If someone offered you $10 if you take it today or $11 if you wait until tomorrow, which would you take? Neuroscientist Eric Haseltine asked that question in his book, Long Fuse, Big Bang. “Evolution has bred patience out of us,” Haseltine wrote, and has hardwired us to focus on the immediate rather than the important.

Granted, eschewing the extra dollar because one didn’t want to wait even one more day might seem like a benign example of instant gratification — a symptom of a debit-driven society, according to Haseltine. But “organizations everywhere are so consumed with short-term problems and goals that they have little time to create and nurture long-term opportunities,” he wrote. Such organizations include fire departments.

How many times have you come away from a meeting excited by new goals to meet only to be mired in “urgent” matters that make you forget those goals? E-mails, phone calls, meetings and the like all detract from the long-term, more important goals.

In 2004, the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation gathered more than 200 leaders of fire organizations and associations, as well as fallen-firefighter family members to talk about how to change the culture of the American fire service. Did those participants realize how long it would take to change the fire-service culture? It would seem they did, as they set goals for the long term: reducing the fatality rate by 25% within five years and by 50% within 10 years.

And change has been steady. Firefighter line-of-duty deaths are down for the third straight year, and manufacturers highlight their products’ safety features in their marketing.

Change comes one chief and one department at a time, but sometimes change can only come with new blood. Recently, the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ Volunteer/Combination Officers Section an event dubbed “The Heartbeat of America: Preserving the Future of the Volunteer Fire Service.” Organizers sought chiefs and officers who are mostly unknown on the national scene for the invitation-only summit. These 125 fresh voices divided into nine groups, received a topic and statement to explore, and proposed solutions for the future of the volunteer fire service.

I was assigned to the “Reputation Management” group, which was comprised of volunteer and combination fire chiefs, corporate individuals, and a couple of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, along with a facilitator and board liaison. We discussed managing a fire department’s reputation in the age of social media.

We touched upon videos of silly department pranks that go public, the use of cell-phone cameras on the fireground or at EMS calls, and members of the community recording first responders in inappropriate situations. We agreed that prevention of such instances and uniform damage control should a breach occur are top priorities, and all thought that a department with open and strong communications with its citizens would be best-equipped to weather such an incident.

But as tight budgets and high printing costs have killed many annual reports, how can departments effectively communicate to their communities? Well, that depends on whether your needs are urgent or important: urgent because you need a referendum or to perform damage control; or important because it’s part of ongoing relationship-building efforts?

Short fuses produce small bangs, like firecrackers; long fuses produced big bangs, like dynamite.

Which do you need?

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