Episode 281: Action Demonstrates Priority in the Fire Service with Erin McGruder

Published 2025-07-03

Topics: Data & CAD, Health & Safety, Leadership, Training & VR

Episode notes

Let’s talk about practical, hands-on firefighter training:

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

In this episode:

What is durable learning, and why is it essential for firefighters?

How to create a culture of psychological safety?

Which data-driven tools can supplement training and help tackle evolving fireground hazards?

Hear from Erin McGruder - the Instructional Program Manager at Kansas Fire and Rescue Training Institute .

Erin shares her extensive experience as a firefighter, instructor, and National Fallen Firefighter Foundation advocate. She dives into transforming fire service training from outdated approaches to durable learning focused on real-world readiness.

Erin emphasizes how culture and technology must work together to drive meaningful change. Her insights offer a call to action for leaders and learners committed to firefighter safety and growth.

So take a listen to hear what she has to share!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

0:00 Intro
0:45 Erin McGruder joins
1:27 Erin's path into the fire service
2:58 Back in school
4:51 What effective training actually means
6:23 Training to the textbook versus the job
6:44 Durable learning
7:03 How Erin found NFFF
9:20 What the NFFF fellowship does
13:24 Learning from line of duty deaths and near misses
18:01 The next one to five years of instructional design
21:15 Technology that shortens the learning curve
25:54 Supplementing training and keeping what's good about culture
29:46 Change management and firefighter safety
35:57 What NERIS is and why it matters
39:38 How to get involved with NFFF
42:31 Erin's guiding principle
43:54 Wrap

Questions answered in this episode

What is durable learning and why does Erin McGruder emphasize it in fire service training?

Erin McGruder describes durable learning as having the skills, knowledge, and integration so that when a situation changes or you walk into a new scenario, you can retrieve those basic skills and apply them to the new situation. She says a lot of traditional training prepares firefighters for multiple choice tests, which is just recognition level, but multiple choice never put out a fire at 3 AM.

Hear it at 5:18

What does Erin McGruder say about how Kansas Fire and Rescue Training Institute tests instructor candidates?

Instead of multiple choice tests, Kansas uses demonstrability and open short answer, open book tests for discretionary time tasks where you would normally have resources. For skills that must be done at 3 AM with no resources, they use skill sheet testing for non-discretionary time. Erin McGruder says this approach tests competency in how the job is actually done.

Hear it at 18:21

How do NFFF staff rides help firefighters learn from line of duty deaths?

Erin McGruder says staff rides put participants on the actual scenes of fatalities where they meet incident commanders, people who knew the victims, and others involved in the response. They retrace the decisions that led to the fatality and often realize these may not have been dumb mistakes but decisions they might have made themselves. This helps with situational awareness and prepares others for similar incidents.

Hear it at 9:24

What is NERIS and why is Erin McGruder excited about it?

Erin McGruder explains that NERIS, the National Emergency Response Information System, is a new data warehouse being built for the fire service to replace older systems. It integrates weather reports and other live data feeds so firefighters can submit reports from their phones or tablets before returning to the station and have faster access to data from other departments and sources.

Hear it at 36:04

What does Erin McGruder mean by action demonstrates priority?

Erin McGruder says action demonstrates priority, a paraphrase of a Gandhi quote. She pairs it with the idea that to know better but not do better is to not know better. She explains that we can talk about what right looks like all day, but until we show up and demonstrate what right looks like, we are not facilitating true change.

Hear it at 43:11

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 281 transcript

Action Demonstrates Priority in the Fire Service with Erin McGruder

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Erin McGruder

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to the Smart Firefighting Podcast. Kevin Sofen here, where we cover all things related to the future of smart technology for first responders around the world. Please enjoy the show and let me know what you want to learn about next. Joining me today is Erin McGruder, a seasoned firefighter instructor and advocate for the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation, NFFF. Erin brings a wealth of experience and a commitment to transforming fire service training from straight memorization to durable real-world readiness. She shares how blending effective training, positive culture, and smart use of technologies can help firefighters stay safe and prepared. Let's dive into her insights on driving meaningful change within the fire service. Enjoy. Erin McGruder, happy Friday. How you doing?

[0:54] Erin McGruder: Doing great, Kevin. How are you today?

[0:56] Kevin Sofen: I'm doing well. Thank you for bearing with some of the audio challenges that we are facing, but that is the essence of the fire service. We triumph, we overcome, and we have multiple options.

[1:07] Erin McGruder: Yes, we have to maintain that rigid state of flexibility and observe Semper Gumby at all times.

[1:13] Kevin Sofen: Yes, redundancy, resiliency, just find a way to model my family is called FIO, figure it out, and we just figure it out, what we do.

[1:23] Erin McGruder: Yeah. Well, I'm glad we're connected. I'm excited for our conversation today.

[1:27] Kevin Sofen: Me too. So for those of us that don't know, Erin McGruder, tell me a little bit about you, your role, and kind of your path to the fire service.

