In his new book Shop Class as Soulcraft, political philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Michael B. Crawford examines value of manual labor and craftsmanship. He concludes, among other things, that the meaning of such work lies in the pursuit of excellence, which is evidenced in two ways: the objective quality of one’s work product and the recognition of one’s mastery by other skilled craftsmen. Crawford argues convincingly that much of what passes for work these days lacks such qualities by favoring conformity over quality.

Difficulty in reducing a job to a series of easily repeated steps described by rules or algorithms that one can rely on to produce repeatable results and consistent high quality distinguishes the kind of work Crawford considers most meaningful. This sort of work, he argues, defines culture in the form of shared meaning, and in doing so promotes a sense of community. Such qualities characterize work that relies on tacit knowledge, intuition and expertise. Crawford cites firefighting as an example of such a craft.

As members of that craft, we should carefully reflect on the question raised by Crawford’s analysis: Has our pursuit of rules, standards and measures diminished our profession? Are we lowering the bar rather than raising it when we equate quality with compliance?

Without a doubt, we have obligations to others outside our profession to prove our worth. Clearly, this is no mean feat. It begs of us the question, “What do others expect?” Our profession’s efforts to answer this question by reducing our internal values to a series of quantifiable measures such as response time, crew size and similar metrics diminishes the inherently qualitative nature of “a good stop” or a “righteous save” while neglecting altogether the cultural disposition required to sustain commitments to preventive measures. It also marginalizes the highly situational nature of these experiences, which often arises from more from opportunity than skillful execution.

The high esteem in which firefighters are held owes itself in no small measure to the subjective experience of how we conduct ourselves rather than any objective standard such as response time or crew size. People think we did a great job even when we know we didn’t simply because our crews responded in an orderly, focused, and compassionate fashion. In many ways, this is what really counts, not that people hold us in high esteem, but that we acted in a manner consistent with both their expectations and our own values.

As leaders in our profession, we have nothing less than a moral obligation to resist efforts to define agency in terms of simple rules or standards. We know that how we respond makes as much or more difference to the public than questions such as “how fast” or “how many.” Being a good fire chief requires us to respond to both communities — our profession and our jurisdiction — in ways that appeal to moral reason without resorting to oversimplification or moralistic prescription. We can start by asking both communities to consider carefully what qualities distinguish good work.

Monday’s decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in Ricci v. DeStafano (Docket No. 07-1428) does little to resolve long-standing questions about the proper place of race in public hiring and promotional processes. In siding with the appellant, the court has made the case that process (disparate treatment) outweighs results (disparate impact) in determining whether racial preferences have violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution of the United States.

Previous courts have ruled that results alone could could satisfy the “strong basis in evidence test” used to determine that a process was inherently biased and therefore flawed. Today’s decision swings the pendulum too far in the other direction by indicating that a sound process alone outweighs what many see as a flawed result.

It’s worth noting that the city of New Haven sought only to retest its candidates for promotion, not to deny promotions outright. Although the city had apparently gone to great lengths to ensure the fairness of its promotional exam, the written examination still produced an unexpected result.

That the result was unwelcome as well as unexpected should come as no surprise to anyone. Neither the white firefighters (and one Hispanic) whose promotions were put off by the decision to annul the test results nor the minority candidates who failed to score highly enough to warrant further consideration under the contested process won anything in today’s ruling. Whether the city will have to promote the highest scoring candidates remains undecided largely because the court failed to add anything substantive to the debate. Lower courts that now receive the case on remand will have to grope about for a remedy secure only in the knowledge that precedent is no guide.

If we had bothered to pay attention to history, we might have learned that process and results both matter. A fair process does not always produce results that everyone agrees are fair, especially when such results are projected against a backdrop of bias or neglect. Clearly, context matters (thank you Justice Ginsberg for noticing this in your minority opinion). Flawed results will only prove acceptable when people can all agree that the process was fair. This hardly seems likely in New Haven for the foreseeable future.

