Conferences Are as Useful As You Want to Make Them
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The Editor’s Opinion Page
Now that the conference season is getting under way, it is an appropriate time to take a look at what these sessions can do for us as individuals and for our fire departments.
It is not a coincidence that the most progressive and efficient fire departments are represented at state, regional and national fire service conferences because discussions generate ideas and progress thrives on a diet of ideas. These departments actively strive to find out what others are doing to handle problems similar to their own. The members of these departments look for suggestions and opinions not only from formal talks, but also from more personal discussions with old and new friends over a pleasant meal or in an impromptu session in a hotel room.
Bringing together fire service people from communities with similar problems but with different approaches to these problems is one of the fringe benefits of conferences. Sometimes this fringe benefit alone is worth all the time and money spent attending a conference.
However, the advice heard from the podium should not be regarded like a physician’s prescription—to be taken as directed and without question. Like a good steak, what you hear from the podium has to be trimmed of fat and subjected to the fire of evaluation before it can be beneficially digested in your mind. Everything said about a subject may not be pertinent to the operating objectives of your fire department, so you have to evaluate and select the material that is valuable to you and your department.
Furthermore, those ideas you find useful frequently will have to be shaved and shaped to fit into the specific format of your fire department’s operating procedures. There is nothing wrong with that. It is the way to go. A portion of the advice may be just what you need to alter a procedure in your department so that it can become great instead of remaining adequate.
After attending many conferences during a long career, you may feel that conferences are not as fruitful as they used to be. That’s natural. It just means that you know a lot more than you did 15 or 20 years ago and now you have to pan a lot more talks to wash out a nugget. Then you realize that if you get one or two valuable ideas out of a three-day conference, it has been worth the time spent.
You know that the ideas you acquire from speakers and from informal discussions with your peers at conferences translate into benefits to your fire department, but do you tell others how you got those ideas? As a fire officer, do you report to your chief the conference discussions that have a bearing on the operations of your fire department? As a chief, do you let your municipal administrator know how your attendance at a conference has resulted in a more effective operation in your fire department?
If you do, you are more likely to see your travel and education appropriation survive the budget cuts of hard-pressed municipal economies. The tighter the budget, the more innovative you have to be as an administrator, and to be innovative, you have to seek out ideas beyond your own municipality.