[1:35] Erin McGruder: Yeah, so I've been in the fire service for just about 23 years now. I started with my local fire department as a volunteer firefighter EMT. I'm still with them, still running calls, still active. Also, through early onset into that journey as a firefighter EMT, I was able to join our state slash FEMA urban search and rescue team. So I've gotten the luxury to go out on a bunch of deployments there. I started in plans and technical info specialists, quickly migrated over to shared duties with canine. And then I got pulled into the state of Kansas as a canine handler. So I'm on two urban search and rescue teams. Along the way, I've also been tormenting some instructors and trying to make training better. I do contract work for some authors independently. I've done some work for fire engineering, some work for IFSDA, But when I made that jump from volunteer in the fire service to professional in the fire service was when I joined state training agency in Missouri about 10 years ago. So over the last 10 years, I've worked for Missouri and then transitioned to work for the state training agency in Kansas, who also does the IFSAC and PRO board certification for the state. And in my spare time, if you wanna call it that, I'm a board member for the International Society for Fire Service Instructors, and I'm an advocate and a fellow for the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation.

[2:54] Kevin Sofen: So just nothing going on? No. Just twiddling your thumbs.

[2:58] Erin McGruder: Lots of spare time that I fell with. I'm actually back in school right now, so.

[3:03] Kevin Sofen: You're back in school?

[3:04] Erin McGruder: I'm in school also, yes.

[3:05] Kevin Sofen: Okay, and tell us about that for a sec.

[3:08] Erin McGruder: So like a lot of people, I went and got a bachelor's of science degree. I say I have a BS in BS because I knew I wanted a degree to check a box. And I went, done with school, never doing this again. And the career that I was in with State Training Agency of Missouri, I said, you know, it's probably good to have a master's degree. So I went and got my master's in public administration. Ironically, at that time, I was the lead instructor, a lead instructor for my fire department. So nights and weekends, I was training with one methodology. And then my day job actually was creating PowerPoint because I was the curriculum specialist. And the way that we train nights and weekends, we did maybe 10 hours of PowerPoint for a firefighter one to hazmat awareness and ops class. And the way we did my day job was almost all PowerPoint with a little bit of skills. And those didn't really have the same outcome. And so I went back to school to see why did the nights and weekends hand-on training work so much better, but the prevalent standard in the fire service is the PowerPoint, which is super ineffective. So I started working on a doctorate in educational and psychology with emphasis on adult learning. So we're working towards that today.

[4:19] Kevin Sofen: Well, we sure need that more than ever, especially even we need that at any sort of trade show or industry event. Anything we could do to avoid having just a person on stage with PowerPoint and shoving it down people's throats about this concept. We need you for that because that is definitely one thing that I'm sick and tired of because we don't need any more people on stage screaming at PowerPoints at people.

[4:44] Erin McGruder: Yes, absolutely. So that's kind of my personal mission that I'm trying to help improve the training throughout the fire service.

[4:52] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, so I mean training seems to be a core focus of a lot of the work that you do and the essence of kind of how you got here today. I'd love to kind of hear more about training with your different hats on. I know you mentioned, you know, work with Missouri Task Force, with Kansas and NFFF, kind of a high-level question. What does the state of training in the fire service look like to you right now and kind of what does effective training actually mean?

[5:18] Erin McGruder: Those are huge questions and unfortunately the state of the fire service to kind of a cop-out to that answer is it's so relative. The objectives are so diverse. We've got the folks who train in a success when folks show up, sign the roster, maintain minimum level of consciousness. You know that's that's kind of the low level of the spectrum to me and if that's what they want to do they want to check the box then that's a success for them. But the high level to me is achieving durable learning. And what durable learning is we have the skills, we have the knowledge, we have the integration that when the situation in front of us changes or we walk into a new scenario, we can retrieve those basic skills and knowledge and apply them to the new situation. A lot of the traditional formats of training that we use prepares us for a multiple choice test, which often is just recognition level. Like we look at the three or four prompts and can we guess which one is the right winner? Do we know it when we see it? Which multiple choice never put out a fire at 3 AM that I'm aware of. If anybody has ever whipped out a multiple choice test to do their job in the fire source.

[6:22] Kevin Sofen: We're going to see how the job looks like.

[6:23] Erin McGruder: Yeah, exactly. A lot of the time I find that we're training in alignment with the textbook, because the textbook is written in correlation to a standard, but we're not training in correlation to the job, which is what we actually need to be doing. So when we train to the job, the rest of the pieces fall into the puzzle, if you will.

[6:44] Kevin Sofen: Well said. Durable learning. I need to Google that, but is that a common term or are we trademarking that or what?

[6:50] Erin McGruder: No, that's like all best curriculum development in the fire service, that's a product of R&D, which is rip off and duplicate. So yeah, that's definitely from educational texts that I've been reading.