The people of New Haven and its firefighters have suffered through a long history of racial bias in hiring and promotion. If, as those supporting the court majority argue, transparency is required in public hiring and promotional processes, then why not adopt methods that favor diversity and ensure public service agencies reflect the communities they serve? By telling us only that the written exam’s results do not satisfy the “strong basis in evidence test,” the court has failed to provide any meaningful guidance as to what would justify an outcome as disparate as the one achieved in this case.

Respondents in this case did not argue that racial or ethnic diversity represents a “job-related business necessity” in a public work force consistent with the provisions of Title VII of the Civil Right Act. To many, such an argument would have been wrong on its face. Still others recognize that public employees do not serve themselves. Rather, they serve a public that longs for opportunities to see public employment as a means to build a better life for everyone in their community. Until employment practices achieve this end, no one can or should be satisfied with either the process or the results.

Communities everywhere are confronting difficult budget decisions the likes of which many leaders have never faced. Not since the early 1980s and in some cases the mid-70s have so many communities faced the combined problems of rising costs and falling revenues.

Mayors, commissioners, city managers and finance directors have finally succumbed to the realization that the public’s priorities and ability to pay for them are on a collision course. Unfortunately, many chiefs and unions have not yet arrived at that point.

Avoiding a collision requires someone to yield. In most cases, this means adjusting our priorities or finding altogether new ones since few state or local governments have the authority to fund deficit spending on operations. Even with the recently passed federal stimulus package, most communities have no choice but to cut back services in the near term.

This reveals the root of the problem facing fire and emergency services. Following the last big round of recessions in the mid-70s and early 80s — the unusually mild ones we experienced in the early 1990s and 2000s were little more than speed-bumps compared to the ditch we are now in — state and local governments have adopted many reforms to improve government efficiency and accountability. Relatively few of these interventions, however, have found their way into fire and emergency services delivery.

Now that is not to say such reforms did not have an effect on us. As jurisdictions looked harder at the way they delivered public safety services, chiefs and unions — prone to a sort of siege mentality around budgeting — formed an unnatural, if not unholy, alliance to set national standards and develop accreditation models.

The combined effect of the apparent labor/management compact and reasonably stable budget environments made it unattractive for communities to do anything other than go along without giving up. The result: Few jurisdictions recognized NFPA 1710, but most found it worthwhile to grudgingly accept recommendations that advanced their agencies toward compliance anyway. To recap, from the labor/management perspective using standards in place of sound reasoning about local conditions was not only simple, it was often successful.

In light of the current economic situation, our definition of success now requires close and careful scrutiny. Who benefits more from staffing and response time standards, firefighters or the citizens they serve? Who suffers when libraries close instead of fire stations? Which capability can the community more easily replace if government no longer delivers a service?

Benjamin Franklin, recognized by many as the father of the American fire service for his founding of a fire company funded by fire insurance premiums, first established schools, libraries, and other civic institutions. I suspect he could scarcely have imagined the fire service as it exists today. By the same token, I am supremely confident he saw investments in literacy, education, and civic participation to be his most important and lasting legacies, as indeed they are.

Franklin’s own writings underscore this sentiment: “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” Clearly, our reverence for Franklin does not spring from our acceptance of his sage advice or we would not so easily marginalize or even ignore his other words of wisdom, like “A penny saved is a penny earned” and “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” You get the picture.

Rather than looking for ways to bolster our arguments in support of more firefighters and shorter response times — the current NIST study comes to mind — we should be looking for ways to rebuild the community’s capacity to care for itself. I am not talking about a return to purely volunteer fire companies in every city, but I am thinking about ways we can support badly needed reforms in the way we deliver and pay for health service for instance.

As the current economic crisis plays out we would do well to look at some of the genuine innovations spawned by the last big dips we faced almost 30 years ago. These included the creation of fire investigation task forces to combat arson, fire service involvement in the model code development process, a renewed commitment to fire and life safety education and the creation of new school-based curricula, improvements in personal protective equipment, new radio and computer-aided dispatch systems, lightweight response vehicles, and the introduction of fire service-based emergency medical services. All of these innovations occurred in large measure because of — not in spite of — meager resources and tough budget conditions.

This all suggests the time has come to take off our fire helmets and put on our thinking caps. The destiny of fire and emergency services is in our hands if only we choose to take hold of it and be creative.

