I’m Randall W. Hanifen and I have been in the fire service for around 30 years; 27 of that has been as a career firefighter, where I worked my way up to Assistant Chief of Operations for Westchester Fire.
I started my work with the Institute of Fire Engineers (IFE) in 2010 when I joined as a member before being promoted to fellow around 2016.
In 2016 I became the Educational Manager and then in 2018 I took on the role of Vice President of the US branch.
After two years in this tenure, I assumed the title of President and now I’m serving my couple of years as Immediate Past President and International General Assembly representative.
I think the Institution has two really great benefits. One is the fact that we are an international group, so you can gain perspectives from not only your own country but all over the world.
We all have the same problems and we are just trying to find the same solution- even if it doesn’t exist. It can be validating to know that it is not just a problem in your own organization.
Randall W. Hanifen
The second benefit would be the diversity in our membership. As you noted, the Institution is an asset for fire engineers, but we often say, what is a fire engineer?
Well, it could be somebody in the fire department, it could be an architect, it could be a fire risk assessor or fire inspector.
So, you get a wide variety of perspectives that you can pull from as you are trying to solve problems, versus just looking at something specifically fire service related. By collaborating with a breadth of people, you have a much higher chance of solving any issues that can arise.
In 2012 I started my own consulting company, essentially, I help fire departments throughout the US transition or solve different issues.
What we are currently seeing is a significant reduction in the number of volunteer firefighters, which in turn, either requires the community to pay which they have never done before, or it requires some sort of transition.
My work is mainly focused on the business management part of that transition. Answering questions like “how do you line up operations with the funding?” and “what’s that going to cost?”.
Randall W. Hanifen
Collaboration helps to ensure that you can come up with a better plan of action, especially with succession management; how you’re going to transition organizations from one place to another.
The IFE provides the ability to connect with people in different professions and in different areas of the world. Not only does it help in the fire department every day, but it also helps with my consulting firms. It allows me to access new trends, different ways of doing things and make progress.
For the branch itself, I was able to bring in the perspective of a business manager. We were just about the size where we were trying to have the Board do the day-to-day functions needed to keep the branch moving, instead of being the strategic advisors they really needed to be.
I was able to hire in our first paid business manager and turn a lot of the day-to-day work over to that person.
This in turn, freed up our Board to make more strategic decisions, to look forward and explore what we needed to do to grow membership or see how we could expand the services we provide.
I’m currently seeing a huge legislative trend to try and de-regulate things. You see that, not only here in the US, but also in order countries- which seems like a great idea as a business owner because you ideally don’t want a bunch of regulations.
However, when you talk about fire safety regulations, most of those aren’t trying to impose something on a business or person.
Fire safety regulations are there to be learned from and they give us an expectation of safety.
Randall W. Hanifen
If you look at a building, probably 95% of the building code is related to safety. Such as, the walls must be a certain size to keep fire from spreading. There has to be certain evacuation distances and stairwells and if these important structural aspects did not align with the codes, then this would impact safety.
I think training and education has been an important tool, but it has also been made more difficult.
We used to teach people to memorize certain things, but not there is no real reason to have to do this. It’s all available at your fingertips on Google, whether it’s on your phone or on your computer.
However, the proliferation of information has made it critical that you are able to validate it and check it is not just someone’s opinion.
As a professor, I’m more interested in where the individual found their information and how they pulled it together to make a good choice. Rather than just saying X said this or Y said that.
Randall W. Hanifen
AI is an additional limitation because it is known as a people pleaser so it can withhold information. This is where it takes someone that has an education to be able to take the basics of what an AI program has done and then make sense of it.
That’s why I think that no matter how much technology improves, it’s true that you still need to rely on someone being educated enough to move that information forward.