[7:01] Kevin Sofen: Right on. Well, I really like that. And now kind of to kind of expand upon this durable learning within some of the hats that you're wearing a shirt that has the wonderful NFFF logo on it. Tell us about your role, kind of your path to NFFF. How did you find NFFF? How did you first get involved? And yeah, let's start there.

[7:21] Erin McGruder: Well, and it goes back to training. So, with Missouri, when I was working for Missouri Fire Rescue Training Institute, National Fallen Firefighter Foundation was an entity that would come in and deliver training on our behalf and that we would coordinate training with. So when I transitioned to Kansas Fire and Rescue Training Institute, that was an entity I knew that I'd worked with, I enjoyed the mission, and I wanted to keep working with them. So I reached out to NFFF to say, hey, can we get your programming? Can we get your classes here, especially for our conferences and fire schools? And they said, sure, absolutely. But you got to do something for us. You got to be a part of the team. And so that's how I actually got into in triple F as a formal advocate process. But the information, the relationship I'd had for them with yours, the working with them all had value. Unfortunately, it's value we had to realize very promptly on the back end as well when my agency had a line of duty death. So even though we've taken advantage of the training and whatnot, being a part of that process that they run and the support through the last teams of coming in supporting the line of duty death families and funerals and whatnot. So I've been much more engaged with the organization than I ever wanted to be, but it's always been a very fruitful engagement and beneficial. And every time I work with the vast network of people I've met through NFFS, I always feel smarter, I always feel better, I always feel like I have things I can take back and share with others. And it's just a fabulous arrangement and they are an amazing resource for the fire service.

[8:52] Kevin Sofen: Likewise, anytime I spend, have a lunch or get to spend time with Victor Stagnaro, Gary Krichbaum or the Network of Fellows, which I want to dive into. I always feel like I want to run through a brick wall with passion and excitement and drive to just continue to do whatever we can to make the fire service better, faster, safer, smarter. And you kind of touched on earlier about your role as a fellow and there was this kind of fellowship program with an NFFF. What is this NFFF fellowship and what's the scope? What's it mean? And what's the cadre of a fellowship working to do?

[9:24] Erin McGruder: To use a great cliche that's totally honest, it's one of the best kept secrets in the fire service. So the NFFF fellowship program had been through a couple of iterations before I got into the program. And with the leadership we have right now, every iteration seems to be bigger and better. We just did our introduction of the fourth cohort at the Congressional Fire Service Institute in Washington DC their annual dinner. And so it was kind of a little bit of an outgoing for my cohort three and an incoming for cohort four. And so we got that face to face blend for a couple days to share our experience with them answer. and hear expectations for their group and what they're going to be going forward in the next 12 to 18 months. And it really is exciting to hear the programming they're going to get to go through. For instance, the transition period this year, we had a two day course on emotional regulation and some of those characteristics and life skills you need as an emerging leader in the fire service. We also learn about advocacy. How do we talk to our leaders? How do we talk to our representatives? How do we help make things improve instead of just sitting in the back of the classroom and going, oh, this is crap, nothing ever gets better. So the skills and the experiences they give us as a fellow challenges us and empowers us to step forward and start being a player in the fire service to help make things better. Some of the offshoots the other programs we do as fellows is we do staff rides, which I at first when I heard we're going to go do staff rides, it's like a free vacation. sounds great. But it really emotionally challenges you. Sometimes they physically challenge you. And there's so much information that comes back that you didn't expect. Like for instance, two of the staff rides I did last year was we went to Prescott, Arizona, and we did the Granite Mountain Hot Shot staff ride. And then we went to West Texas for the fertilizer plant explosion. And in both of these staff rides, we met with people who were on the scenes of these incidents, incident commanders. We met with people who knew the victims personally. We met with, you know, folks who had part of that response package. And we went to the scene of the fatalities. And we looked at the course of the events and the decisions that were known or the decisions that were anticipated that led to the fatality. And when you retrace those steps, and you talk to those people, it resonates that this may not have been a dumb mistake. This might have been something that we would have made the same decisions. And in hindsight, how do we help others have better situational awareness, or how do we have others better prepared for when this thing comes next to the fire service near them. And some of the things you don't expect to learn, like the consistency in the incident commanders talking about when, you know, five months and 29 days after the incident, you know, they're served with papers for wrongful death, for the lawsuits from families that come out afterwards, and the toll it takes on their families. And the realization, one of the major takeaways I took was, a lot of times we end the fire service come home and we had a rough day. And we don't want to share that with our families because we don't want to involve them. We don't want to drag them down with us. So what we do is we try to compensate and we do a poor job at it. So now our families are looking at us like, God, why is he or she mad at me? What did I do wrong? They have to live through the tension, but we don't give them the grace of the context of how we're hurting or why we're hurting. That creates an all new issue at home that we didn't protect them, we handcuff them largely. It's like messages like that of, hey, we need to be open and honest and transparent with everybody we're communicating with, so that our communications are better, so that our support system can actually support us. As a fellow for the NFFF, I didn't know what I was getting when I got into it, but there's no way I could have imagined the breadth of information and experience that I would have ever gotten from this. It's been a stellar program and I'm so jealous for Cohort 4 and what they're doing next and the future cohorts to come.

