Aesop told a lot of really good stories, with almost all of them including some sort of moral that was revealed by the interaction between a couple of creatures. The Tortoise and the Hare. The Grasshopper and the Ant. Hardly any of those stories are very lengthy, but the messages are really quite deep.

Aesop probably would be impressed if he could sit around a firehouse dining table and listen to those modern-day fables. Unfortunately, the list of the stories told during coffee breaks, dinnertime and after-hours don't always have a moral to them. More often than not they fall into two categories: They are either extremely funny or bitterly cynical. But hardly any firehouse fables fall into the range of mediocre, because no one repeats a boring story. These often-told stories help create the culture of an organization.

A lot of these fables have found their way into the novels and autobiographies that populate the shelves of a fire service library, but more often than not they are never written down and frozen in time. Instead they are spun, embellished, magnified and in some cases turned into outright urban legends.

You can hardly open up a book anymore about the fire service without hearing somebody talk about the “culture of the fire service.” Just exactly what does that mean? From my perspective, one of the first things that leaps across the page when I see the word culture is “cult.” Cult has a very negative connotation for some people, but in fact it means a group that shares common values.

How do you create a culture within an organization? Well, in the first place I'm not sure anybody starts off to create one. It's a function of what happens when individuals begin to group together for a variety of reasons, whether for the common defense or to change the world.

Most fire departments can trace their origin back to the very first person who identified himself as part of an organizational structure. In many cases that person's name, if not his memory, has been outright obscured by the passage of time. Yet cultures are created by people interacting over a period of time until certain things are found to be acceptable or unacceptable. That is where the culture begins to form an identity.

After spending close to 45 years in the fire service, I have seen almost every stage of development that a fire department goes through, from origin to senility, in the creation of a culture. In other columns I have written about the fact that organizations possess many of the same attributes that personalities take on over periods of time. The development of a culture happens to be one of those characteristics.

My observation is that in almost all organizations, people find themselves in one of three groups. The first of these groups is classified as the “in crowd.” The second is the “outsiders,” and the last is defined as the “silent majority.”

Think about this for a second in terms of how a fire department operates. In almost all fire organizations there is a sense of either being in or being out. It isn't uncommon for there to be rites of passage that we institute in many of our fire departments to go from being out to becoming in. In the old days some of these rites of passage were pretty malevolent hazing. Today these rites of passage are much more subtle, but they are just as powerful.

One method of transmitting the in crowd's set of values is storytelling. If you have been in the fire service for a long time, you probably could start spinning a few of those yarns of your own as you read this. It wouldn't surprise me at all that you have heard stories which go so far back in the actual timeline of your organization that they could have occurred prior to you ever becoming a firefighter. I even have heard stories repeated in fire service conversations that were older than the individuals repeating them. That is the beauty, if not the wonderment, of the fire service fable.

There is bad news, however. For in the telling of firehouse fables, if there isn't a moral to the story, there's a strong possibility that it can become a negative influence in creating the department's culture. Since I began collecting firehouse stories, I have noted that over time truth is overwhelmed by fiction. Because facts have become so garbled, often the moral taken from the story has more of a negative connotation than a positive one.

That's the bad news. The good news is that there are also examples of firehouse fables having a very positive connotation. We just have to keep track of the differences when they are told. The telling and retelling of stories that restore confidence in an organization are immensely valuable. Tales of heroism and acts of kindness keep the fire service culture alive and well in the firehouse.

One of the terms I have used before to describe this phenomenon is institutional memory. This is the collective thought process of an organization that retains facts, perceptions, attitudes and expressions of reality that sometimes transcend an individual's personal recollection. It's the memory of the culture, not the person. Used appropriately, institutional memory can add character to an organization. Used incorrectly, it can keep a wound seeping for many years.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more visible than in the creation of the culture of an organization with regard to the relationships between individuals. I've noticed that in organizations where storytelling centers on positive outcomes, the relationships among individuals tend to become stronger and more thoroughly bonded over time. In organizations where storytelling is used to bring people down or repeat examples of past inequity or inappropriate behavior, then it can have just the opposite effect. Such storytelling creates a negative culture.

What brought this topic to the forefront of my mind was a document recently given to me by a firefighter. I was discussing departmental history in a broad general sense one evening at the dining table, and this firefighter brought out an informal history book that had been put together by a department member who had retired almost 20 years ago. The book was yellowed with age and appeared ready to disintegrate. I am not going to go over the book's content, other than to note it was a very revealing document.

