What do Dirty Harry and Groucho Marks have in common? If you guessed personality, you are going down the wrong path. Both were grouchy, but one was humorous and the other violent. If you guessed that both were movie stars, you are getting close. However, if you guessed that both provided society with an opportunity to answer basically the same simple question in two very different ways, you are on the right track.

Dirty Harry once offered a criminal a choice while pointing a .357 Magnum at him. The criminal's next course of action would have to be based on how lucky he was feeling. Groucho Marks hosted a quiz show called You Bet Your Life. His threat was not nearly as violent, but he would constantly ask people to bet on whether they were feeling lucky.

Louis Pasteur once said, “luck favors the mind prepared.” If Dirty Harry's foe had been counting bullets, he might have realized that the hero's gun was empty. And, if someone with a post-graduate degree went on Marx's game show, his probability of winning might be higher than the person with nothing but a high-school education.

Let's look at the concept of gambling with your future in the context of fire-service success. The concept of risk-taking is almost entirely aimed at emergency operations. Most people don't like to take risks with their careers, their promotional opportunities or their administrative actions. They don't want to be lucky; they want to be successful. However, when we the outcomes of processes aren't in our favor, we often characterize it as being unlucky.

Is it? Luck has nothing to do with it. If you are going to take your money and gamble, you probably know that the odds are almost always stacked against you. If you visit Las Vegas, Atlantic City or Monaco and place your money down on the table to play a card game, the odds are loaded against you — unless you have a plan. People who bet on the outcome of sporting events more often are successful because they have technical expertise about the sport. This is especially true if they have kept really good statistics.

For every problem you are confronted with, you are more likely to have a positive outcome by being better prepared.

Granted, if you are at the scene of an emergency, there often are factors beyond your control that can turn a bad incident into a tragedy. But I am not talking about those kinds of problems. I'm talking about the ones that have to do with making a decision regarding discipline, budgets, political activity, code enforcement, or any number of other policy choices.

To quote the “gambler” himself, Kenny Rogers, “you have to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away and know when to run.” Getting into risky circumstances is as linked to your ability to read the signs and signals as it is to whether you stand a chance of winning and whether you are willing to pay the consequences of losing.

Let's talk about preparation rather than training. I have talked to many fire officers who have enough certificates to wallpaper their houses with diplomas but who lack a very essential element of surviving a critical and stressful decision-making process: They aren't prepared. The job description and the badge often aren't an adequate explanation of what is expected when there is a really catastrophic and stressful problem to solve. As you acquire knowledge on your way up the pecking order in the fire service, you should be obtaining experience at the same time.

But a leader also needs wisdom. Wisdom is different than knowledge and experience. Wisdom comes from making judgments in the past from which you have learned something. It is ephemeral, as opposed to being very specific. It was once stated that good judgment depends on wisdom. In turn, wisdom depends on experience. And sometimes, experience depends on bad judgment.

Continuing with the gambling metaphor, one of the things that will improve your chances of succeeding in a highly stressful situation is to know the rules better than anybody else. Studying the options before you are asked to exercise them is not an exercise in futility. Instead, it improves your odds of being successful. Imagine a diagram in which the horizontal axis represents the passage of time and the vertical axis represents the number of options available. At the far left, when there is no crisis on the horizon, you have multiple options that are available to you. As you move across the bottom axis, a diagonal line comes from the upper-left-hand corner to the lower-right-hand corner that ultimately means one of those options is going to have to be exercised. The lower-right-hand corner — where there are few options and a lot of time has passed — is the crisis box. That is when a deadline becomes readily apparent.

It is sort of like when you are sitting at the card table and someone has just bet against you and you now have to determine whether you are going to raise the ante. The longer that you stay out of the crisis box, the better off you are. Examining all of your options as part of the preparation phase is a lot more important than having a certificate that says you know about the subject.

For example, many fire chiefs get themselves in trouble over labor relations, yet have not really examined the relevant laws or the memorandum of agreement in detail. They make assumptions and bluff in hopes that their feint will carry them through the bet.