[13:24] Kevin Sofen: And you mentioned in some of your work within the fellowship, I mean, going and investigating some of those tragedies that happened and sort of acknowledging that, hey, if I was in those shoes, maybe I would have done the same thing. So it wasn't necessarily an individual fault. It could have been a cultural thing, a procedural thing. From looking at some of these different line of duty deaths and kind of, again, the role that NFFF has, how do we really put learning lessons into action? And how do we not let any near miss or line of duty death go to waste? And I don't want to say, I don't mean that in a way. How do we make sure that we continue to honor anyone that's fallen to make sure that we only get better, stronger, safer, and apply those learnings? Any context in terms of how you've seen that within the role of NFFF?

[14:12] Erin McGruder: So the interesting thing with that is we have some people who experience a line of duty death or a near miss, and they immediately take it to heart. And I think statistically it shows that the folks who are involved in a significant near miss usually are more likely to take accountability and make improvements and change. But by the counter to that, folks who are involved in a line of duty death don't want to speak ill of the dead, don't want to feel like they're their victim shaming or blaming or whatnot. So sometimes those messages from those line of duty deaths aren't as impactful as they could be because we don't do that deep of an analysis of the incident. We tend to, and I say, we sum up folks in the fire service will tend to take that line of duty death and go, cost of doing business, that's collateral loss. That's what we do in the fire service. We sign up knowing that this could happen to us. In those cases, I think we have a great loss of opportunity to prevent the next line of duty death or the next egregious near miss because first step first is folks have to take accountability. What happened? How did it happen? What were the contributing factors? And if you look at the NIOSH 5, communication is usually a huge thing. Command is a huge reoccurring theme. And a lot of those things play into our culture. And so getting to a point where we can have real, honest conversations about our culture. Are we rank and file? Are we have strong in-groups, outgroups? What's our communication? What's our respect level for someone? I've been on fires where maybe the most experienced firefighter but still just a firefighter and I've said, you know, cited a scene safety issue and it kind of gets brushed off. So it's like what's the culture of the agency? What's our self-assessment on that? And then what are the actionable items from the line of duty that can change? We often look at these things and we talk about platitudes about command and control or communications. Well, what is it? Is it every member has a radio and they're proficient on it? Is it that your radio cord is ran in a way that it's not going to be the first thing to burn through? I think it's relative to every event that we see of not just looking at the accountability and the platitudes, but really drilling it down into the actionable minute steps and then practicing them. Starts with training, ends with training, if that makes sense.

[16:34] Kevin Sofen: It always comes back to training.

[16:36] Erin McGruder: It does.

[16:36] Kevin Sofen: But also the way that we're creating the training, the way we're creating the instructional design and not just PowerPoint and Scantrons and memorizing stuff, but really making sure that you have that durable learning built in to where it's just. I always remember when I was in undergrad or graduate school, I found that I was not a good test taker. I really wasn't that good at school. I'm much more of a street smart person, but I knew when I could actually comprehend something is when I could just genuinely have a conversation about it. And I would have a conversation myself, whether it was in the shower or just kind of walking or talking, but like when you could actually talk about it. And also I learned, I studied Chinese for five years or so. And whenever I was in the classroom, I could memorize a bunch of phrases, but like there's no real learning from just memorizing stuff. Like you gotta go and live it and earn it and just be in it. And I lived in China for six months I learned really what it was like. If you want to speak Chinese, you really got to speak it, not like a Western guy. You got to own it and live it. So I think just hearing how you're talking about training as such an influential part comes back to just how it's all designed. And I know too you mentioned some of the work that you've done with IFSTA or IFSTAC and NFPA ProBoard. If we could just continue to double click on that for a second, I'm just kind of curious of like, Where do you see the next one to five years in terms of any sort of progress or hope that you have in terms of the evolution of how this instructional design will continue to apply lessons learned to make sure that we only continue to get better, faster, safer, and make sure all our people are able to go home safely?

