#24 - "Perception doesn't have to match reality" (DARC Vs. 4S)

Perception vs. Reality

“That’s why you have to base your actions on fire behavior.” My hotshot superintendent Stan Stewart used to say that when our crew studied historical accidents. He thought most accidents were caused by bad decisions, and most bad decisions were caused by basing your actions on something other than the fire.

Leave aside the question of hindsight bias; his deeper point was this: When you fight fire, you have to stay grounded in operational reality. Slip a little, and it can cost you dearly.

Stan also used to tell us, “Your perception doesn’t have to match reality. But sooner or later, reality wins.” Meaning: you can ignore reality and get away with it for a while, but sooner or later, someone will pay.

Here’s something I noticed as I moved on from the crew: As you get further from the field, you no longer see and feel the immediate results of your actions, and this perception/reality match can feel less and less urgent. Misperceptions might still be disastrous, but they may not feel disastrous to you personally right away, so other things can become priorities.

DARC vs. 4S

There is a very important misperception that I think underlies (and distorts) a lot of training, policy, investigations, executive decision-making, and safety talk. It has had disastrous consequences. It will continue to cause trouble until we face it squarely.

I’m talking about this hidden assumption that the operational environment (in my case, fire) is basically:

• Stable

• Straightforward

• Safe, and

• Simple

I call this the 4S mindset.

Through fighting fire, investigating accidents, studying human factors, and training firefighters, I discovered sometimes fire is the opposite of 4S, sometimes it is DARC:

• Dynamic

• Ambiguous

• Risky, and

• Complex

We are much more comfortable with 4S thinking, and we tend to assume the operational environment (and everything else) is supposed to be 4S. Change surprises us. Ambiguity irritates us. Risk scares us. Complexity tries our patience. So we ignore all this and pretend fire is instead how we want it to be. That is, we pretend fire is 4S.

When we fundamentally ignore operational realities, the consequences can be devastating.

How 4S thinking fooled accident investigators

Early in my career, I remember reading accident investigations that did not ring true. This inspired me to do accident investigations, and eventually to work for investigation reform in the fire service.

I’d like to show you how the DARC vs 4S lens can help us understand the mistakes that cause investigators to fail, and how we can avoid those mistakes and do better.

Investigators sometimes talk about a person or an action as being “the cause” of an accident. In order to say that, you have to think that the environment was basically safe and stable. Everything was fine … until that action started a chain of problems that culminated in disaster.

This is a pretty normal and natural way to think, actually. The problem is: it doesn’t match reality.

At least, it didn’t match what I saw.

When I studied accidents, I saw people who were working in a risky environment, and who took action in response to one kind of risk, and then they were caught by a different one. I also saw the fire environment changed faster than people could keep up. So the actions that seemed so wrong—would have been okay hours or minutes before the accident. To me, it seemed cheap to simply say they did the wrong thing. It would be more useful to say the fire changed faster than their situational awareness and tactics could keep up.

In such scenarios, should we regard firefighter actions as the cause of an accident?

Well, if you think fire is basically safe and stable, you would say: Yes, of course, the accident could not have happened if they didn’t take those actions.

On the other hand, if you acknowledge that fire is inherently dynamic and risky, then it doesn’t make sense to pin the accident on a single action. Instead you’d want to ask better questions about how they perceived the risks, why they prioritized what they did, why there may have been gaps in their awareness, and so on. Those are useful questions.

When you ask good questions like that you gain real insight into how accidents happen and where we can find leverage points to improve.

My point here is: I saw this failure in how investigations were done, and I tried to understand why investigations failed. When I looked, I discovered that investigators at that time shared a common error—they routinely pretended the world was 4S where it was really DARC.

I wanted to find a better way to investigate, so I faced those operational realities, which led to better insights, better questions, better recommendations … better investigations.

This is an example of how powerful this DARC vs. 4S lens can be.

It is also versatile. You can look at your system through this lens and see problems and solutions that eluded you before.

How you can use this tool right now

I suggest, if there’s any part of your system that keeps breaking down, pull out this DARC lens.

See if maybe you are pretending something is 4S, when really it’s DARC.

If you are not certain, ask yourself: What if I were absolutely sure this problem is fundamentally DARC, then how would I approach it? What specifically would I do differently?

