Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By : Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D
Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By: Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D

Overview of this book

There comes a day when we have to make a tough decision under stress. That decision might change the course of our life. Flow-Based Leadership helps you improve your decision-making skills through the use of some great real-life stories of firefighters. The book first introduces the feeling called ‘flow’—teaching by example its importance in decision-making. Next, you’ll explore various techniques to initiate flow in critical situations and how to respond when flow doesn’t occur as expected. You will learn how to implement flow-based decision making and flow based-leadership within personal and professional circumstances. You will next encounter an extreme, experiential training program called Georgia Smoke Diver (GSD), and how it helps special military forces like Navy Seals and Army Rangers to maintain a calm focus in chaotic situations. Towards the end, the book uses the GSD program to describe the flow-based organizational framework and how it can be integrated into your life and workplace to achieve better decision-making skills. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use flow-based leadership in your personal and professional life maintain clarity and confidence under duress.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Course Content

Firefighters have to function in high stress, emergent situations. Every incident is different. Muscle memory is critical in these situations. According to Klein’s recognition-primed decision making concepts, when we are in stressful situations, we make decisions based on previous similar experiences and training, and use solutions that worked in those situations.79 Drilling over and over on both basic and not-so-basic activities frees the mind to deal with the anomalies that occur in all emergent activities.80

Instructors teach the drills incrementally so that they instill muscle memory. Drills begin with the basics, the mechanics of how a task is done, in an open, stress-free environment. Later during the week, students must complete the same drills in a simulated fireground scenario with the addition of smoke, fire, zero visibility, running water, and loud noises.

Recent research shows that “emotion and vividness influence fluency, availability...