[18:21] Erin McGruder: Well, and unfortunately, again, that's a relative answer. Each state has their what we call NAFTI, North American Fire Training Director entity, who may or may not be the IFSAC pro board certifying entity for the state. And so for departments who are looking for that third party accreditation, it comes down to that state entity decide how are we testing? How are we training? In many states across the country, there's no minimum standard of training required for firefighter. You can show up, you can say, Hi, my name is Erin. I'd like to be a firefighter. And they go, Cool, we're gonna go to call come with us, you know, you can have that rapid of an onboarding. Other states, you have to go to their fixed site, you have to pass their class, you have to pass their test. And it's up to the AHJ is at that state level in those states, in the deregulated states where there's no minimum qualifications, it's at the department level. And so in order to make change, we have to set a standard that everyone values. We want to go back to NFPA and say, hey, this is what right looks like. And we sometimes want to drive it by the NFPA level. But again, it's up to the states or the individual AHJs to adopt or not adopt NFPA. So what we have to go forward in the route that I choose is try to fix it at home and be an example for others. So my domain in Kansas is, of course, everything related to NFPA 1041, which is now 1020. And I've converted my testing away from multiple choice testing. So if somebody comes to Kansas, and everybody in the country is welcome, come to Kansas, come train with us. If you come to Kansas and you come to my instructor one, my instructor two, my live fire instructor, my live fire instructor-in-charge classes, to get certification at the end of that class, you have to do demonstratability. You have to show me your competency. Instead of a multiple choice test where you can look at the prompts and guess which one's the right one, you're going to have an open, short answer, open book test because that part of the job that we're testing in that method is what we call discretionary time. So if in the real course of your day-to-day job, you would be able to go sit at a desk, of textbook or pull out Google or phone a friend, then we're going to test you in that domain of application. In the heat of battle, if you need to know it, if you need to execute it, if it has to be done at 3am with no resources, well then that's our skill sheet testing, that's our non-discretionary time testing. And so what we're doing, and we're not the pioneers of this, there's other states that test this way, but this is what I'm trying to bring to the fire service and show we do have alternatives because when it's the multiple choice test, when we're teaching the textbook, then we start filling in that rote memorization, that death by PowerPoint, that one of the least effective ways and most inefficient ways to teach that doesn't translate to the job. Again, it goes back domain of application. If we can all learn to start building training to match the work, it's going to be so much better.

[21:15] Kevin Sofen: Yeah. Well said. I feel like I need to come out to Kansas and take a more Erin Firefighter 1 masterclass because I'm I'm very intrigued in terms of how you're being a practitioner of some of this modern day practical curriculum development and application. So kudos to you. And throughout this time, you'd mentioned the NAFTD and AFTD, and I know Camolette continue to lead that, and there's a big push from a training perspective to consider different types of tools particularly augmented reality, virtual reality, different immersive learning tools to help support, enhance, augment learning, and I think VR AR is one aspect of technology. And then within, you mentioned the NIOSH 5, and there's also the NFFF 16 fire and life safety initiatives, and with technology being a key part of that. Technology, I mentioned VR AR for a second. What are some aspects of technology that you've used in your role, and what are some technologies that strike your interest as something that could be useful for the fire service from a training in perspective or just in general?

[22:21] Erin McGruder: Yeah. So a lot of the ways we're using technology lessens the curve for us on learning. For instance, the CMS pumping system, where instead of having a million lovers, a million gauges, and a very complex pump panel that you walk up to it, you're able to just walk up with an iPad-like interface, tablet-based interface, and go, this inlet's going to this hydrants, and no longer are we doing pump counts and all those other things. So that's one extreme end of it. So the training for that parallel, domain of application training, is just as simple as how that needs to work. On the other end of training, being an estate training entity, we need to be able to go out to the field. We're a mobile facility. So our folks, our state's so big, they don't have to come to us, we go to them. And so some of the things that we find that works really well with that is, have a well-coordinated video of what the tactic we're teaching today looks like, and have that video file available by QR code or whatnot, and have just a tablet in the field so that we can play back and forth what right looks like. And so there's both ends of the spectrum of using the technology we have and looking at the different things that we can get. I used to use simulation software in a previous Instant Command class. That was really interesting because everybody had their own laptop interface and we could break them up by cruise. And so we could run it like a real fire scene and put command down the hall. And so we got our folks who had to use their real radios and practice their radio. They had to go real break windows. The simulation was all built using FRR side data. So flow pass, bi-directional, unidirectional flow pass. If you break a window, you start seeing the situation go bad. If you do vertical ventilation before you have water to reset the fire, you see the situation gets worse. And so technology gives us that opportunity to put people in situations so that they can see the fire behavior, they can see their impact in the fire scene without actually putting them in risk. So that helps us to keep them out of their gear, which may be contributing to the cancer issue in the fire service. We know when we put them in their gear that it contributes to the cardiogenic load, that the strain of heavy repetitions and whatnot. And when we start fatiguing people, they start shifting out of their prefrontal cortex and they stop processing information as effectively. So there's times and places we can really use technology to drastically help us supplement training to make training more effective and efficient. And there's times and places where it's a little bit of a detriment too. So if all we do is the digital training, we don't get the real movement for moving our hose lines. We don't get the real dynamics of swinging those long candle tools that the newer generations probably have less experience with than us older generations who have chopped wood to stay warm. And so technology has a lot of trade-off, and it's always one of those things is the tool can be really handy, but if we don't have an effective tactic to use it in, then it's just a tool. So looking at the new technology pieces and seeing how can this mirror match up to the job and how can it benefit us, is a question we have every time we bring it in. I mean, it's as simple as a thermal imaging camera. Industry-wide, we regard those are essential tools. You know, NFP even agrees, those are essential tools. But if we don't practice with them, if we don't train with them, if we don't learn to use them right, then they can cause a lot of harm as well. So, it's always, what tool can we get next and how can we use it?