Brainstorm answers, and then try some.

See if you don’t find something that works better than what you had before.

VUCA vs. DARC

There’s a similar concept of Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA), and some great work has been done on how to operate in a VUCA environment.

But I prefer the acronym DARC. I think it’s a better fit for the fire environment. Here’s why:

Dynamic vs. Volatile

I go with Dynamic over Volatile because what’s essential about fire is how it’s constantly changing (Dynamic).

To me this is more important than the potential for change (Volatile).

In a Dynamic environment you must constantly adapt. In a Volatile environment you just have to be ready.¹

Risky

The fire environment is fundamentally Risky.

This point is often missed in safety discussions. And once you acknowledge there’s an inherent risk to fighting fire, it changes how you see everything about it. So “R” for Risky is an essential part of the acronym.

An environment can be V, U, C and A, but still be perfectly safe. It’s important to add an R for Risky so we don’t forget the stakes.

Ambiguous vs. Uncertain

The important aspects of Uncertainty are already included within Ambiguity. Of course, there are differences between them, but I think the Ambiguity of the fire environment is more important to focus on than Uncertainty.²

So I keep the A (for Ambiguity), but skip the U (for Uncertainty).

That’s why I use DARC over VUCA. It’s better calibrated to the fire environment and more useful.

OpComms in the DARC

Why are we talking about DARC now, in the middle of American Fire Saga: Season 1 — when we have been so focused on Operational Communications (OpComms)?

Alright, let’s zoom out a bit.

The big problem with communication is: it tends to break down just when it counts the most.

Notice: those moments that count the most are also when things get DARCest.

(Test this yourself: think of a time you saw a critical communication breakdown. Ask yourself if that moment was also more Dynamic, Ambiguous, Risky, or Complex than usual.)

Most of our communication skills are based on a 4S environment. And, in practice, our world is usually 4S enough. So 4S communication works well enough most of the time.

But in the build up to really critical moments, things get DARC, and our normal skills fail us. Like if you are used to fighting fire in SoCal brush and you try to use the same tactics in South Carolina palmetto. Wouldn’t work.

So, we need to explore the question of how to communicate in a DARC environment. This is a massive question. It touches every major firefighter tragedy. The question also challenges much of what we think we know about safety. Before we can take it on, we need to get grounded in this DARC concept.

That’s why we are diving into it now.

So, kind of like HOP and HRO, right?

Well, yeah, actually.

You may be familiar with schools of thought like Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), High Reliability Organizations (HRO), Safety II, Safety Differently, the New View, Resilience Engineering, and so on.

They are great, they have influenced me. Most of my work is compatible with most of what they say.

But, right now, I’m not focused on orienting this work within an academic tradition or school of thought, even the ones I think are great. Also, I’m not trying to map out new academic turf or start a new school of thought. I’m also not trying to introduce new jargon just for kicks. I’m allergic to jargon. BUT, sometimes you need a new term or acronym when nothing else will do.

My mission now is to stay grounded in the realities of the operational environment. To distill what I learned through fighting fire, investigating accidents, researching human factors and training firefighters. To translate this into something you can use in your world, if you work or lead in a high risk environment.

And I’ve found the DARC vs. 4S lens to be incredibly versatile and powerful. It will give you a new way of looking at leadership, operational learning, communication, resilience, risk, and innovation.

That’s why I’m excited to share it with you over the next few posts.

1. Ask yourself which is more important for your operational environment:

• recognizing constant change (Dynamic) and adapting to it, OR

• recognizing the potential for change (Volatile) and preparing for it.

To me, the former includes the latter, so that’s where I place the emphasis.

2. Ambiguous means that thing you are looking at could have different meanings. e.g. The wind gets calm. Does that mean fire activity is starting to subside? Or does that mean the wind is just about to reverse, drive the fire in the opposite direction, and creating chaos?

One signal—the calming wind—could mean different things. It’s ambiguous.

Uncertain just means you aren’t sure.

If we have to pick between ambiguity and uncertainty, I think the ambiguity is more important to understand and focus on. I think firefighters get in more trouble by misreading the fire, than by feeling unsure what fire will do.

I guess you might regard ambiguity as a specific sub-set of uncertainty, if so I think the slightly narrower concept of ambiguity is a higher priority than the broader concept of uncertainty.