Combustible

Everybody likes to have fun. But what happens when the allure of having fun gets in the way of personal growth? Or for the growth of the organization?

We’ve talked before about leadership in movies like Moneyball and Saving Private Ryan. But what happens when there’s great leadership in a movie no one wants to see? Who talks about those moments?

On September 4, 2024, Greene County Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Chris Eddy was tragically killed at a tractor trailer fire. In this episode, Fire Chief Rodney Wiggins, who was at the fire when the trailer exploded, sits down with us to talk about his theories on why the trailer suddenly exploded, and what he thinks has changed about fighting fires in refrigerated containers.

Antarctic Explorers, the British Prime Minister, and a recruit that wouldn’t give up.

One word to describe Fire Chief (Ret.) Pat Kenny’s story is heartbreaking. But you could also describe it as raw, honest, inspirational, optimistic, and most of all…a call to action. In this episode, we talk to Pat about his son’s mental illness, Sean’s suicide, and the helplessness that he and his wife felt trying to save their son. We also talk about how he balanced (or didn’t) his family life a...

For this episode, we sit down with Chris Welchel, co-owner of the Towing and Recovery company Welchel Enterprises, to talk about leadership; specifically the concept of “extreme ownership.” What it is, how to walk the walk, and how to get your followers on board. But along the way we also end up finding out that the towing and recovery industry is a lot closer to being like the fire service than w...

This is the second part of our discussion on whether this podcast’s focus on the challenges of leadership are discouraging the next crop of leaders from stepping up. If you haven’t listened to Part 1, go give that a listen first.

This episode grew out of a discussion while hiking that maybe we have talked about great leadership to the point where anyone starting out on their leadership journey may think good leadership is almost unattainable. Have we elevated the discussion to mythic proportions? In our pursuit of sharing the challenges of leadership on so many episodes of this podcast, are we actually discouraging people...

On this episode, we examine the crash of a B-52 in 1994, and the events leading up to it, through the actions of two of the four USAF officers killed: the pilot whose disregard for safety led to the crash, and the copilot who had tried to have him grounded. This is a story about missed opportunities and what can happen when warning signs are ignored. It’s a story about tolerating things that we sh...

We hijack Daniel Kahneman’s idea of substitution and apply it to decision-making in the fire service. How reliable is your decision-making on scene if your brain unknowingly substitutes a logical question with an emotional one?

A recent discussion with one of our listeners led us on a discussion of what part emotion plays in our roles as firefighters and our responses on this podcast.

This episode is about delaying decision-making. Or maybe it’s not. We really don’t know what to think of Falkland’s Law, but we have a good time not getting anywhere.

We talk about it A LOT, but we’ve never really tried to define what we think leadership is. In this episode, we discuss various definitions of leadership; what we like and what we don’t like.

Whenever you lose your way as a leader, you can always ask yourself, “What would Ted do?”

In this episode, we dive into how firefighters’ decision-making process works, and how critically reliant that process is on experience. So, where are we missing opportunities to build experience and convert it to expertise? We’ve come up with a new concept called DIFOS that is a series of questions that can be asked to really examine how a decision-making process evolved. It can be used on-scene...

In Part 3 of our interview we pick up where we left off and get into how we evaluate accidents in the fire service, what we might be able to learn about that process from the airline industry, how to remove dominoes, and we give Bob “The Questions.”

Bob is the first guest we’ve had to show up to the recording with a powerpoint presentation. And while that gave us a chuckle, it’s a presentation filled with concepts that blew us away…and it’s a presentation that he threw together the day before. There’s a lot here, and we barely scratched the surface on some of it, but we really dig into purposeful non-compliance in Part 2. We also discuss gett...

Former Birmingham Firefighter George Cowgill posted a very personal account of his time as a firefighter and why he’s leaving that behind. If you’ve read it, you’re probably not surprised that it went viral, which is how we came across it. In this episode, we interview George (in Birmingham) by telephone as he discusses how he decided it was time to go.

Like the picture above, psychological contracts can be binding, circular, heavy, old, rusty, and sometimes broken. Before this episode, two of us hadn’t ever heard of a psychological contract, but apparently we all have them. What they really are, who you have them with, and whether or not it’s okay to break them are questions that aren’t so easily answered, but we give it the ol’ Combustible try.

Fire is where the glory is. They call us firefighters, not building fighters. But fire isn’t really the enemy, is it? How well do you know your enemy?

Murder holes, force multipliers, and obstacles. All of them are components leading to what very well may be a unified theory of firefighters.

Spoiler Alert: we don’t really solve the pay problem. That would break a long-standing tradition on our podcast of not solving anything. But there are virtual arms races in some regions as departments raise salaries to compete for what seems to be an ever-shrinking pool of firefighters. Pay is one of those things that we’re all talking about, but we haven’t talked about. So, we took a stab at it.

What happens when lightning doesn't strike a house, and you don't act like the other firefighters?