[25:54] Kevin Sofen: As you were talking, you mentioned, again, the words of kind of enhancing, supplementing training in different ways. And one phrase that I personally live by is, and not or. And it's as opposed to kind of looking at a new piece of technology or something new in making a decision, being like, well, we can't do this. It's an or type mindset. What are your thoughts in terms of that kind of and mentality in terms of how we can continue to maintain all that is wonderful about the fire service culture and the fire service traditions while continuing to evolve in some aspects and find ways to integrate modern day tactics and training technologies and just technology in general to support fire service operations?

[26:41] Erin McGruder: That's a huge question. Which acre of that question do you want to start on?

[26:46] Kevin Sofen: Any acre that you decide to throw the shovel in first.

[26:50] Erin McGruder: So high level, how do we maintain all that's good about culture and how do we adapt and improve? It's human nature, but we often say there's two things firefighters don't like, that's the way things have been and change. There's a lot of psychological principles that reinforce that. But to continue the behaviors that we want, to maintain all that is good about the fire department culture, we have to recognize and reward it seems so simple to say, reward the behavior you want to see more of. But too often, our managers and leaders are focusing on our problem children, and we're trying to shore up the weakest link. By that nature, we start neglecting the folks who are doing great jobs, the folks that we can trust to be on autopilot. They sometimes don't show back up on our radar until we've already neglected them for too long. Shifting that leadership mindset, and I say leadership, not chief's mindset because this is that every member of the organization is a middle manager, which means every member of our organization should be a leader as well. Shifting that leadership mindset and that leader's intent to looking for the work done right, looking whether that be, hey, who picked up the dishes after dinner, or, hey, who saw the dangerous thing on the scene or who made the right call. Looking for the positive behaviors are important. Looking with positive intention instead of the deconstructive behaviors we typically do in the fire service, which honestly, a lot of those I think are because we haven't had solid psychologically safe environments. So we have been deflecting, we have been defensive, and that really perpetuates that humor that we've often been pretty proud of, but can sometimes be detrimental. So constructing the psychologically safe environments where it's okay to make mistakes, we're gonna address them, we're gonna correct them, but we're gonna really reward and reinforce the positive behaviors, if you will. And really driving forward what that optimal culture looks like. Clear expectations, regular communications, good feedback for our folks and support where they need support, but focus on the positives more than the negatives. And then integration of technology. When we build that environment where we're accepting when people make mistakes, and we want our people to make mistakes, especially in training, because that shows us they're pushing beyond their normal boundaries and competencies. When we build that, where it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay not to understand something, it's okay to ask questions, then I think adaptation and innovation is just a half a step away from that. If we can bring new information and bring it to the kitchen table and go, hey, let's talk about this. I saw this at the last conference, or hey, I got this gadget I want to try out, and what do you think this looks like? When you can have that environment that's welcomed and encouraged, it's a natural conclusion to see what can we do to make things better, if that makes sense.

[29:46] Kevin Sofen: Very much so. You mentioned the words adaptation and change management, which I think arguably, that's maybe one of the biggest challenges that the fire service faces is sometimes getting over these historical and self-imposed obstacles that are sometimes hidden and sometimes physical but what are some examples or ideas of just change management in general that you've seen be effective in terms of moving the needle to continue to have this relentless focus on firefighter safety?

[30:18] Erin McGruder: Well that's a great question and I hate to say everything is relative but everything is so relative. So it comes back to your department and as a department their culture and it comes back to the individual players, their mindsets. So a lot of the barriers to change are, people have not been allowed to make change for so long. Then now they're in the seat that is responsible for making change. The principle of learned helplessness applies. So they've been told they can't, they can't, they can't, they can't so long that now that they can, they don't believe they can. Or they have been promoted to a point of incompetence, promotion by tenure results in this quite a bit too, where we have leaders in positions that genuine or just emotionally feel like they don't know what they're doing, and so they build walls to protect their image. Those behaviors and those leadership structures are harder to influence change within, and those are a case-by-case how to manage the change for those. Simon Sinek has a gorgeous video that I play for a lot of my students about middle management. And he really hits it on the head from my point of view, is when you want to make change, and you can't make change up the ladder, you can't progress up the food chain in your organization to get change widespread, you have to be the leader you wish you had. And what that means is that middle manager is, you know, if your guy, if you're the guy in the backseat of the truck, and you're the only one putting on your seatbelt, keep putting on your seatbelt. Keep talking to the other guys about putting on the seatbelt. If you're the captain, make sure the truck doesn't move until everybody has their seatbelts on and let your guys have clear expectations of when it's okay to bring those seatbelts off. And, you know, protect the folks below you from what you know is wrong, and model what is right and model that environment where it's okay to start welcoming change and implementing change within your domain. And eventually people are going to hear about it, and they're going to want to be a part of it. And so that's the slowest way sometimes to make changes from the grassroots end. But then at the same time, is if you're at the top of the ladder, if you're the fire chief, you want to make change, you still have to take your time and get that buy-in from your folks as you go as well. The easiest change to make is the change that makes sense, if you will. If you're one of those people that just want to come in and innovate for the sake of innovation, and it's not fully vetted, that's also a hazard as well. Make sure it makes sense. Make sure it's applicable to the built environment you're working in, the response package you're traveling with, and have people supported. Don't just say, hey, today we're going to make this change. Have that roadmap of how to implement it. Give them the opportunities to practice, have that open discussion to make sure they understand why we're doing this.

