Ep 97: When Thinking Negatively is Positive
Episode 97
Published Dec 16, 2024
Last updated Feb 18, 2026
Duration: 39:11
Episode Summary
Today’s podcast delves into how focusing on potential negative outcomes can actually lead to better preparation and decision-making during critical incidents
Episode Notes
In today’s episode our panel explores the power of "inverted thinking" in emergency response planning and management.
This episode delves into how focusing on potential negative outcomes can actually lead to better preparation and decision-making during critical incidents. Key points include:
• The natural tendency for emergency responders to anticipate worst-case scenarios
• How "negative thinking" can be a valuable tool for incident commanders
• Using inverted thinking to identify and address potential problems before they occur
• Applying this approach to training, policy development, and inter-agency cooperation
The panel discusses real-world examples and exercises that demonstrate the effectiveness of this mindset, challenging the notion that negative thinking is always detrimental. They emphasize how this approach can help emergency services better prepare for and respond to active shooter events and other critical incidents.
This thought-provoking episode offers a fresh perspective on emergency management, encouraging listeners to embrace "the power of negative thinking" as a proactive strategy for improving public safety outcomes.
VIDEO LINK TO CHARLIE MUNGER INVERSION THINKING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_vFpa0v3Wg
View this episode on YouTube at https://youtu.be/T3xQ4IDCxAg
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:Why is it easier to see things that will go wrong rather than to see things that go right and can that help you or does it hurt you as an incident commander? That's today's topic, stick around. Welcome to the "Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast". My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. I am joined by two of our other fellow instructors here at the National Center for Integrated Emergency Response. We got Joe Ferrara on the fire EMS side. Joe, good to have you back in the studio.
Joe Ferrara:
Glad to be here, Bill.
Bill Godfrey:
And Terry Nichols from the law enforcement side, Terry, good to have you here.
Terry Nichols:
Glad to be here. As always.
Bill Godfrey:
So today's topic, this issue of the sky is falling. We all have these people in our lives that we know, and I'm one of 'em, I'll admit it, that tend to be the pessimistic thinkers. They see the bad before they see the good. Always the negative, always the negative. It turns out that there's actually some science behind why we're wired that way. But what I really wanna do is talk about how that can help you or hurt you as an incident commander. So, Joe, I'm gonna put the first question to you. Why is it that we are wired to say, "Oh, that's a tiger over there. I'm going the other direction."
Joe Ferrara:
Well, I think everybody in the emergency services profession can relate to, at least in my circumstance, sitting around the firehouse and thinking about the worst case scenario. Or what if we get that structure fire right now. So we are always thinking of the downside or the negative side of things. But it turns out, and as Bill you alluded to it, there is some science behind that. Everybody's aware of the fight or flight response. Everybody's aware that half of our nervous system is dedicated to our protection. And it turns out that our protection is about thinking about the worst thing that could possibly happen to us. Fight or flight is all about, hey, that Tiger's coming at us, what do I do? Do I stand and fight? Or do I run like crazy to get away from it? And that's not sitting here saying that I'm gonna stop and smell the flowers and everything's happy. No life's about to get bad and I've gotta do something about it. And as we're saying, it turns out that's probably a good thing for an incident commander to be prepared.
Bill Godfrey:
Terry?
Terry Nichols:
Going back to my life in law enforcement, I was thinking about, as Joe was talking, is that I was taught to always think about what bad could happen. I mean, my FTO, my field training officer, we'd pull up to a stop sign and they would say, "Okay, a car just went by and shot at us, and what are you gonna do?" So I had to start scripting in my mind, building scripts ahead of time before things happened. We used to go to a 7/11 to get coffee and working nights, and I'd run through my head 100 times. If I walk in, X happens, or B happens, or C, what am I gonna do? And it's that worst case thinking as as a police officer, I'm thinking emergency responders, Joe, like you talked about, emergency response as a whole. We think like that, we're wired to think like that and taking it down the incident command level, absolutely, but Bill, to your point, I think we mirror each other a lot. I think that way a lot. Just ask my wife, she'll gladly tell you that I can be that person, always looking at the worst case scenario. But I think you have to have a plan A, a plan B, a plan C. And that's just the way I'm wired. And I've always looked at it as a bad thing, honestly, that, listening from a different perspective, it's not always good. But I think that's just how we're wired in this business.
