Fire Chief

There was an article in The Washington Post of significance to those of you who need to and want to influence people. The article talks about a young California woman who suffered unwanted attention after her photo was included in a sports blog. There were significant statistics in the article that we should pay attention to and are relevant to connecting us with people. The Washington Post described how, “she had more than 1,000 new messages on her My Space page. A three-minute video of [I am redacting the subject’s name because I don’t want to perpetuate her problem] standing against a wall and analyzing her performance at another meet had been posted on YouTube and viewed 150,000 times.”

This is critical stuff to the fire service. We could have people reading our recruiting message all over the world. What is of interest to the fire service is our constant need to facilitate positive attention to market ourselves, recruit the best and brightest new members, change people’s risky behavior, and compete for scarce resources. Even if we choose not to enter this venue, we need to know that other successful organizations will. This will be our benchmark. Trust me (no wait, you don’t know me that well yet, do you?). Even though the environment is changing, the mechanics of connecting has not changed much. What has changed is the speed by which it operates. The Washington Post article reinforced the power I had begun to notice about networking electronically. This power can be negative as described above or unbelievably positive.

While there is some luck (Denis Waitley considers luck an acronym meaning “laboring under correct knowledge”) to getting influential information to target recipients, there is a growing body of information about how information, fads, fame and notoriety can spread like a virus. In the best-selling book The Tipping Point, author and researcher Malcom Gladwell describes how concepts and ideas can go from obscurity to all the rage. It’s mostly due to factors that are as common in spreading an idea as a sneeze and contaminated hands are to spreading disease. One critical component of this process is a key person called a connector who generally makes a great effort to know many people from diverse backgrounds, careers and interests. Connectors are either sought out to spread the word about something, or they have a natural process for this as they communicate within a network of peers and friends. They also generally carry established legitimacy, which makes any message more readily received and forwarded.

Consider the number of legislative bills passed in the last two years related to flammability standards for cigarettes. One critical element is people who can connect the issue to people who vote, both on the assembly floor and for the legislators. Those people contacted by the connector, if convinced of the legitimacy of the issue to be supported, then will flood the legislators with e-mail and faxes to state their support. Those people who send the faxes and e-mails often will be connectors themselves and will send the message to their sphere of influence. Before you know it, the support increases exponentially in relation to the effectiveness of each connector’s sphere of influence. Elected officials monitor their mail like a cardiac monitor in the cardiac-care unit. The electronic communication process makes it easier because it takes little more than pressing “send.”

If a connector becomes aware of important information that can help someone else or just wants to recommend a consistently good restaurant, he or she generally tells someone about it, usually within a familiar and well-established network. Two important fire service connectors are Chief Ronny J. Coleman and Chief Billy Goldfeder. These two connected people have built long-term relationships and contacts as they went about doing their jobs, delivering speeches, teaching, writing in national journals and, in general, connecting.

Chief Coleman has a very powerful and long-term profile of connectedness. His is one of more traditional routes that took many years to establish and — key to connectors — continues to grow. He will cross paths with his connections time and time again. My first exposure to him came when I used his book as a college text in my “Strategy and Tactics” class at Montgomery Community College. In 1984 I attended the ISFSI Company Officer Development I course in Framingham, Mass., where Ron presented several subjects and was the first fire service person I had heard to talk about the benefits of reading both Fortune and Ms. magazines to broaden your sphere of knowledge and awareness. I have also had monthly doses of topical interest from Coleman’s “Chief’s Clipboard” column.

While I have had many other direct and indirect contacts with Chief Coleman (and remain possibly an unidentified connection to him), these connections with me and thousands of other people are important to his sphere of influence. Just last week I had the opportunity to talk to him directly at the International Code Council Hearings in Rochester, N.Y. Ronny testified on behalf of the fire service and the fire protection industry in favor of an effort to include a requirement for residential sprinklers in the International Building Code for residential structures.

In 23 years I have had an unusual number of contacts with Chief Colemen. Many of you probably have as well and also will have had similar experiences with other connectors, such as Dennis Compton, Meri-K Appy, R. Wayne Powell and Billy Goldfeder. If you visually mapped out all these people and their interactions with you, there would be a very interesting web of interconnections and influence between them all.

Billy Goldfeder has built a base of connectiveness not unlike Coleman’s. The difference is Billy’s targeted use of electronic media to deliver information. He has used an Web site and e-newsletters to build a widely seen, effectively delivered, and highly relevant and repeated message about firefighter safety and survival. Possibly with all the other attention being paid to firefighter safety and survival, such as “Everyone Goes Home” and the National Firefighter Near-Miss Reporting System, the context for the ongoing message was ideal for an information epidemic, and word spread in an extraordinarily short period of time.

My first contact with Billy was around 1989 when he was director of a fire and rescue service in my region. Billy had done some work and research into increasing assignment, recruitment and retention of volunteers. At the time my department was researching ways to better facilitate and assign human resources, and we were looking at how we could schedule volunteers to fill staffing gaps. I talked to Billy at that time, but I hadn’t heard much about him until 2005 when I heard about his extraordinary presentations on firefighter safety and survival. That same year Billy was awarded a “President’s Award” from then-IAFC President Robert DiPoli for his safety work.

Around the same time, Billy was getting his now incredible FirefighterCloseCalls.Com established online. Billy’s experience is the positive counterpart to the negative story mentioned earlier. He is a prime example of how connecting helps to spread ideas and influence. I recently asked Billy about how many people he has on his lists. The list of formal subscribers to his electronic newsletter “The Secret List” is one known layer of a huge network. Beyond the formal layer of subscribers is a downstream information system where the list is handed off to an extraordinary informal network that is hard to conceive. Here are recent statistics related to Chief Goldfeder’s site and e-new letter: “The Secret List goes direct to 80,000+ via our server … and gets forwarded to many, many more. The Web site gets 250,000+/- (average) unique hits monthly and 4 million hits monthly.” How about that for circulation?

None of us need to perform to the same remarkable degree as some of the people discussed here, but I hope you will see how strategic connectiveness begins to produce positive influence. Getting your message to stick is a subject I’ll look at in the future.