What is important is that some of the stories in this history book — mostly written with tongue in cheek — would have caused a lawsuit if re-enacted in a modern fire department. I do not mean that as a criticism of the statements themselves, but rather as a commentary and observation on how much things have changed in our profession. Those old-timers weren't bad people, but they were able to do things, say things and engage in behaviors that today are considered inappropriate. For example, I'll bet that many of you know firefighters who have nicknames, most of them well-deserved. But using them these days risks creating a problem in the firehouse.

In reading the torn and tattered history book, however, it was very interesting to note that many of the stories were still being told in the firehouse as if they were legitimate. In other words, the “fable” was a mixed message. Repeating what people said or did in the past sometimes gives them a ring of authenticity that isn't deserved. As I turned page after page and looked at cartoons that had been drawn, nicknames that had been ascribed to people and stories that had been told, I couldn't help but wonder what impact this was having on the existing members of the department when they heard the same stories.

Bringing all of this up to date, many similar events in today's firehouses are fodder for future stories. Aesop could easily derive morals from the mishaps, misdeeds and misdirected activities of firefighters working for us right now.

One of our challenges within a modern fire department is to make sure that, as such happenings transpire, we do everything possible to stay out of the courtroom. Hopefully these fables will not be discussed in the city attorney's office or a judge's chambers. By the same token, we don't want to take away the fire service's culture of characters. If we try to sterilize a fire organization to the point that it loses the ability to learn from its past, it also can no longer celebrate its experiences. We need to monitor the use of the firehouse fable.

If storytelling perpetuates the values of the in crowd, what drives the outsiders and the silent majority? Those who are on the outside are often individuals who have passed initiation into the organization but find themselves segregated over time because they violate commonly held beliefs of the organization. Think about this for just a few seconds in your fire department. Are there people who are there, who wear the uniform, have the badge but aren't considered part of the group? More often than not these people saw some form of initiation and then chose a different course of action based on either their personal beliefs or in some cases circumstances that force them to be outside the in crowd.

Then there is the silent majority that just seems to go along with whatever is happening. They maintain the status quo. What is acceptable? What is the minimum? Individuals who fall into this category neither raise anxiety nor provide leadership motivation to anybody in the organization.

A culture is created in an organization when there is broad-based adoption by all three groups of what is minimally acceptable. In my career I have seen organizations that had a culture of honesty and openness that borders on being altruistic. Organizations that are closed and hostile aren't very fun places to work. More often than not, most organizations have a culture that is somewhere in between those two extremes.

The three groups I identified are responsible for influencing a different part of an organization's cultural complexity. If the in crowd is very small, the organization tends to be elitist, arrogant and in some cases abusive to the remainder of the organization. On the other hand, if the silent majority is the predominant creator of what's acceptable in the organization, then the leaders have to work very hard to keep up with their followers. Those who are on the outside are almost always on the fringes, but never too far away from meeting the minimum.

Now what's interesting is that any of these groups may be competent or incompetent. What's really interesting in an organization is if one of these groups is competent and the other two are not, as there will be a definite sway to the organization. When all three are incompetent, the organization is in a state of chaos most of the time. When the organization is perceived to be the most stable is when all three have the ability to interact without animosity.

There is another phenomenon that I have witnessed in fire service cultures: falling from grace. This is really nothing more than individuals finding themselves removed from one of the three status levels because they have been rejected by other members of that same cultural group. For example, if an individual is part of the in crowd and violates some value, he may find himself going to the outer fringe in a big hurry. People who are part of the silent majority can find themselves pushed into either of the other cultural relationships by speaking up on a particular issue.

We aren't going to stop the creation of events and experiences that create the culture of the fire service. To the contrary, I don't want to. But as chief officers we need to be monitoring the firehouse fable to ensure that it is accurate to the event, helpful rather than destructive and kept into perspective of the culture of the organization.

At one level we tend to think that fire departments are very unique cultures. The fact is I see many similarities between the development of a fire department's inner culture and the development of almost any organizational setting in which groups of individuals find themselves in close contact. One is well-advised to study anthropology and archeology when it comes to understanding the fire service, because the same processes that we use to deal with culture at the community level are very much alive and well in the firehouse.

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With more than 40 years in the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.