Late last month in Minneapolis, the fire service and its industry partners secured final confirmation of changes to the International Residential Code that will provide communities with mandates for the installation of automatic fire sprinklers in new one- and two-family dwellings. After years of active opposition from home-builders, lackluster support from the sprinkler industry, and ambivalence in many quarters of the fire service, this milestone represents the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end.

Who would have imagined that such a long-sought change in fundamental life-safety requirements would come just as the housing sector in some markets around the country is in a freefall? How will the prospect of a worldwide economic crisis affect efforts to implement the new fire sprinkler requirements?

While home builders decried fire sprinklers suggesting they would render housing unaffordable, housing markets in most parts of the country surged ahead at a pace hardly seen before. While home values ballooned, new home prices soared higher than many families could afford. These conditions coincided with rising costs of energy to heat and cool homes, questionable lending practices, and lax (perhaps non-existent) regulatory oversight.

The deep and damaging recession that many homeowners fear may already have begun. Just as we have seen the crisis influence the politics around the race for president, we can be sure that it will affect the local politics surrounding the adoption of the residential code and its new fire sprinkler requirement.

Communities that already have an oversupply of housing or home values less than the mortgages held by their owners will be reluctant to adopt new requirements while homes sit vacant and more families become homeless. That should neither come as a surprise nor cause much concern, since very little building subject to the new code will occur until conditions ease significantly.

In communities that have blessedly avoided such calamities, lack of access to or the high cost of credit will make it difficult for homeowners or their builders to justify any costs they could otherwise avoid. They will have no trouble finding political support to keep costs low and restore housing affordability and price stability.

Neither firefighters nor the communities they serve will want to see economic conditions curtail the level of fire service. In some communities though, the costs of providing these services, like the costs of housing, have become unsustainable. When a community can afford neither housing nor its fire department, which do you think it will work harder to keep?

Firefighters can do little to make fire sprinklers more economical or attractive to homeowners. They can make sure people do not have to choose between fire sprinklers and their fire service by recognizing that fire sprinkler requirements reduce demand for fire services. Fire chiefs who want their communities to adopt the new fire sprinkler requirements must look for ways to change their departments‘ structures, improve systems and reduce costs to help communities recoup these investments.

As the city of Vallejo, Calif., races toward bankruptcy, firefighter unions are asking “Why us?” But they should be asking “What next?”

An article in the San Jose Mercury News reports that Vallejo, a medium-sized city at the northern end of the San Francisco Bay, faces a $6 million budget shortfall this year with a deficit of $14 million projected next year. And Vallejo may be nothing more than the tip of a very large iceberg.

The paper cites public employee pay and benefit spirals spawned by two problems — comparisons among communities rather than comparable private sector jobs and binding arbitration decisions — for unsustainable public safety payrolls. Rising overtime claims, fueled by cozy relationships with unions and among employees to help colleagues boost their pensions, also erode efforts to improve the certainty and security of public safety budgets.

Like most cities, public safety consumes the lion‘s share of municipal revenues in Vallejo. Fire and police salaries and benefits consume the vast majority of that large slice of the municipal budget pie. Unlike many of their peers in other cities, Vallejo firefighters have enjoyed significant wage increases at a time when revenues have remained more or less stagnant. A new wage agreement in 2007 granted firefighters a 9% pay hike while maintaining employer contributions to the generous CALPERS retirement system.

An independent citizens’ group, citing information obtained from city payroll records, demonstrated that the median income of a uniformed Vallejo Fire Department official in 2006 topped $157,000, while the median income of Vallejo residents sat around $54,000. The top-paid fire department employee’s W-2 form reported a whopping $359,000 in gross income during his last year of employment, a figure that would appear to guarantee a pension wage equal to or greater than the average enjoyed by his still-working former colleagues.

Community activists have accused the local firefighter union leaders and high-ranking fire department officials with nothing short of corruption in the handling of firefighter pay issues. Claims and counterclaims have consumed local media coverage and public discourse for much of the past year without resolving the looming fiscal crisis.

