Where Are We Headed?

By David C. Denniston, ESIP

Have you ever been at a wake or calling hours, or at an older person’s birthday party where there was a screen of pictures flashing in the background? How many times have you watched one of those picture reels and thought “I didn’t know that person did that?”

Perhaps you have looked at those old pictures and learned that the person had a better or worse upbringing than you had imagined. Did you ever stop and think to yourself “now I understand more about why that person had a certain trait”? Did you ever think, “I wish I had known them better”? Most all of us have been there and had those exact same thoughts. The sad fact is we never learn enough about a person until after they are gone. All we are left with is a gut-wrenching feeling and a million excuses as to why we never took the time.

The same can be said about most of our fire departments. You see, our departments have an extensive history that most of us will never find the time to examine or appreciate. Carl Sagan once said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.” There is a lot of power in that statement. And yet most of us will try to figure out where we are currently at, and never look far enough back to understand how we got to where we are.

How many times have you been at a monthly meeting to listen to an hour-long debate about some predicament the department is currently in? We don’t have enough money, enough people don’t come to calls, the same six people do everything around here, training is always on the same night as my kids’ soccer games, no one picks up after themselves, the equipment checks aren’t getting done, no one lets the straps out on the SCBAs, the trucks aren’t getting cleaned, and the list goes on and on. Sound familiar? Before you call and ask me, relax, I have never been to one of your meetings hiding in the back corner. I often tell people, the only thing that is different is the amounts of our budgets, the color of our firetrucks and the name on the back of our t-shirt. Other than that, we are pretty much all the same. We are the volunteer fire service in the United States. The good, the bad and the ugly all come with that title.

So now that we understand that we are mostly the same, I want to take it a step further. Find a copy of your minutes from five years ago, 10 years ago and even 20. If someone took the date off those minutes and retracted the names, would you even be able to tell that they were not from the meeting you had last night?

I have tried this several times with different departments and been amazed at how the same topics, the same problems and the same successes have been repeated over and over. I read a set of minutes on display at a local firehouse from 1903. I swear that could have held true from their meeting just last month.

Our minds tend to lead us to the extremes. A few weeks ago, I rolled my lawn after a winter that seemed to last forever. The weather changed quickly, and I was amazed that I was rolling my lawn the earliest that I ever had in the spring. I threw a post on Facebook with a picture stating, “What a wonderful spring, in 20 years here I have never rolled my lawn in early March.” I couldn’t believe how awesome it was to be doing that. An hour later, a Facebook memory popped up that was me, rolling my lawn, exactly one year earlier on the same day. How was that even possible? The fact is that if we do not explore our past, our minds will make us believe that we are doing something totally unique, when in fact we have done the exact same thing before.

Carl Sagan was correct, “You have to know the past to understand the present.” I believe that we can take that statement even further. If we fail to understand where we are and how we got here, we will never be where we want in the future. Go to Google Maps and type in a destination, someplace you want to be. If that is all that you enter, what happens when you hit return? Nothing. The program needs to know where you are before it can plot the route. For some reason, however we think we can go to a department meeting and throw out a lofty goal, and then scratch our heads when we fail to achieve it. Without knowing where we are, and more importantly how we got here, few of these great ideas will ever materialize. That does not mean that we should abandon them. It just means we must put some work into them while we still have the opportunity. Many of our fire departments are like that person we went to the wake for. They are slowly dying right before our eyes and we haven’t even noticed it. Don’t wait until it is too late to figure out how cool your organization really is.

Learn from the past. Take a look at your past minutes, dig through the trophy case, clean out the old storage closest, stare at those pictures on the wall. Take the time to learn where we came from to understand the struggles and the successes. Next, take notice of where we are. What is going well? What could improve? What outside influences are affecting us? Write it all down to use it as a solid reference point in the future. Finally, plot the course for the future. Be realistic, use smart goals. Ask yourself if this goal is obtainable? Can we measure it? Is it in the best interest of the organization? After completing all of that, we can put our plans in motion.

Scholars will argue for years over whether it was Ben Franklin or Albert Einstein that said, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Most likely it was neither, but it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that if we continue to make the same mistakes, we are almost certain to have the same outcome.

Learn from the past, understand where you are, and plan for the future. If we fail to do that, the future of the volunteer fire service will be no better off than we are today and we will continue to burn energy on who left the toilet paper roll empty or didn’t lock the doors when they left the station.