[33:09] Kevin Sofen: Then Erin, I think Simon Sinek could watch a masterclass from Erin after hearing that's well said in terms of a lot of tangible, actionable little things and I think a lot about Dr. Burke Clark and a lot of the work that he's done from seatbelt advocacy. We talk a lot about some of this new technology. I'm the first to be an advocate for new technology, but some of this, you always have to take pause. The seatbelt is one of the best technologies that we have, and we still don't even fully use it. There's still, unfortunately, injuries in line due to deaths every year from people not wearing their seatbelts. It's like, if you can't put on your darn seatbelt, why are we talking about VR or AI or any of these buzzwords if we can't even do the basic stuff.

[33:51] Erin McGruder: Well, and that's the hard part, is sometimes we try to engineer and prepare for the really outlier call, that battery factory up the road, it's gonna get installed in 10 years. We wanna spec out how are we gonna do that response, what are we gonna do. Critical conversations to have. But if we can't extend the first hose line to the first floor of a residential structure that makes up 90% of our district, we're kinda puttin' the carpet for the horse. So, I have a mentor who has, I've stolen this phrase from him and it's just absolutely perfect, is basic students want to work on intermediate training, intermediate students want to do advanced training, and advanced students know it's all about doing the basics flawlessly. Because everything is like Legos that we do on the basic level. Now, technology can help us with that. Thermal imagers, great example. Before we had thermal imagers, we could get to fires and put fires out. We can be much safer, we can be much more proficient, we can be just overall better if we're using that technology and we're using it appropriately and consistently. So there's definitely room for technology to help us. And we definitely need to keep our eye on the horizon to see what technology is coming and how we can implement that. But a lot of folks who look at the latest, greatest, the bleeding edge of technology, sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn't. Case in point, I can't say whether it will work or not, but I have heard great feedback about Nearest coming to the fire service, replacing infers. And I'm old enough in the fire service. I had the forms I filled out at the station when I got back from a call to do our run reporting. And so the implementation of Nearest, I'm very excited for. My department's an early adapter of it. I'm looking forward to when we get it, but I have friends who are in departments that are early adapters. And the innovation that's coming with that, we're essentially flying the plane as we build it with that project. But I think even though it's gonna have hiccups, it's going to be overall better for us. And so that's why-

[35:57] Kevin Sofen: I don't know what NERIS is, in your words, what is NERIS and why is it something that'll be beneficial to the fire service?

[36:04] Erin McGruder: So my understanding of NERIS, and I have some really great friends that could put this in way better terms than I am. I'm not really qualified to talk about this, But my understanding of Neerus is we are building a data center for the fire service. So in M-verse, where we used to take departments had the option to opt in and push data up to their state, the state could then push data to the federal government. And with anything IT and with multiple points of failure and whatnot, it can be a little clunky. It could be a lot clunky. And with Neerus, they're trying to build a whole new data warehouse, a whole new system that's built for this unique purpose, that can integrate weather reports, that can integrate a bunch of different modern live feeds of data so that we in the fire service, as we're coming back from the call, can pop open our phone or our tablet and our rig as you're not the person driving, just to be clear. We can open that data device and submit our report and be done with it before we get back to the station. The cool thing is we have faster access to that data and the supplemental data that's also in it. So it's not like we're just gonna be limited to our data. We'll have other data streams that might be able to help us on the call, especially if we're doing a wildfire incident and having access to other reporting information from other departments and we have access to weather, we have access to all those other little trinkets that we can't even imagine right now, that I'm really excited to see how this blooms and plays out for the fire service.

[37:37] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, me too. And kudos to Dr. Laurie Moore's leadership to get it to this point. And then everyone at UL, FSRI, and USFA there continues to drive it. Because it's, it's obviously overdue and needed and something that we've never really had this two-way data exchange to be able to use our data to help make inferences, a hypothesis about where should we, you know, how should we approach dealing with this rising incident that's happening here and how do we best categorize these growing incidents of lithium-ion car battery fires, which before was just, again, just like a nether fire, which is obviously not just like a nether fire.