An outside observer might reasonably wonder whether either side in the Vallejo budget dispute recognizes its complicity in this disaster. Firefighters, like other public servants, deserve a decent wage for their work. Most public servants receive generous benefits that make up, in part, for pay that usually lags behind comparably qualified private-sector occupations. They also receive employment conditions that protect their tenure to a far greater degree than most other workers and generally have enjoyed greater consideration of tenure than performance in pay and promotional decisions.

Local elected officials agreed to the generous employment and remuneration conditions for Vallejo firefighters despite ample evidence that their conditions not only were fair, but also were competitive. By committing to these conditions despite ample demands for fiscal restraint — remember Proposition 13? — they bound their fellow citizens to a commitment they clearly cannot keep.

When firefighters employed under collective agreements are earning more than the exempt executives overseeing their departments and many private-sector senior executives and professionals, it seems reasonable to ask what‘s wrong with this picture. When firefighters‘ average salaries and benefits are nearly three times the local median wage, citizens could reasonably question the morality of the situation.

“We deserve whatever we can get,” is not a reasonable answer to reasonable remuneration for firefighters. The dangers of the job do not justify additional pay; they demand a well-trained and engaged work force that practices what it preaches.

The days when fire department vacancies attracted hundreds of applicants for a handful of jobs may be gone, but so too is any illusion that candidates for fire department jobs require special qualities beyond a simple and deeply felt desire to serve. As such, competition for candidates should be seen as a need to invest more money in firefighter training and fire prevention instead of higher pay and better benefits.

Leading Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama has outlined a plan for a program to promote public service and civic engagement in exchange for college tuition benefits. Notwithstanding concerns about the prospective costs of the Democrat‘s proposal, Republican frontrunner Sen. John McCain unsurprisingly seems to support calls for national service. The success of these efforts will depend on local opportunities to engage young people in activities that serve the needs of their fellow citizens. And few needs rank higher among citizens than safety and security.

Before the unions tell us why engaging young people as volunteer firefighters or EMTs will undermine the safety of the community or firefighters mdash; and they will say that — we better ask ourselves what we are prepared to do to see something like this work. Firefighters have an overriding obligation to serve their communities not just themselves. If they can’t or won’t reconcile their interests with those of their communities, we must not only support efforts to encourage a national service program that will supply communities with the willing and able volunteers needed to ensure their protection, but also do everything we can to make sure it succeeds.

For decades, American school children have practiced fire drills as often as monthly to ensure they react safely and swiftly in the event of fire. The fire code requirements mandating these exercises stemmed from disasters that claimed dozens of young lives and remain in effect despite — if not because of — the fact so few have perished in similar circumstances since they took effect.

The conditions under which such requirements came into force bears some scrutiny today as at least one school district in Maryland asks whether fire drills have become outmoded, if not simply outdated.

Neglected maintenance and decaying school infrastructure — which included combustible interior finishes, unprotected exit pathways, and poor maintenance or outright absence of fire-safety features like alarms and manual firefighting equipment — contributed to disaster. The 1958 fire at Our Lady of Angels school in Chicago, which claimed the lives of 92 children and three teachers, serves as a chilling example of what can happen. This fire, more than any other, served as the impetus for most of the requirements we take for granted today.

We could ask ourselves whether things have changed much. Many school districts cite aging infrastructure and competition over declining tax revenues as a major concern. At the same time, they face new threats never really envisioned when the current fire code requirements first came into effect.

School violence has jumped ahead of fire safety as a concern in most schools, although recent evidence that such dangers are less prevalent today that just a few years ago.

Nevertheless, at the insistence of parents and politicians, many schools have instituted comprehensive security programs that include access control, barriers, and individual screening. Armed security guards now patrol schools in many communities, meaning that firearms are now commonplace on many campuses.

In response to advice from security consultants and experience of massacres like the Columbine High School shootings in April 1999, many schools have gone so far as to institute complex lockdown procedures for securing students in classrooms in the event of an “active shooter” incident.

Decisions about whether to stay or go during a fire make a crucial difference in who lives and who dies. Neither strategy works flawlessly all of the time, and which action works best in any set of circumstances requires careful consideration of both what is happening and what is already in place to manage its continued development.

