Episode 302: How Expert Incident Leaders Think Under Pressure with Claire Cooper

Episode notes

When everything feels uncertain, what guides your decisions?

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.

Recorded live at the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) 2025 Conference alongside the AFAC, WAFA, and Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience Conference in Perth, Australia.

In this episode, Claire Cooper shares what her research and real world experience reveal about how expert incident managers make decisions when conditions are complex and uncertain. Drawing from her PhD work on bushfire decision making and her role as Director of Strategy, Policy and Planning at Triple Zero Victoria , Claire explains why experience alone is not always enough, and how optimism bias, planning assumptions, and blind spots can quietly shape outcomes.

She discusses how strong leaders deliberately think through worst case scenarios, use mental simulation, invite critique, and build adaptive expertise that holds up when incidents scale beyond the familiar. This conversation offers practical insight for public safety leaders who want to strengthen decision making before the pressure is on and better protect both their people and their communities.

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

1. 0:00 Intro, live from Perth
2. 0:47 Meet Claire Cooper
3. 1:04 PhD research on bushfire decision making
4. 3:25 Labeling biases as they happen
5. 6:04 When experience is not enough
6. 7:41 Optimism bias
7. 10:13 Applying the research at Triple Zero Victoria
8. 10:43 The pre-mortem
9. 12:16 A new paradigm for major crises
10. 14:17 Words to live by: confidence in your own views

Questions answered in this episode

What did Claire Cooper research in her PhD about bushfire incident managers?

Claire Cooper studied how bushfire incident managers make decisions and how they consider worst case scenarios in that decision making process. She found that expert incident managers consistently talked about playing out in their heads how things could go wrong and having backup plans, thinking about how situations could develop over multiple time frames.

Hear it at 1:52

What is optimism bias and how does it affect emergency decision making?

Claire Cooper describes optimism bias as a rose-colored glasses concept that impacts what people pay attention to. It can influence what you notice and how you make decisions. Sometimes people only notice information that aligns with what they already believe is true, rather than deliberately thinking about how things can go badly.

Hear it at 8:29

What is a pre-mortem and how is it used?

A pre-mortem is a thinking exercise developed by researcher Gary Klein. You assume things have gone terribly wrong and play that out in your mind as a group, then try to diagnose what happened to bring the plan to that terrible conclusion. Claire Cooper used it in organizational change at Triple Zero Victoria to identify problems before they occurred rather than waiting for failure.

Hear it at 10:33

Why does Claire Cooper say experience alone is not enough for incident managers?

Doing the same thing over and over is not enough. Limited experience in predictable contexts does not give you the adaptive expertise needed in really complex, uncertain, unique scenarios. She says it is important to have a breadth of experience, deliberately seek out other experiences, learn from events elsewhere in the world, and build critical analysis skills.

Hear it at 6:20

Transcript

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

Ep 302 transcript

How Expert Incident Leaders Think Under Pressure with Claire Cooper

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Claire Cooper

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 our podcast mini-series, recorded live at the Institution of Fire Engineers 2025 conference in Perth, Australia, alongside the AFAC, WAFA, and the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience conferences. With over 28 conversations with fire chiefs, engineers, researchers, and innovators. We explored how the fire and emergency community is adapting to a rapidly changing world. From climate resilience, and was designed for the field, to the importance of mental health, diversity, and global collaboration. These episodes highlight the shared challenges and inspiring solutions shaping the future of safety. Enjoy. Claire Cooper, what brings you to the AFAC show? And I hear you're giving the presentation later. Tell me about what brings you here.

[0:53] Claire Cooper: I am, I'm lucky enough to be presenting last up on the last day, so a good slot, but I'm looking forward to it. I'm here, as part of the IFE conference, as part of the broader AFAC conference, exciting. So, I'll be talking a little bit about my PhD research, which I did a number of years ago through the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, which was affiliated with AFAC. I've been to the conference a number of times. And that was in to decision making in bushfire settings. So, how do, particularly, bushfire incident managers make decisions, and how do I consider worst case scenarios in that decision making process?

[1:32] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, worst case scenarios. I mean, it's something that within public safety, we have some of that boy scout, girl scout mentality of Within your PhD research, what were you researching around this and then I want to kind of learn how that's translating into the work you're doing, but tell me more about the PhD research, what was it about, and what were you researching?

[1:52] Claire Cooper: Yeah, well you've pretty much nailed the concept, because that's exactly the idea. A plan for the best, prepare for the worst is exactly the idea. When I interviewed really high-level expert incident managers, they consistently talked about that concept of playing out in their heads, how things could go wrong, and then having an idea of what they were going to do if that happened. So they talked about multiple backup plans, thinking about how things could develop over multiple time frames. So what's going to happen in the next two hours, four hours, 12 hours, 24 hours? And compared to less expert incident managers or less experienced decision makers, there was a real difference between the way they thought about it. So those that had a great experience, it's more difficult to imagine, how things are going to play out and particularly not quite so aware of what the signals might be to pay attention to, that things are starting to fall apart. And so then you start to get things like cognitive biases like optimism bias. So assuming things are going to work out well. fallacy which is underestimating how long a plan is going to take to put into effect. So looking at some of the psychological research gave us some ideas about what was going on and how to support decision makers to build those skills and think about worst case scenarios, think about how things are going to go wrong and put it into practice.