Bill Godfrey:
I know exactly what you mean, Terry. I've had a lot of the same feelings until recently on this topic. I used to joke all the time 'cause people have called me pessimistic a few times that I'm trying to be more optimistic. I just don't think it'll work. But it turns out that there's been a lot of cognitive science that has researched this, a lot of brain science. And yes, Joe, as you said, our brains are wired for fight.
Joe Ferrara:
Fight or flight.
Bill Godfrey:
Thank you. Our brains are wired for our survival. And so it's kind of built into our DNA quite literally. But here's the other thing that that benefits us. If we look at how to screw something up, that's a lot easier to come up with those answers than it is how to solve the problem. And so if you, Charlie Munger, you guys probably recognize the name, Charlie Munger was a partner with Warren Buffett, two of the most prodigious investors in the history of the world. He calls it the inverted thinking or the negative thinking. If you ask me how to do something good, I'm going to actually start by saying, "Well, how would I completely screw that up?" And I always thought that was a fascinating point of view. And recently we experimented on this in one of our classes. And I kind of want to tell you guys this story briefly because it ties to where we're going with this. We had an active shooter incident management class we were doing, and as soon as we got done with the intro before we did anything else, I said, "Okay," we got a flip chart up to the front of the classroom. And I said, "I want to make a list of all of the ways that if we wanted to have the worst possible response to an active shooter event, what would we do to make sure that it was absolutely the bottom basement, worst possible response that you could have? And it took us about five minutes to fill that board, "Well, we wouldn't talk to each other, we wouldn't communicate. Nobody would take charge, everybody would just flood in. There'd be no assigning of tasks." I mean, the list went right on down the line. What was fascinating to me about it was two things. Number one is I watched that list be compiled from the audience members who have not been taught anything on the subject. We haven't even started teaching yet. They gave us the list that if you did the opposite of everything that they did had a great incident. And a lot of that was exactly what we were going to teach and address them. But the other fascinating thing was for the next three days, as we went through the training, those issues kept coming up in the hot washes and the critiques about mistakes that were being made. And so I just thought it was fascinating that they were able to say, this is how we would screw it up. They were able to acknowledge that, well, if we did the opposite of that, it would have a good outcome. And yet still, when we ran the practical scenarios, we tripped over a lot of those mistakes.
Terry Nichols:
Yeah, I think that that's a natural thing, but we don't think of thinking negatively like that in a positive way, if that makes sense. That yes, look how to not make stupid decisions, don't do this, have over convergence on the scene. Okay, how do you mess things up? Have over convergence on the scene, okay, let's not do that. You identify what you said, that class identified all these issues and let's not do those. And that's how we learned and, but we've gotta, well, I don't think we think about that enough in those terms in a positive light. Like we started off talking about negative, people see that as a negative, but in reality, it can really help us make much better decisions. Don't be stupid.
Bill Godfrey:
Joe. Why is it that it's so much easier for us to see, for us to imagine the negative outcome as opposed to how to solve the problem? How to, so Terry's example over convergence.
Joe Ferrara:
Sure.
Bill Godfrey:
Okay. So we don't do that, but how do we solve that, right? If we wanted to start from a blank page and we said, okay, we need to make sure that we get people in in an orderly fashion and give 'em assignments and all that, all of a sudden that feels like a very overwhelming problem. But if you start with the reverse of it and say, "We don't want this over convergence, so let's not do that. Okay, how do we solve that?