In essence then, fire drills have already moved from being simple rule-based exercises in which everyone follows a simple set of instructions that are more or less standard for any public building — hear the alarm, get out, and stay out — to very particular instructions tailored to individual buildings and quite often tailored to the very peculiar ways in which each of these buildings and the people within them operate.

By their nature, fire code requirements have difficulty accommodating the necessity of such diversity. We would like to believe that by reducing complex problems to their essence, we can discern a set of rules by which everyone will be properly instructed in what is safe.

Maybe the time has come for us to reconsider the purpose of fire drills. I can think of no better context for such reconsideration of their utility than schools. We can start by deciding whether fire drills represent a test or simply an opportunity to practice and learn not only what works best but how to appreciate what makes it work when needed.

Fire drills work poorly as tests, unless, of course, we take the opportunity to learn from what went right, what went wrong, or at least what we can improve the next time. The efficient conduct of fire drills involves much more than assessing the travel time of students and staff. The time it takes to get everyone where they need to be depends more on how long it takes them to decide the proper course of action and implement their decision. Even necessary distractions like determining where particular students are or whether the fire blocks an escape route can have a significant effect on the time taken to complete an evacuation.

With the introduction of complex security procedures in schools, the decisions teachers must make about what to do and how to do it have become much more involved than they were right after the Our Lady of Angels tragedy. When a fire alarm sounds, we like to think that we need not think about whether it signals a real fire or not, the action should be the same either way. But now we must consider whether the activation of a fire alarm places teachers and pupils at-risk if the sounding alarm is used as a means to draw people into the line of fire.

Despite the fact the number of school children and teacher dying due to gunfire in schools is dropping, it remains evident that this risk remains as high or higher than that from fires. If we are truly committed to the safety of schools, we should be thinking of ways to ensure they prepare those who use them for all sorts of emergencies.

We know the importance of exercises and experience in honing the effectiveness of fireground decision-makers. Why not apply the same reasoning to the preparing school administrators, teachers, and staff who must look after the safety of young people in the ever more complex world in which we live? In the absence of significant new spending on school buildings, we are becoming ever more reliant on their ability to get things right.

Since Alan Brunacini wrote the Essentials of Fire Department Customer Service in 1996, fire and emergency services agencies have engaged in vigorous discussions about ways to add value to their service by focusing on “Mrs. Smith.” This trend echoed the emergence of a broader emphasis on performance and accountability in the public sector as a whole, which often placed customer charters and customer service expectations on par with privatization and competitive tendering for public services as ideals in the delivery of government services.

The ever-expanding needs of Mrs. Smith have driven a revolutionary repositioning of fire departments as the agencies people turn to when no one else will help. This shift started long before Brunacini gave these expectations a name. Firefighters’ desire to be of service have provided fire departments with opportunities and challenges alike. Many communities have experienced declining fire incidence and fire death rates in spite of — rather than because of — their fire departments’ lack of attention to fire prevention, yet they have not enjoyed a “peace dividend” largely because fire departments can count on increasing response demands for non-fire services to justify their budget requests.

In an attempt to restore balance to the debate about efficiency, effectiveness, economy and equity in the provision of public services, citizen-focus and civic engagement recently have replaced customer service as organizational imperatives. The difference between citizens and customers distinguishes the public service ethos from the quid pro quo motives of private enterprises. Understanding how to engage citizens rather than serve customers should then represent a core function and top priority for any public entity. Getting a grip on how people appreciate and value public services can provide public managers with insights into new or different ways of meeting community expectations, often without increasing costs.

The ways public agencies interact with and serve their citizens vary widely depending upon their operational functions and the nature of the communities they serve. In this sense, communities include not only the residents or inhabitants of the political subdivision overseeing the public service entity, but also the communities of interest that influence the public agenda.

Placing the various forms of civic engagement between a public agency and its citizens along a continuum will help illustrate how leaders can improve, expand or at least alter the interactions between their agencies and communities to improve service performance, efficiency and accountability. Such improvements offer the possibility, if not the promise, of durable, constructive and respectful relationships between citizens and public agencies.

