Incident Control – Storytelling and learning from other’s mistakes

A couple of years ago there was a visiting speaker from the US who spoke about situational awareness and common deadly mistakes that Incident Controllers make. We all know there is not enough time in the world to make all the mistakes ourselves, so being able to learn from the experiences of others is really valuable. The way they summarised everything into almost a dot point list made it easy to see… but there wasn’t any storytelling that went with the points.

We also know that emotion and memory have a strong role in what we remember and retain over time. There was a great opportunity to make these points more memorable. If the list had included stories and real examples as to why these things were so important, it could have been a really powerful session.

Here is a summary of some of what was on their list.

How does this compare to your experiences?

What stories could you share that would help make these come alive for new incident controllers and commanders?

1. Incomplete assessment of incident – without understanding the situation you can’t plan effectively.
2. Understaffed initial response – Not enough personnel to do everything, and multitasking leads to fatigue and errors. No one has time to get ready for changing conditions.
3. Commanders being hands on – Working in the weeds and losing the big picture.
4. Lack of accountability – The chain of command isn’t clear, information and briefings are not effective and so personnel can’t address the situation and make good decisions.
5. Lack of procedure – SOP’s that are not known (or not followed)
6. Poor communications – No repeating/confirming of information, lots of jargon, not using situations reports to support information flow.
7. Failure to address near hit events – Not stopping to capture learnings, thinking people are skilled and safe because no-one has been hurt (yet), although this is likely more luck.

If you haven’t heard about the link between learning and storytelling before, here is a quick article.

Opens in a new tab: https://www.harvardbusiness.org/what-makes-storytelling-so-effective-for-learning