Joe Ferrara:
So I'm gonna offer somewhat of an explanation to that or an answer to that. In our profession, for lack of a better term, we see the darker side of humanity. In law enforcement, Terry talked about it. What if I walk into this 7/11 and there's a holdup? As a paramedic, what's the worst possible call we can have, a child, a child drowning, a child cardiac arrest? And when we see those things and experience those things, I think it begins to train our brain to back into the problem instead of hitting the problem face forward. And what I mean by that is, if we start with the worst in mind, it can only get better. I mean, I've always said to my students as I taught, "The easiest call you're gonna have because the patient can't get any worse, is a cardiac arrest." They're not gonna get worse. Everything you do is gonna improve that. So the worst possible problem that you're gonna have as an incident commander on an active shooter event, if you think of that, you can only improve from there. However, if you quote unquote look at things with rose-colored glasses as an incident commander, and everything bad that happens when you do that, it's gonna take you down a couple pegs. And we're not designed for that, we're not wired that way. And I think human beings as a whole, we love the power of positive thinking and it makes us feel good. But the power of negative thinking, I think is the critical skill in managing these events.
Bill Godfrey:
So Terry, pulling on that thread that Joe's opened here, how do you as an incident commander at an active shooter event or a hostile event, look at where you're at and say, "Okay, very quickly, these are the negative outcomes." And then ask yourself how to fix that?
Terry Nichols:
I mean, I think you have to dissect it down. And one of the things we talk about frequently is the safety priority checklist from the National Tactical Officers Association. Where we talk about when you're making decisions, you start looking at how's it gonna affect, are the hostages? And my decision, so I'm thinking, okay, the hostage is gonna be killed. I go immediately to the negative side of this. How do I prevent that from happening? Is my decision that I'm going through right now, I'm gonna think hostage is gonna be killed, or innocent could be killed, or whatever that the negative outcome is, and it'll help me make much better decisions thinking that way, like Joe mentioned. So as role incident commander, constantly breaking it down and looking at these different things, go back to over convergence for a second. What are some negative outcomes if that happens? Well, I don't have accountability of people. We don't have any control of folks. Break that down about all the negative outcomes just from that one incident. Not saying the whole incident's gonna be bad, but just over convergence piece and then take the rest of the response. Well, if I don't have rescue task forces stood up, what's a negative outcome if I don't do that? Well, you won't be able to get medical personnel to the side of people that need it immediately. I hope that answered what you were looking for.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah and Joe, how much of this is something that we should lean into for all supervisors to have the potential to be in command of really any scenario? How much of this is an opportunity to leverage how we're already wired to reverse our way into a good outcome?
Joe Ferrara:
Well, I mean, it starts with training. So when we train together, when we drill on these subjects, when we do a mass casualty drill or active shooter incident management training, we have to lean into it as what's the worst thing that can happen here? And if we start with that thought in mind and then back out of that, then everything else that we do is to prevent that. But if we don't say that to ourselves ahead of time, I think we're missing the boat. Because if you don't say it to yourself, even if it's self-talk, you don't have to say it out loud, but if you don't say it to yourself, you're not gonna believe it. And I don't want to be surprised by the worst possible scenario. I want to expect the worst possible scenario, and then that way I can prevent it. Because every action that I take from that point forward is about prevention of that worst possible situation.
Bill Godfrey:
Something you just said made me think of this, that there's actually kind of two negative thinking issues here. There's what's the worst thing that can happen here? But then there's also, what can I do to screw this up?
Joe Ferrara:
Oh, yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
Because those are actually, I think, two different things. I've got, these are my worst case scenarios on this particular event that I'm at. Now, in our response and in our actions, what can I do that would really screw this up? And then let's not do that, let's do the opposite of that. Would you agree with that, Terry? That those, it seems to come into focus to me, those are two different things.
Terry Nichols:
No, I think you're right that you have to look at it from both perspectives, both individually and collective. It helps you make individual decisions. I really have to focus on me. And like we talked about earlier, that kind of comes natural for me to think that way. Again, maybe it's just coming up in this business, but the event as well, Joe, I don't know what you think on it.
Joe Ferrara:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, and you said trust me, Terry, you're not alone. I think everybody at this table quotes the pessimistic oath. So, and that's not a bad thing for our profession. It may not help us the best of times in our personal relationships. However, as from a professional standpoint, I think it's incumbent upon us that we have to think this way. And if we're not thinking, how can I screw this up? Guess what's gonna happen? You're gonna screw this up.
Terry Nichols:
You're gonna screw it up.