Communication. At the most basic level, public agencies communicate with citizens. Efforts to communicate with citizens often involve little more than efforts to inform or educate people about the agency or its activities. In some cases, communication with citizens seeks to change their behavior as a means of fulfilling the public agency’s mission. As the relationship between an agency and citizens evolves, communication often becomes both an activity or output of the agency and an input into its processes. When communication from the public influences an agency’s agenda or programs, then it advances along the continuum toward consultation.

Consultation. When public agencies consult their communities, they seek information from citizens to guide them in the development of policies, the implementation of programs, or the evaluation of results. Consultation involves active listening as distinct from simple hearing. Rather than providing a forum for the expression of opinions and the venting of frustrations, effective consultation yields valuable insights into the aspirations and expectations of citizens and communities. Effective consultation can help build consensus, but failing that can still assure opponents that their concerns have been given appropriate consideration.

Cooperation. Public agencies that find themselves regularly confronting controversial issues often find it appropriate to apply the old adage, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Cooperating with key stakeholders to identify problems, determine priorities, or evaluate alternative solutions helps ensure that public service remains aligned to the public agenda without turning the organization’s direction or operation over to special interests. Cooperation with key stakeholders falls short of slipping toward direct democracy, and properly understood and applied it builds the public agency’s capacity to anticipate and respond to public expectations without compromising the interests of the public officials ultimately responsible for organizational governance.

Partnership (co-production). Public agencies can’t meet every demand placed on them. And in many cases they cannot deliver what’s really required. In such instances, public agencies often find it valuable, if not imperative, to engage citizen stakeholders in the enterprise of delivering service to affected communities. In some instances, public participation augments agency capabilities by working alongside existing delivery systems. In other cases, it replaces public agency delivery systems altogether by providing a more efficient or effective means of meeting public expectations. Often, but certainly not always, the public agency retains overall authority and responsibility for policy decisions and the overall direction, but depends on partner organizations for program delivery.

Participation (collaboration). In some special circumstances, public agencies find it not only possible but desirable to enter into relationships with their citizens and communities that involve either shared decision-making or action. These processes often involve carefully crafted discourse, reasoned deliberations, and decisions taken by consensus. In a few instances, public agencies turn the decision-making process over to citizens entirely, and assume the sole role of service provider or policy implementer. The effective execution of this sort of engagement often requires public officials to display extraordinary leadership skills as facilitators rather than directors.

Few fire and emergency services agencies ever get beyond the communication stage of civic engagement. We often mistake the highly favorable opinions of citizens as an indicator that consultation on important matters is unnecessary because people trust us implicitly. As a consequence, we often marginalize the opinions of nay-sayers or opponents of public safety programs, concluding that they are a small and disaffected minority operating far outside the mainstream.

When we do engage in co-production, we often compromise its effectiveness by systematically co-opting program participants, leaving little distinction between their interests and our own. This has the effect of aligning their interests to ours, rather than vice versa, which leads us to believe that our actions are already congruent with the public interest rather than a only narrow segment of it that happens to share our perspective.

Turning the future over to others is the farthest thing from the minds of most fire and emergency services executives. Conventional wisdom seems to suggest that decisions about public safety should be kept as far away from the public as possible. Efforts to develop and impose staffing and response time standards on fire departments through NFPA 1710 and NFPA 1720 are a classic examples of an intention to undermine, if not overturn, the public will.

Getting to know Mrs. Smith has helped fire and emergency services look beyond ourselves. Now is the time for us to expand the conversation and get to know others in our communities. By engaging our communities outside the usual discourse of emergencies and customer service we can have the opportunity to gain understandings that can help us mediate conflicts between competing conceptions of what’s good and what’s right such as who pays, who benefits, how much things cost, and what kinds of alternative arrangements exist. If we truly open ourselves us to what citizens have to offer, we might discover that they know a lot more than customers do and care much more deeply about how we operate and how well we perform.

If art imitates life, the fire service should ask itself what kind of message it is sending these days about our ethics. In a recent episode of the long-running cartoon sitcom The Simpsons, Homer and his friends become volunteer firefighters after a drug-addled Homer crashes his car into the Springfield fire station, disabling the town’s firefighters.

