Thinking Critically Isn’t Enough—You Also Need a Dash of Creativity
You really can’t succeed as a fire service leader if you can’t think clearly. Without a firm mastery of critical thinking skills as applied to problem-solving and decision-making, you’ll continually struggle as both a manager and a leader.
But critical thinking is only one facet of a well-rounded cognitive skill set—you also need to be able to think creatively.
Here’s why: Now, more than ever, fire protection agencies must innovate to remain viable in a rapidly changing social, economic, and political environment—and you can’t successfully innovate without creativity.
We innovate to make the job better. We innovate to make the job safer. And, we innovate to stay competitive for our fair share of the resources needed to do the job well.
Critical thinking—the conscious analysis of a problem or a decision—can only take you so far toward innovation. Just ask many of today’s successful businesses and organizations: A strategic dose of creative thinking— that intuitive, subconscious ability to make mental connections—could be the difference between innovating or stagnating.
Firefighters take to creativity naturally
The traditional understanding of creativity often relegated it to the arts—the domain of artists, sculptors, writers or composers. It seems to many to be more abstract than practical.
But you’d be hard-pressed to find any momentous discovery or invention that didn’t involve some form of creative connection. Even down-to-earth scientists often have flashes of insight that leads to a breakthrough.
In short Creativity isn’t just for artists—it’s for all of us, even firefighters.
In fact, creativity has had a long association with the fire service. I know this because we no longer use bucket brigades or horse-drawn steam engines (except perhaps for parades).
Our history as firefighters is one of revolutionary innovation. That could not have happened without a long line of our predecessors practicing creativity (whether they realized it or not).
So, if creativity has been and, presumably, still is part of the fire service, why put a new emphasis on it?
Thanks to a great deal of study and research, we can now actually harness the power of creativity—and sometimes on demand. But it takes intent and practice to realize the power of creativity on a regular basis..
A Little Inspiration from the Writing Profession
One of the reasons I’m interested in creativity and its applications is because of experiences through my second, “moonlighting” job while I was a firefighter: writing. Specifically, I made a second career writing for advertising, marketing, and public relations firms.
When you write for clients you have deadlines. You can’t wait for inspiration to hit you while you stare dreamily at a blank computer monitor. If you don’t produce, you don’t get paid.
So, I stayed on the lookout for advice about overcoming “writer’s block,” a kind of creative impasse that can affect people who write for a living. This search in turn led me to the study of creativity itself.
The most important thing I learned was that those “lightbulb” moments when an idea or solution suddenly pops into your mind don’t come out of nowhere. These flash moments are the outcome of a process within your mind, often without you noticing it.
As you mull over a problem or look for new ideas, the mind will continue working on it even when you take a break or move on to something else. During this process, it begins to rearrange all the bits of information and tries to put them in some form of order.
When it hits on something interesting, it sends an alert to your conscious mind, i.e. the lightbulb moment.
What’s even more exciting, there seem to be techniques we can use to stimulate this process and make it more likely to happen. Rather than bide your time for lightning to strike, you can put up a lightning rod, so to speak to attract that illuminating moment.
This isn’t theoretical for me personally: I’ve used some of these techniques as a writer and found they worked. More importantly for this discussion, I found they also worked in my other job, as a fire officer.
Since retiring from the fire service, I’ve had an opportunity to dig deeper into creativity. The more I learn, the more I’m convinced stimulating this innate human ability can benefit any profession. And, that especially includes emergency services.
So, that’s what The Creative Fire Officer is all about—looking at this unconventional means of idea generation and seeing it how it can apply to one of the greatest jobs on earth. Going forward, I hope you’ll be able to take what you learn here and make it a part of your corner of the fire service.
David Webster served twenty-seven years with the Hattiesburg Fire Department in Mississippi before retiring as fire chief in 2013. Besides The Creative Fire Officer, He also writes marketing content for businesses.