Bill Godfrey:
And does that provide an opportunity? 'cause I'm thinking in the class, in fact, one of our boards, the command board has a list of really key problems that are what we call right now right now problems. Fix this right now. Does this become a built-in filter to recognize problems that are unfolding? So you're the incident commander, perhaps you haven't created the problem, but you're seeing a problem that is unfolding and recognizing that, oh crap, this is one of the things that's gonna really screw this up. I need to get on this and get this fixed?
Terry Nichols:
Yeah, I think it helps you certainly look at things with a broader brush. That instant commander, especially on our board, like these are right now, right now problems. And if you see the train wreck coming like I said earlier, don't make stupid decisions. And the way you don't do this, think of the negative outcomes that would happen if I make this decision. So again, getting ourselves to think that this is not a bad thing, to think way is not bad.
Bill Godfrey:
But I think the key here though is don't, you say don't make the stupid decisions, but I think you almost have to flip your thinking to say, all right, wait a minute, what's the stupidest decision I can make here? What's the thing that I could do that would screw this up more than anything else possible? And let's not do that.
Terry Nichols:
And then don't do that.
Bill Godfrey:
Right.
Terry Nichols:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
Do the opposite of that.
Terry Nichols:
Absolutely.
Joe Ferrara:
I think from another perspective of that is, if you do that and you practice that and you think that way, it's almost easier to do that during an event to see those potential failures and avoid those than it is to not see the failures and just happily go along that this event's gonna go great, no matter what I do. It's so much easier. I hate to use this phraseology, but it's so much easier to be that negative thinker during these emergency events than the alternative.
Bill Godfrey:
I think the thing though that I keep wanting to come back to is not just about the worst case scenario, but thinking about, it's literally, the conscious thought of what are the actions that I could take to make sure that we all die that this has the worst possible outcome. What could I do to influence this negatively? Because as you said, our brains are wired to spot those a mile away.
Joe Ferrara:
I think it's easier for our brains to do that.
Bill Godfrey:
It is.
Joe Ferrara:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
It is.
Joe Ferrara:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
In the negative outcomes. So how much of this is in the context of active shooter, managing active shooter events, how much of this is trainable? How much of this should we be working on in training? For example I told you the story about the class we did where we asked the class to give us a list. And as the list is forming, I'm thinking that's a list of everything we're gonna teach in the next three days. How big a role does taking that approach holistically within an organization, Joe, you were a fire chief, Terry, you were a police chief. You're rolling in and you're like, I think we've got some blind spots here on active shooter events. Can you use this power of inverted thinking to get you to the answer of not only what you need to do as an organization, but what your priorities should be?
Terry Nichols:
Yes, short answer, absolutely it can help. 'cause you can start looking at holistically, say with my command staff, "Hey, we have an active shooter event. What are some worst things that could happen?" Well, we don't respond. We don't do X, we don't, all these things that are gonna make a really negative outcome. Okay, then we need to start training on these things. We know these are impediments to us for an event happening in our community, then let's start fixing 'em right now before they happen. And constantly think like that. Constantly have discussions like that. So we start implementing programs, we start doing the things that identified that we don't wanna do, let's fix it now before it happens. And keep moving on.
Bill Godfrey:
Joe, how about you on the fire side? How could you see this helping a fire chief look at the lay of the land, training within their department, relationship with their law enforcement brothers and sisters, policies, procedures? How does this become a tool that they can use?
Joe Ferrara:
Well, I think fire and EMS service leaders in this country need to have an honest conversation with their staff about active shooter in their community. Because it's not a matter of, if it happens, it's gonna be a matter of when it happens. And we need to sit down and say, "All right, what's the problem here? If this happens today, are we ready?" And if someone raises their hand and says, "Well, we haven't talked to law enforcement about it," that's a problem. We gotta fix that. Or "Our personnel are not equipped and ready to move into a warm zone," that's a problem. We've gotta have a discussion, we've gotta have training about it. So it is just a matter of let's have an honest conversation and start with the worst in mind, that active shooter event happening in our community. What will I do today to prevent that for tomorrow? That's gotta happen.