As Homer, Moe, Principal Skinner and Apoo begin receiving recognition, respect and rewards from their fellow Springfield citizens for their efforts, they begin to assume a sense of entitlement. When Mr. Burns, Springfield’s most prominent resident, rebuffs their requests for reward, they begin helping themselves to the spoils of war with the red devil.

As Homer’s behavior begins to spin out of control, Marge and Lisa force him to confront his demons before he loses their respect or further erodes his dignity. As his fellow volunteers scramble for booty in the next burning building they enter, it starts to collapse, literally as well as figuratively. Homer rises to the occasion, rescuing his fellow firefighters from both the fire and the consequences of their looting. All ends well with Homer recognizing that a job well-done is its own reward, regaining his self-respect and the admiration of his loving family.

Good satire always has at its core a kernel of truth. What truth then does this episode reveal about us?

Has the fire service become just another vocal, disaffected self-interest group? Are we signaling the community that we not only deserve their respect but also demand rewards for our service beyond reasonable compensation for our labor and expenses? What does our behavior say about our values? Others can only judge our ideals through our actions. What are we doing to promote ethics and sound moral reasoning among our firefighters?

I recently helped conduct interviews for the appointment of a chief fire officer in a metropolitan fire department. The candidates each were given 10 minutes to prepare a five-minute presentation on a project with which they had been involved, either as a leader or participant, that either promoted or embodied one or more of five key values: service to community, skill, integrity, adaptability and camaraderie. These presentations were, on the whole, disappointing. Ten minutes does not give you enough time to think too long or hard about what you want to say, and as such it minimizes if not eliminates the opportunity to baffle with BS when unable to dazzle with brilliance.

Values are something you feel, and what I saw suggests that we don’t feel too deeply about what we’re doing these days.

Of the four presentations, the two most consistently overlooked of the five values were integrity and service to community. Skills, adaptability and camaraderie strike me more as means than ends. Each of the presentations that emphasized these values suggested in one way or another how the things we do enhance our value to the community (in contrast to increasing the value we deliver to the community) and reinforce our sense of loyalty to one another. I couldn’t help thinking that anyone outside our organization hearing these presentations might need to be forgiven for thinking that we were only in the fire department for ourselves.

Despite my sense of disappointment, even despair, at the quality of the presentations I heard and what they might say about ethics in the fire service, I remain firmly of the view that firefighters join the service out of a sense of longing to be part of something bigger than themselves. They, like most of us, genuinely wish to be of service to others. The rewards for such service come from the tacit knowledge that they are, with our support and guidance, making the world a better place simply through their willingness to put their lives on the line for others.

Of course, we want to minimize the risks we face as well as those we expose our firefighters to. That is only rational and responsible behavior. But we should also want to know that what we do makes a difference, both for us and for those we serve. Too often these days, we seem to avoid situations where we can be assured of making a difference simply because the work that produces those results is not accompanied by the same level or risk and accompanying recognition and reward we get from fighting a big fire or making a daring rescue.

We should see serving the community as a privilege and a calling, not just a job. We should not tolerate a sense of entitlement within our ranks or promote the idea that firefighting is any more noble or necessary than the other vocations we depend upon to make our communities safe, comfortable, prosperous, enjoyable and just places to live. None of this precludes promoting a sense of pride in our profession or recognizing our accomplishments so long as we remember that we are here for others not ourselves.

Getting right with ourselves means getting right with the communities for whom we work and appreciating that their world does not and should not revolve around us. Every community has its Montgomery Burns. If we depend on their recognition as our reward we will inevitably succumb to bitterness and a sense of entitlement. As Homer learned the hard way, when we respect ourselves and place the needs of others first, we will always enjoy a far greater reward, one that can’t be taken from us.

The great Chicago architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once quipped, “less is more.” His pioneering vision stripped buildings down to their bare essentials and restored a sense of human scale and purpose to the urban form.

The fire service could learn a lot from modernist architects. Rather than turning their backs on their profession, Mies, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius deconstructed and renewed architecture by focusing on its essential purpose: making buildings work for people. How could we make the fire service work better for our communities?