[38:16] Erin McGruder: Right. Yeah. And the extra hazards that come with it, because now we're dealing with the gases and environmental impact and whatnot, and that's just to circle back to the NFFF, that's one of the great things about the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation is they help fund some of those researchers, that research, and then they help package and distribute it. So the firehearalearning.org network is fabulous to get on online, and I refer people to this weekly, if not more often. There's so many classes that are, you know, it's a self-paced online learning, but it's impregnated with so much critical information and modern information. So it's not just the stuff that we've been talking about for the last 20 years in the fire service, it's stuff that our current research from Fire Safety Research Institute and the First Responder Center of Excellence, and all those other organizations that are making this huge push to spend the money, to spend the time to find out how we can do firefighting better, how we can do it safer, how we can actually go home and not bring the cancer back into our household with us, and those kind of elements. Packaging that in a way that we can access it and review it and share it. And that's one of the greatest innovations of technology is the speed in which communications can move, the extent at which we can share data, and how quickly we can actually start collecting data and making informed decisions and practices.

[39:38] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, well said. And you just alluded back to NFFF. And to kind of close out here, I'm curious in terms of if people were interested in getting involved with NFFF or getting in contact with you or just in the fellowship program. And I know you can go to firehero.org, and there's so many resources. which is, it's amazing. What are some opportunities? or ideas about how people can get involved with NFFF?

[40:03] Erin McGruder: So that is such a huge opportunity and there's so many ways. So the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation, as I said, when I was first acquainted with it was about the training. The state advocates and the regional advocates were kind of the army of volunteers for NFFF that we learn some of the in-person delivery classes and we go out and we deliver them as requested. So the lowest level of engagement for participation is contact one of us. If you go to the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation page, there's a web page within that for the advocacy. You can go in and request to become an advocate. You can request to have a class delivered at your department. We love those because we want to get the programming out as much as possible, and we have a huge catalog of programming that we can deliver. So lowest access is request class. have us come in and talk to you and your people. But on the training side, on the advocacy side, that's one thing. There's also Memorial Weekend that you can become a volunteer to go out to NFA for the annual Memorial Weekend, where we put all the names on the memorial, regretfully that we put names on the memorial. Ideally, our mission is to create an opportunity to lessen the preventable deaths in the fire service. And so that's an opportunity you can participate in. Memorial Weekend, there's Memorial Benefit golf tournaments that you could volunteer at or participate in, there's stair climbs, there's so many opportunities, but the first step is letting us know that you're interested. The fellowship specifically will send out emails. I don't know how they plan to advertise it in the future of the next fellowship cohort. When that opens up, throw your app in. Even if you don't think there's a chance in heck that you're going to get in, throw your happen because it's an opportunity you don't want to miss if you've got that chance. And another thing about the fellowship is when you're a fellow, when you're an advocate and we need to deliver the message places or we need to support our training partners or our research partners, advocates and the fellows are the first folks that are called in NFFF to go in and go to and be ascribed for other conferences. So there's infinite learning opportunities for us when we step into those volunteer roles with the NFFF. And that's just the side of the house I'm familiar with. I'm sure there's much more, but go to the website, let us know you're out there and let us know how you want to help. And we often can find a way to help fulfill that.

[42:31] Kevin Sofen: Well, Erin, thank you for being my guinea pig on this NFFF fellow podcast launch, along with my audio mishaps at the beginning, but it's been so wonderful learning about everything that you are doing as a professional in the fire service and as well as everything you're working on with NFFF, and my heart bleeds NFFF in every way, shape, or form. And just, again, want to thank you for everything you're doing. And I guess my final thing is, I didn't prep you for this, but if you have any sort of like quote or words of wisdom or kind of like something that you have hung on your wall that you live by that you could leave this with here today.

[43:11] Erin McGruder: So I'm guilty of being a bit hypocritical. I say when we teach and when we train, we need to speak in action and forego platitudes. But probably one of my favorites is action demonstrates priority. It's a little bit of a paraphrasing of a quote by Gandhi. But what it sums out to is, I'll give you two. The first one is action demonstrates priority. The second one is to know better but not do better is to not know better. When you take those two and you combine them, is we can talk about what right looks like all day. We can speculate, we can armchair quarterback, we can do this all day long, but until we show up and demonstrate what right looks like, we're not facilitating true change.

[43:54] Kevin Sofen: Erin, I just want to say thank you again for all your insights. I look forward to continuing to stay in touch and have a great weekend ahead.

[44:01] Erin McGruder: Thank you so much, Kevin. I appreciate your time, and I appreciate any opportunity to share the joy of NFFF.

[44:07] Kevin Sofen: Right on. Thanks, Erin. Thanks for joining another episode of the smart firefighting podcast. We hope you learned something today and if so please consider leaving us a review or a comment so we can keep creating the best content for you. Have a great day and thanks for all that you do for public safety.