What Makes A Good Industrial Brigade Incident Commander

INDUSTRIAL FIRE BRIGADE INCIDENT COMMANDER By: Steve Watkins Gijsbert van Pinxteren

Imagine, You are sitting behind your desk and you receive a call that there has been a small explosion in one of your gas refining units. You are worried. It is your first major incident and you are responsible for the coordination of the emergency response. The emergency response plan is set in motion. Those plans that you have vetted and sanctioned, the skills of the response staff, your decisions and how you interact with your team are what stands between a disaster averted or losses in life, huge production losses and reputation of your organisation seen by the outside world. Are you up to it? WHAT MAKES YOU A GOOD COMPETENT the situation to their experiences in the making and type 2 is a formal process INCIDENT COMMANDER? Someone who stays calm, can work under stress and can communicate well to motivate their subordinates are obvious traits. Be how do you come up with the correct decisions? Gary Klein made study back in the 1990’s suggested that the best commander used Recognition Primed Decision Making process to make the quickest decisions based on matching past. But what if the commander does not have that experience. Incidents in petrochemical plants are rare, which means new commanders may not have been exposed to those decisions. Which poses huge dilemmas. The latest research in leadership and decision making suggests that there are two decision making modes, Type 1 (intuitive) and type 2 (analytical) decision making processes. Type 1 is the above recognition primed decision in which analyse is done before the decision is made. Type 2, often termed a Conflict Management Model analyses the information received and then assesses that information in terms of risk and threats to come up with tactical options. Then a process of filtering and elimination gives the option that is most promising. The research concludes that both styles maybe adopted depending on the experience of the commander, information available, time constraints 43