Bill Godfrey:
What would it look like? So we have a lot of chiefs that are listeners here on the podcast. What would it look like if a police chief and a fire chief and their senior staffs got together for a half hour and said, "Okay, let's put a list on the whiteboard of everything that we could possibly do to make sure that we have the worst possible active shooter response in the history." What would that look like?
Terry Nichols:
I think it'd be powerful. If you have the right leaders in place and the right staff in place, I think it'd be incredibly powerful. Spend 30 minutes together. Again, just what you did in that class that you mentioned, is do the whiteboard. If we wanna really mess this up, we want our community to be on the national news for the rest of our lives. What would that look like? And start the whiteboard, get on the whiteboard and list it out. And we're gonna identify gaps. We're gonna absolutely identify gaps. Man, we really don't want this thing to happen. We don't want a bunch of deceased, our community members shot in a church, a school, a mall, wherever it is. How can we make sure, we can't prevent the shooting, but we can certainly know, address our response to it.
Joe Ferrara:
We can improve the outcome by our response.
Terry Nichols:
Absolutely improve the outcome, but having us together around a whiteboard over a cup of coffee and having this very simple discussion, how would we mess this up? And then start tackling those one by one, set a training plan for the next three months, six months, one year, how we're gonna address all the things we listed.
Bill Godfrey:
You know what's interesting, when I did this with this group at the one class, the first half a dozen items were things that the police department could do, or the fire department could do. Not communicate with each other, not have a command structure, not have staging, not have assignments. And then there was like this moment that somebody said, "Well, we could not work together. Police and fire could not work to, we could refuse to work together and not cooperate." And as soon as that one thing was said, it was like opening the floodgates on all of these other integrated issues that I think a lot of 'em probably had not thought about or talked about. And literally, I'd say two thirds, if not three quarters of the list became about things that you would screw up in integration. You think that tracks with your personal experience? I know you were, Terry, you were a police chief of two different organizations where you tried to, and bring 'em into a better spot on active shooter preparedness.
Terry Nichols:
I was blessed because my counterpart on the fire side, both organizations were incredibly receptive to this. They got it. I know there's places around the country that one side or the other, whether it be law enforcement, not wanting to come to the table or be the fire EMS side, not wanting to come to the table or both in certain communities. That's an impediment to the community response. And but again, back to my experience, I had welcoming leaders across the table from me that were willing to have the discussion. I wish we had done this exercise 'cause I think this would be incredibly powerful. So everybody's out there listening, I'd encourage you take this for a test run. It's not something that requires eight hours. Like Bill, you said 15 to 30 minutes.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, well actually in the class, we didn't even spend 10 minutes on it. The list was done in five, six minutes.
Terry Nichols:
It's gonna spur a lot of discussion though. I mean, it should, if you really do this right and you start listening out and you look at it and you start identifying these gaps, you go, holy crap. This is gonna be a problem if we don't get in front of this and it should bring a sense of urgency to it. Because we all know as Joe said, it's not if it's when. So if you get, again, those leaders together and put the egos aside, you can really, I think start to lay out a plan to get your community prepared by looking at this inversion process.
Bill Godfrey:
So here's a question for both of you. What does, no, strike that.
Terry Nichols:
Take two.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. If you are in a jurisdiction, city, county, whatever, that's just got some intractable public safety challenges. But you're in the role of city manager, county manager, mayor. Is this a conversation that you could pull your partners in, the emergency manager, the fire chief, the police chief, and facilitate without necessarily having the domain expertise to say the city manager's the boss, he pulls the police and fire chief in, the county mayor, the county administrator. I mean, the sheriff may be an elected official, but they've still got enough juice to get 'em to a meeting. What does that look like if somebody outside of public safety that is the boss pulls 'em in? Can they facilitate this as well, is it that simple?
Joe Ferrara:
It could be as long as that county official or that county administrator recognizes and understands the power in that sort of inverted thinking and leads with that because maybe their emergency services officials haven't thought of that. So here's the county manager saying, "All right, police chief, all right, sheriff, all right, fire chief in our community, if this happens right now, what's the worst thing that can happen?" Or "Fire chief, what's the worst possible outcome if your personnel don't cooperate with law enforcement?" Or "Sheriff, What's the worst possible outcome if law enforcement doesn't move paramedics forward to care for the injured? I think you don't have to be an expert in public safety to introduce the concept of the what if in our community.