[3:25] Kevin Sofen: Based on my limited understanding of some of the research you're talking about, it seems like how to continue to instill self-awareness within ourself to kind of identify when some of these things are not happening, because I think it's probably impossible to not have some of these biases, but it's a matter of labeling it, being like, this is happening, and then what to do about it. So, I mean, I'm almost thinking about when I go to my therapy sessions and you know, You have these emotions and you label them and then you take action on them, but you try and take a. Pause. I'm just sort of guessing, but is that kind of kind of trying to do it, of like labeling these experiences as they happen and then trying to translate that into how to make better responses?

[4:04] Claire Cooper: Yes, absolutely. So the first step is being aware of some of the possible biases, being aware of the weaknesses in our brain processing, or maybe not weaknesses, but just there are different ways that we process information are things that we pay attention to, and that is just inherent in the way our brains work, you know, just part of how we move through the world. We can't process every piece of information that comes at us, so we have to prioritize, and our brains often do that automatically. So the first step is kind of understanding that, and that we're all going to have blind spots, a biases, assumptions that we bring to it, where there's important decisions to make, it's useful to understand how that's going to influence what you notice, how you might make a decision and then use the right kind of cognitive thinking at the right I, or ask for other people to critique your decisions is a really useful in a respectful way, really useful way to improve decision making, to use mental simulation to think about how things might play out in different ways and from a different context. So, the experts that we talked to really thought about things from different perspectives like quite high level over the situation, so in this case it was bushfires, like what does it look like in terms of four days out from a real macro view, but also micro views, like is the safety implications, for example, on the fire ground for that immediate two hour window. So they're really expert incident managers and decision makers, all about things from different perspectives. And so a building that into some of the training can help to uphea

[5:56] Kevin Sofen: It's curious, and it seems like a lot of times where in the heat of the moment, the important thing is we I can fall back on our training. We've trained. I'm curious in sort of that phrase you say, when experience is not enough, I would think that you can train as much as you can, you can build experience. And that's, I like to think the best you can do. But why is that not enough and what else should we be doing or should we be considering as first responder operators?

[6:20] Claire Cooper: Yeah, that's a that's a good question. So a bit of a provocative title. And the point I was making, and we'll make in the presentation, is that doing the same thing over and over is not enough. So a limited experience, doesn't give you that adaptive expertise that we need in really complex, uncertain, unique scenarios. So if people are making decisions in quite a predictable context, you can train really well and you know what's going to happen and experience is really good in that kind of very predictable, complex environment. When we get into the major, for example, compounding concurrent emergencies, it's important to have had a breadth of experience. So deliberately seeking out, either other experiences or learning from other events that you might not have attended, but might be have happened elsewhere in the world. Understanding kind of the implications of those. how situations unfolded, what and then also building in those skills of critical analysis is really important. So that foundation of experience is essential but it's not enough to really build that sort of the worst case scenarios and plan for the worst. It's really, it needs more than just the same experience and times over.

[7:41] Kevin Sofen: You said something earlier that I hadn't heard before. And I sometimes fall trapped at this of being an eternal optimist. And I do like to think that there's a lot of good amongst humanity and that there is a lot of ways for humans to continue to be good people and live amongst each other and trying to reduce risk and continue to allow people to live the most fruitful, productive and happy life, comma. I also know that there's probably the optimism bias, I think within a public safety perspective sounds like an interesting topic in terms of maybe optimism can over weigh maybe reality at times. So I'm curious, I've just never heard that before. So I would love to know what that means and how to spot it and how can we taper that optimism bias.

[8:29] Claire Cooper: Yeah, it's a really interesting concept and these days felt like maybe less and less people have optimism bias in the culture, But in general, it's a pretty consistent bias that's found in lots of different research into decision making, sort of the rose-coloured glasses concept. So it impacts what we pay attention to. So sometimes we don't actually, it's similar to another concept prospective confirmation bias, which is I only notice information typically that aligns with a view I already hold. So I actually, my brain is picking up signals and ignoring other things that tend to align with what's perceived to be true. Optimism bias is really about, it can influence what you notice, what you pay attention to, how you make decisions, if you're not deliberately trying to kind of fight against it and think about not just how things can go well, but also how things can go badly. And I think. It's important to have kind of both sides of that, not one or the other. I tend to, which, you know, comes out of this research, tend to think about worst case scenarios reasonably frequently. And I think if you go too far on that side as well, that's not healthy either. So it's really about having a balance and bringing people together to collaborate on decisions where you can, because that helps to highlight the assumptions and the biases that people are bringing to it. So if you're really openly listening to other people's views, you can kind of fight against that.

