Contemplating the consequences of things that haven't happened yet is a mental game that many of us play in our lives. What if our budget is reduced by 10%? What if we add an additional person to our engine company? What if the council votes this way or that way on a specific piece of legislation or regulation?

When this game of “what if?” is speculative, we can talk about what might be. If it's hopeful, we can wish for certain things to happen. If it's approached fearfully, we could be concerned about something happening over which we have no control. In any case, the question of what if should be used whenever we can as a form of professional inquiry.

What if we use the “what if?” game as a means of motivating change? Recently I read a book in the Robert Cowley-edited What If? series featuring essays by Caleb Carr, John Lukacs, James Bradley, Stephen Ambrose and others that examine how numerous historical events affected contemporary society and how our world would be different if things had happened in another way. In other words, what if something had not happened? For example, what if our nation had not fought the Civil War? What if Nazi Germany had prevailed in World War II because the United States remained neutral? These are big “what if?” stories and a lot of fun to read, but they don't have much to do with the modern world, mainly because those things didn't happen.

But what if we ask some questions about how we can do things better, faster or quicker? Perhaps we could change the nature of what we're doing in the world of fire protection. In the context of innovation and adaptation, the “what if?” game is the world of the inventor, the early adopter and the entrepreneur. In the world of the pessimist, the late adopter and the technologically obsolete, “what if?” is used as a form of professional paranoia.

I was contemplating this concept the other day as I was looking at “Gadgets, Geeks and Gizmos,” a magazine article that examined modern technology. Specifically, it discussed what's possible with the many things that our society is starting to adopt from the wonderful world of technology. Perhaps it's time for us in the fire service to sit back and take a look at what's happening in the rest of the world and ask ourselves, “What if some of these things were brought into our world faster and in a well-structured fashion.”

Let me give you a couple of real-world examples. For example, what if Bluetooth technology allowed every firefighter to wear an earpiece that allowed them to monitor radio traffic all of the time, not just when they're wearing PPE. Firefighters could have situational awareness of everything that's happening while they're at the fire station, without having to use their hands. I'm not just talking about having a radio with Bluetooth capability, but rather a mechanism that is worn by firefighters when they're on duty so they can receive timely information ranging from dispatch center updates to last-minute warnings on safety issues.