Terry Nichols:
I think this brings up a good point, Bill, about, so the scenario you gave me is me having relationships with the fire and the EMS partners. If I'm that chief and I'm finding myself in a community where maybe I'm not getting the resources I need from my boss, from the council, from the commissioners or whoever it is, ask the mayor or the city manager, whoever your boss is, to come to that meeting with your police and fire where you're having and you're doing this inverted thinking process and let them see, 'cause they're gonna go, "Hmm, we're not prepared. Chief, what are you gonna do about this?" Well, that budget we submitted, we're requesting to go to this training class, requesting hosted this, get this equipment. That's what we need and that'll help.
Bill Godfrey:
And Joe, I was thinking about it when you were talking there about the kinds of questions. I think it could be as simple as the county manager, city manager, the mayor, whoever, bringing everybody to the table and just saying, "Look, can we all agree that if we have an active shooter event, we're all gonna be there?" And the answer to that's gonna universally be yes in almost all cases. Very, very few places are gonna do it on their own. Okay, so we're all in this together. What could we do? I want to make a list on this board. I got my dry erase marker out and I'm ready to go. Gimme the items that we could collectively do to make sure that we screwed this up as much as you could possibly screw up, one of you said earlier to end up on the news for the rest of our lives. Go and start getting that list up on the board because I think as soon as that list comes out, 'cause it's gonna flow pretty quick.
Joe Ferrara:
Oh yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
Then I think the county manager caps the pen and looks at the group and looks at the board and says, "Okay, so clearly we need to do the opposite these things. What are the solutions? And go right down the list. Do you guys have a solution for this? Do you have a solution for this? Do you have a solution for this?" And then that becomes the work items?
Joe Ferrara:
Absolutely
Terry Nichols:
That's the way I see it, is those are our tasks now. This is what we need to address. It may be something very grand that's gonna take a lot of time. It may be very simple as something we need to, "Hey, we haven't trained together in the past year. We need to get back together and walk through the rescue task force concept. We need to have a brief on this. Hey, we haven't done the ASIM Basic in two years. Let's get everybody back on Counterstrike and get going again on this." So I think that it'd be very helpful in pushing the conversation along. And that city manager, that mayor, that county, whoever it is, should hopefully have a little bit of his or her team working together and say, okay, they've got this, but that won't happen absent this kind of meeting, this kind of thinking.
Joe Ferrara:
Right.
Terry Nichols:
At least it makes it much more difficult.
Joe Ferrara:
And it also puts the participants on notice. It puts them on alert, when you put up there that there'll be significant loss of life in your community. That's a telling statement that better hit you right in the face. But if you're afraid to say that or you don't say that, then people aren't gonna be ready. Let's say the county official or the county manager is uninitiated in the emergency services arena. However, to the uninitiated, when you say people are gonna die,
Terry Nichols:
They get that.
Joe Ferrara:
That's a big deal. That's a huge deal. And if your emergency services professional that are in your organization, that are in your county are not ready for that, then how do we do it? How do we get ready for that, how do we prepare for that? But if we don't say it, I mean, that's the negative thing, right? There are some difficult conversations coming, there are difficult things that have to be said. If we don't say it, we're never gonna see it, ever.
Bill Godfrey:
It's really interesting, really interesting perspective. And so let's say you have this meeting and you've got your shopping list of what not to do, and we want to do the opposite. And some of 'em are gonna have fairly clear answers and known solutions, but can the training officers and that leadership that's responsible for policy and procedure development, which a lot of times starts in the training department. I mean, sometimes you have to kind of experiment with things to figure out what'll work. Can they also use the power of inverted thinking to break the problem down even further? For example, we know if we don't communicate with each other, we are not gonna have a good outcome in an active shooter event. One of the surest ways to screw that up, but communication that's got a lot of tentacles, radio communication, face-to-face communication, runners, I mean, it just, it really has a lot of tentacle to it.