In recent years, fire agencies around the developed world have pursued a modernization agenda that has seen an unprecedented expansion of the services they offer the public. But do people really need these services or do they use them because they have already paid for them?

Look closely at who pays and who benefits when fire agencies deliver these services. Until recently, the provision of fire and rescue services was widely, if not universally, considered a public good. Public goods have two distinctive characteristics: anyone can use them and the use by one individual does not diminish the amount available for someone else to consume. For the most part, fire service meets the first part of this test. But as the consumption of these services rises because of free access and diversification of service offerings, the quality and the quantity of service available to others has come under increasing pressure.

The fire service has argued vigorously that the supply of services should expand to meet rising demands as a way of preserving the public good character of the service. But these arguments are tainted by the fact that in most cases calls for such expansion benefit those delivering the service more than those consuming the service by creating more jobs and pushing managerial pay scales higher.

One way of managing demands involves charging fees for certain services. This simple act transforms the service provided for a fee into a private good rather than a public good; the value extracted from the consumption is related directly to both the consumer’s ability and willingness to pay. Inability to pay excludes people who might need the service from enjoying its consumption or requires others to cross-sibsidize their consumption when efforts to collect the fee fail. Willingness to pay encourages rivalry as competing conceptions of the value derived from the service by the consumer drive demand for its consumption at various price points. Cost recovery or fees for attendance at false alarms are a good case in point. Many building owners would rather pay for fire service attendance at false alarm rather than upgrade their fire alarm systems.

Fire and rescue services have historically avoided fees for service because they marginalize or exclude the most vulnerable in society from consuming the services. When this happens, others in the community can suffer undesirable consequences even if they could otherwise afford to pay and would be willing to do so to avoid the harm caused by another’s failure to consume the service when it was truly needed, especially when doing so sooner rather than later would reduce the costs and consequences for all concerned. Economists refer to this situation as a negative externality.

Many fire and emergency services recognize externalities can be either negative or positive. As such, many enabling statutes specifically preclude charges for services that benefit others besides those who deliver and consume them, like fire prevention services. Oddly, some fire departments take exactly the opposite stance, charging for fire prevention activities such as plan review and inspection services because they relate to specific projects and require permits or regulatory consent and involve profit-motive transactions among the other participants.

In the absence of simple and accessible ways of reducing the costs of maintaining fire service as a public good, many fire and emergency services have sought to extract greater value from each unit of investment and production as a means of increasing efficiency.

Innovators recognize four primary pathways for improving products and services:

1. Change the product or service;




2. Add accessories;




3. Add complementary products or services; and




4. Enhance the product or service delivery channel.

The fire service has pursued the last three of these pathways with vigor. But have we ever really established though whether the services we provide are the right ones for our communities? A close look at the situation reveals significant inconsistencies in our own expectations, not just those of the communities we serve.

Instead of seeking additional fire sprinkler requirements as an alternative form of fire service delivery or granting financial incentives for the installation of protection beyond minimum building code requirements, many communities and fire service advocates are seeking both higher building standards and the adoption of minimum staffing and response time requirements in their communities. If firefighters believe, as they suggest, that sprinklers will mean smaller, less threatening fires, then why would fire departments need to maintain high staffing and low response-time standards when more buildings are better protected? The answer lies in the large proportion of existing buildings that will require protection despite our best efforts to raise the bar for others.

How then can we improve protection and lower the costs of providing fire safety for our communities. We can start by considering how economic incentives influence the choices people in our communities make. If we continue to increase the range and scope of services we provide as a means of increasing productivity then the internal efficiencies we achieve may come at the cost of community welfare when demand for these “free” services outstrips our ability to meet community expectations. Doing fewer things better as a means of improving the economic efficiency of our agencies may require us to consider ways of encouraging greater consumption of preventive services and those activities that promote positive externalities.

Less can be more if rediscover the essential truth about fire services: people are prepared to protect what they value. We can restore a human scale to our service and make fire and rescue services work for people even before they find themselves in strife. Doing this will require us to tailor our service to the community’s preference for prevention rather than cure. Making such changes will ensure that benefits accrue to both those who pay and those who consume our services.