Tactics, command, leadership

with leading a municipal fire brigade, conducting emergency re-
sponse operations or conducting tasks are thus not simple duties.
Research, however, points to a number of clear conclusions
that can be worthwhile for decision makers to be aware of in con-
junction with response operations. Among these conclusions, one
can mention that decision makers who are experts within their
particular fields and that participate in actual situations, do not
tend to generate several different decision alternatives (Orasanu
et al., 1992a). A decision maker instead generates a highly pro-
bable alternative based on his or her assessment of the problem,
and evaluates it against the current situation. If it is deemed cor-
rect, the decision complies with this alternative. The alternative
is otherwise modified or replaced and evaluation is repeated. It is
apparent that the factors that primarily differentiate experienced
decision makers from those less experienced are their ability to
assess the situation and their manner of reasoning or making de-
cisions. An experienced and knowledgeable decision maker can
study a situation and quickly interpret it with the aid of his or
her experience base. This is highly relevant in conjunction with
emergency response operations, where the theories concerning
emergencies and the escalation of various types of emergency si-
tuations are very limited. The lack of such theories entails that
there are not always practically applicable models to rely on, but
one is instead forced to base a large portion of knowledge on per-
sonal experience and the experience of others.
This in turn leads to decision makers usually utilising a satis-
factory strategy for their decisions rather than an optimised. Deci-
sion makers tend to make a decision that is good enough but that
is not necessarily the best decision. One can speak here of a type of
passable decision making, i.e. decisions and decision making that
are not optimal but that approximately fulfil that which is to be
achieved. While this can entirely suffice, it is also important to be
able to determine when it does not and when a decision requires
better decision making data.
Many of the situations that a fire brigade encounters in some
sense are new or encompass phenomena that are more or less
unknown. Even in such situations the decision maker can utilise
reasoning in arriving at a decision or a solution with the aid of
a scheme or predefined model, rather than a specific method of
calculation. In such cases, the decision maker often uses his or
her knowledge to organise, interpret and define the problem so