Terry Nichols:
Broad.
Bill Godfrey:
It's very broad. So can trainers and the people that are responsible for developing these procedures use this same inverted thinking to drill down and break the problem out further?
Terry Nichols:
I think you have to because there are some that are so broad. So you take just your example, take the radio communication piece of it. Okay, what's the worst thing that can happen if our radios are not, we can't communicate with each other on the radio. "Well, we won't know when to send in RTF's, we won't do X, we won't do Y." Okay, we need to start addressing those issues with radio. Okay, now worked on the communication with radios. Let's talk about verbal communication. If we're not communicating with each other because we don't like each other or we think we don't like each other and break 'em all down.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, there's no chain of command, which is really easy day to day. I know what agency I work for and I know who out ranks me. But in an active shooter event, when there's 15 jurisdictions on the scene, suddenly that's,
Joe Ferrara:
Who's in command?
Bill Godfrey:
That's a little bit different. And I wonder if, if in evaluating this, so you pulled on the radio thread, which I think is a really interesting one and what popped in my head was a story that a responder was telling me that had an event and they patched channels together from two different organizations and it wasn't good.
Terry Nichols:
Probably had never been done before.
Bill Godfrey:
Just because it's technically possible doesn't always make it a good idea. The patch introduced a little bit of a transmission delay. So everybody was used to being able to key up and talk in a half a second. And this introduced about a two second delay. And so from there on out, everybody was clipping because they didn't have the habits of keying up and waiting for that long. On top of that, a lack of radio discipline caused too many people to be yapping on the radio with things that weren't the critical messages. Is that part of our due diligence in driving down when we're taking these pieces apart? I mean, it's not enough to just do it high level. We gotta dig at it.
Terry Nichols:
I would say absolutely you have to dig at it because those things are going to mess us up. That worst case outcome, is those are the things that are gonna cause it and we've identified it. Now that means practicing what the fire, EMS, the police officers are out on the street, how to pull out your radio, show me how to go to a different bank. And that's what I had to do. Because you do it so infrequently. I mean, it's just you have your regular set scan that you listen to all the time, you communicate all the time. But man, when it comes to integration, working together on a, it could be a hazmat deal, it could be a active shooter, whatever the event is, you've gotta practice this stuff. So yeah, by identifying these early and then take tasks and fix it so you don't have this negative outcome.
Joe Ferrara:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
Joe, I'm reminded of the, I don't know if you'll remember the full scale exercise we did where their procedure, they had a bank that was their disaster channels. So it was their shared mutual aid channel. So anything that involved multiple agencies, they would go to this bank and they would use it and they'd all talk on the same. So they all had a shared frequency except in practice day to day they didn't do that.
Joe Ferrara:
They didn't use it.
Bill Godfrey:
And we're at this full scale exercise and there's, I don't know, close to 100 responders there on the scene. And they called to go to this channel. And it turns out that almost 50% of the radios did not have the proper programming to even transmit on those channels. There were dozens of radios that had them on different, some agencies had 'em on different banks, had titled them different things. The languages didn't match, self-inflicted wounds?
Joe Ferrara:
Well, that's a great example. And here's the difference between doing that as inverted thinking and doing it as conventional thinking. The conventional thinking is how do we communicate? If I ask the question as a leader, how do we communicate on a disaster? How does law enforcement and fire communicate together? Let's have a common disaster channel. Hey, what a great idea. Hey, communications director, make sure you put a common channel in. Now if as the leader, I said, "What's the worst possible outcome if we have a disaster?" The channel doesn't work. That's a different approach to that situation because me saying as a leader, "Hey communications director, go put a channel in place." Okay great, me as a leader saying, "If it doesn't work, what do we do?" That's a whole different mindset.
Bill Godfrey:
And I would even piggyback that and say, if you're the communications director that gets told by the boss to put together a disaster channel, you ought to close your door and whiteboard out, okay, how could this go horribly wrong.
Joe Ferrara:
Horribly wrong, yes.
Bill Godfrey:
And how do I make sure it doesn't?