[10:00] Kevin Sofen: most things in life, some level of moderation in the middle is the best answer.

[10:03] Claire Cooper: Yes, even Tim Tams.

[10:04] Kevin Sofen: Like, no, I won't have all the Tim Tams, I'll just have, like, five Tim Tams.

[10:08] Claire Cooper: That is moderate, yes, yeah. That is moderate. Yeah. That seems fair.

[10:13] Kevin Sofen: And so you've done all this research, and then now, I mean, I see on your shirt that the zero, Zed, triple zero, Victoria.

[10:18] Claire Cooper: Yes.

[10:19] Kevin Sofen: How is this now your research that you've done and everything kind of translate into what you're doing and how is that being implemented a practice and ultimately now trying to make both the citizens of the community and first responders safer.

[10:33] Claire Cooper: Yes. Yeah. I've been really lucky because my research is quite applied. So I've been able to kind of think about how it applies in different context, as I've moved through my career. Since I did the research most recently, we used it as a bit of a thinking exercise, which is called I didn't make it up, but it's called a pre-mortem Gary Klein is a researcher that came up with it. And the idea is you assume things have gone terribly wrong and you play that out in your mind and as a group and then you try and diagnose what has happened to bring the plan in whatever way you're doing it to this terrible conclusion. So we used it in actually corporate project management and organizational reform and so not at all to do with actual emergencies but really about a plan for our organizational change. organization names and entities and so we thought about what are all the things that could actually lead to a failure, the situation that a goes really wrong and one of the ways that it's really helpful is it highlights the inter connections and dependencies between different teams, pieces of work so as Triple Zero went through significant organizational change shifted to a new name and a new set of branding we were able to identify there were some we needed to connect up in the organization to make sure that whole idea of a pre-mortem is you diagnose the problem rather than where you wait for the failure and then review to find out

[12:09] Kevin Sofen: seems logical and like a good a good plan and so I mean now again you I've done great work applying research now into action. roadmap of the work that you're terms of the research and to action over the course of the next one five ten years in. What are you excited about with that?

[12:32] Claire Cooper: Yeah, one of the things that's really exciting, and a couple of presentations, this week, Joe Buffoni, for example, spoke, he works for NEMA, National Emergency Management Agency spoke about a new paradigm of major crises in Australia and this need to shift to a new way of doing things. And I think a lot of what I was sort of getting at with my PhD research about how do we think about these of scale events and what are we going to do about them collectively, it's becoming more and more mainstream to think about those and think about what we might do, because no one agency or state really is going and be able to manage that on their own. So how do we think about how that collaboration might work as a whole sector and come together and think about that before it happened? Hopefully it never does, but be ready if it does. And I think that's an exciting time for the sector to be thinking about what are we. a lot of things that we're going to do to pull resources and build capability so that we can deal with those large scale, impact the community. So those things are really exciting and I think just being, how to collaborate across agencies and share ideas about some of these things. It feels like there's the other thing that's really exciting is that there's a lot more discussion of what I would call kind of psychological concepts in the mainstream discussion about really exciting. When I did this research, there was no discussion of what a bias was, like no one, that wasn't a thing that people talked about. We didn't talk about cognition or metacognition, which is sort of how we think about our thinking, and there's a lot more of that now and a lot more understanding of how we can better understand how we make decisions and use that in our practice.

[14:17] Kevin Sofen: Well, Claire, I appreciate the continued insights and leadership that you're driving in this and I'd like to finish it now with, within your work that you've now done with your PhD, is there any quote that, or words of wisdom that a mentor has told you or something that you've learned along the way that you come back to within the work that you continue to lead day in, day out?

[14:38] Claire Cooper: That's a good question. I can't think of a quote, but I think I've learnt to be more confident in my views and opinions. When I did my PhD research, I really felt like I had to quote other people and really base it on the evidence that was there, which I did. But over the years, I think, particularly as women in emergency management, of important or has weight or merit. And I think over the years, I've been really lucky to have great mentors that have supported that kind of idea of working out what my opinion is, and then sharing that and being confident in that. So I've been lucky to have that support over the years.

[15:18] Kevin Sofen: Well said Claire. Well, I admire and appreciate the work that you're continuing to lead and look forward to stay in touch.

[15:24] Claire Cooper: Thank you.

[15:25] Kevin Sofen: I think it's time to dive into a Tim Tam.

[15:27] Claire Cooper: Excellent.

[15:34] Kevin Sofen: this episode of the hit Like, leave a comment, share it to someone, and tell us what you enjoyed most. Take care, and thanks for listening.