The purpose is to explore. This project started one year ago today with a question, “Can the fire department shake the rust off before it faces oblivion?” I have yet to answer that question.
Pulling Threads
It was meant to be short term. The first ten posts were supposed to ask all the questions. When I started the first ten posts were done. Laughable. The questions kept coming. Such things happen when pulling on long threads. When I run out of questions it will be over.
In previous iterations of similar projects it was about technical questions. How to best suppress fires. Is it possible to “push” fire with water? Do exterior flows degrade occupant survivability? Is it pressure or buoyancy that dominates flow? Those questions have been answered, more or less, to my satisfaction. I am not talking about them anymore.
Ruin
How will the municipal fire department fit into the social fabric of the 21st Century? Money is tight, volunteerism is down, standards are up, there is not a lot of space available to build fire stations. Different things matter, no one knows how it will work out. I don’t question that the municipal fire department as we know it is subject to ruin. Ruin is possible, and:
“…if there is a possibility of ruin, cost benefit analyses are no longer possible.” 1
Keep questioning.
Is the idea “endstate” useful as a tool for developing objectives in the presence of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity? Endstate unfairly frames the planner as seer.
How long will fire based EMS make sense? There are good reasons to separate the two. There are great reasons to keep them together.
How will we navigate the widening swath of new technologies that each bring great societal benefit along with the potential for disastrous harm? We are already way behind.
Os·se·ous
Are there better analogues?
What if the fire department is modelled as bone? How would we think differently, how would we re-engineer our systems? Is that metaphor better than the prevailing warfighting metaphor2? The bone you start with is not the bone you end with.
Next
The purpose of the coming year? Explore, not explain. Become, not be. Question, not know.
question…
Os·se·ous
Nassim Taleb. The Logic of Risk Taking