Joe Ferrara:
And there's a great example of how it went horribly wrong, Bill.
Bill Godfrey:
Let's not program the radios correctly. Let's call 'em different things.
Joe Ferrara:
Let's not test them.
Terry Nichols:
It's taken this thinking, I mean, you can apply this to everything you do.
Joe Ferrara:
Yeah.
Terry Nichols:
And it's not a bad thing. Again, now I'm having to reprogram myself to think, okay, the way you've thought that you've been told at times is not good, it's always negative. It's not a bad thing. And it's a way to problem solve. This is a way to identify things and get you prepared in the public safety arena. Get you prepared for very bad things.
Joe Ferrara:
Well, unfortunately, negative thinking has a negative connotation.
Terry Nichols:
It does.
Joe Ferrara:
Oops.
Bill Godfrey:
It really does. I mentioned Charlie Munger earlier. There's a great story that he tells. In fact, Karla, let's put a link to that video clip in the show notes for folks, it's a great story he tells, in World War II, he was a weather forecaster for the Air Force. He was in the ferry command and he was supposed to be figuring out all of these things with the weather and forecasting the weather. And he just decided to look at it in a different way. And he said, "Okay, how can I make sure I kill these pilots?" That's a pretty brutal, shaking statement. But he said, "Well, okay, I can put 'em into icing conditions that their aircraft cannot handle and that is certain to kill 'em. Or I can send them to an area that is fogged in or socked in and they run out of fuel before they can land. And if I don't do those two things, I can make sure as much as possible that my weather forecast doesn't kill pilots."
Terry Nichols:
Don't kill pilots.
Joe Ferrara:
Yep, don't kill pilots.
Bill Godfrey:
It's kind of a fascinating issue. The second part of what we did with the class after we got this list of all of the things that are wrong, 'cause I was really kind of curious to see where this would go, is I said, okay, I picked up our book, which is about a 300 page student manual. And I said, "Okay, I want you to just imagine for a moment that the answers to all of these issues that you've just written up on the board are in this book. And what we're gonna teach you for the next three days is going to show you how to avoid all of these things that you've just said are a surefire way to have a horrible outcome. Now let's get another board over here and give me a list of all the reasons why you can't implement this in your organization." And I'll spot you the first one. It's not the way we do it around here. And the funny part was, it was lighthearted, but that took about two minutes and 30 seconds to fill that whiteboard with a list of all the reasons why they could not implement the solutions to the very problems that they identified in their organization. And then we left both of those up for the three days of training. And what fascinated me the most is how often those issues came up. The very things that they said were a surefire way to screw it up came up. And the very things that they said were reasons that they couldn't implement in their organization came up not once, not twice, but dozens of times every day.
Terry Nichols:
That's amazing, it's again, powerful for them to see that. And flipping over the implementation side is like, we're giving you the answers to the test. You can do it, you can do this. You've identified all the bad outcomes, everything we can do to screw up this response and then we're giving you the answers and you're telling me all these things. "We don't do it that way here." That's the classic one.
Bill Godfrey:
That's not what we call it. That's not our terminology.
Joe Ferrara:
Maybe that needs to go on the negative list. That's not the way we do it here.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah.
Joe Ferrara:
Well.
Bill Godfrey:
Actually that would be a great topic for another podcast.
Joe Ferrara:
Implementation, wow.
Bill Godfrey:
Implementation.
Terry Nichols:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
And challenges?
Terry Nichols:
Yeah, how do you use this kind of thinking to implement a program, a policies and procedures in your agency, in your community.
Bill Godfrey:
Sure.
Terry Nichols:
I think it would be powerful.
Bill Godfrey:
It could be, it could be. Well thank you guys for coming in and talking about this, the power of inverted thinking. It turns out that it's not a negative to think negative.
Terry Nichols:
I'm going to share that with my wife.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, you and me both.
Joe Ferrara:
Lemme know how that works out.
Bill Godfrey:
Exactly. Lemme make a list of how to make sure I don't stay married. Joe, Terry, thanks for coming in. Thank you to our producer Karla Torres as always, for pulling this together. And until next time, stay safe.