ask and the answers we believe might exist. We choose the categories, establish the possible responses and ask firefighters to place themselves somewhere inside the structure we created. The presence of an “other” box should tell us something. It means the person’s experience exists outside the answers we thought to offer.
There’s an old line about Henry Ford that historians have never been able to confirm he actually said, but it has stuck around this long because it’s too good to let go. If he had asked people what they needed, they would have said faster horses. Whether he said it or not, the point holds. People can’t ask for something they have never been shown is possible. They can only describe a better version of what is already sitting in front of them. That’s the trap of the survey and the trap of the assumption — we hand someone the closest available box, and we act surprised when the answer stays inside it.
We only know what we know, which makes the quality of the question as important as the answer it produces. When we begin with an assumption, we tend to build evidence around it. When we arrive holding a hammer, the fire service supplies no shortage of things that resemble nails. We can become highly skilled at measuring, improving and defending a solution that was aimed at the wrong target from the beginning.
I have had to turn that criticism toward my own work. Until recently, I believed an educated understanding of firefighters would allow me to place a meaningful set of options in front of them and learn from what they selected. I’m less convinced of that now. The work CRACKYL has done through hundreds of interviews and conversations has shown me that the most useful answer is often several layers beneath the first one. It only appears when someone has enough room to explain what happened, what changed and what they were holding onto at the time.
The Answers Beneath the Surface
An interview can travel somewhere a survey can’t. It can follow contradiction, emotion and frustration. It can move past what happened and begin examining why it happened. It can reveal that burnout was tied to sleep, disengagement began with leadership, a mental health struggle was connected to finances, or the decision to leave the fire service began years before the resignation letter was written.
This entire line of thinking was brought to the front of my mind in early June at the First Responder Center for Excellence Mental Wellness Symposium in Iowa City. During his presentation, Assistant Chief Manny Almaguer of the Denver Fire Department used a long-standing public-health analogy about rescuing people downstream while asking why they were entering the river upstream in the first place. He didn’t present the metaphor as his own, but the way he applied it to firefighters stayed with me. It pushed me to think less about how well we respond once someone is already struggling and more about whether we’re doing enough to understand where that struggle begins.
The fire service is very good at rescuing people downstream. We see someone in trouble, deploy resources and work to bring them back. The harder work is travelling upstream to find where people are falling into the river. That place will not be the same for everyone. It may be two months into a career or 20 years into one. It may follow a promotion, a difficult call, a divorce, a death, a conflict at work or years of operating without enough recovery.
The absence of one universal entry point does not excuse us from looking. Fire departments spend money preparing for low-frequency, high-consequence events that may never happen. We maintain equipment, conduct inspections, train for worst-case scenarios and invest heavily in public education because prevention has value before the emergency occurs. Our own people deserve that same commitment, even when the return cannot be summarized neatly at the end of a budget year.
Finding the Real Problem
None of this is an argument against testing. It’s an argument for testing the right thing. We don’t have to focus on testing the problem. We have to focus on finding it — because the best-tested solution to the wrong problem is still the wrong solution.
There is an old marketing principle that people don’t want a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole. Even that stops too soon. Most people don’t want the hole, either. They want to hang a picture. The drill bit is only a tool, and the hole is only one possible step toward the outcome.
A drill-bit manufacturer can spend years producing stronger, faster and more durable bits. Sales may rise until someone develops an adhesive capable of hanging the picture without drilling a hole at all. At that point, the better drill bit is no longer the best answer because the understanding of the problem has changed. The customer was never committed to drilling. The customer was committed to getting the picture onto the wall.
The answer isn’t to abandon research, measurement or testing. It’s to ask whether we have gone deep enough before deciding we understand what we’re looking at. There is nothing wrong with a survey. There’s something wrong with starting there. A survey should help refine a problem we have already taken the time to understand, not become the instrument we use to decide what the problem must be. Data can show us where to look, but only conversation can reveal what a firefighter was holding onto, when it became too much and what they were trying to preserve before anyone noticed they were struggling.
Curiosity Before Solutions
That work asks more of us. It means entering the conversation without the comfort of a predetermined answer. It means accepting that the program we planned, the resource we funded or the tool we spent years improving may have been built for an outcome nobody actually wanted. It means recognizing that a department seeking retention and a firefighter trying to feel like themselves again may be describing the same crisis from entirely different places.
The truth is, firefighters don’t need us to become more convincing about the solutions we have already built. They need us to become more curious about the lives those solutions are meant to serve. Until we understand what is actually wearing them down, we’ll keep offering better drill bits to people who never wanted a hole and pulling them from the river without learning where they fell in.
