Decision-Making: Inside the Mind of the Incident Commander

Abstract

This chapter explores the decision-making of firefighters in greater detail. The relevance of Classical and Naturalistic Decision Theories of decision-making are critically reviewed to highlight the need for a more realistic model suitable for application in the Fire Service. Towards this goal, the current study first adopted a laddering method of knowledge elicitation to develop a set of example incidents that account for the diverse range of incidents attended. These incidents were then developed into a card-sort task to determine the relevance of time and risk (directed card-sort), and to determine other factors of relevance in decision-making (free-sort). Results suggested four dimensions of importance: crew safety, complexity of casualty rescue, time-pressure and containment. Encouraging a more explicit decision-making process, the way in which this model can act as a scaffold for learning during training activities is discussed.