Mental Edge Mondays: Time to Think — But Not Always Alone

Chiefs need time to think, but they also need trusted people who can help them see what they might otherwise miss

In a recent Friday Truth, Kory Pearn makes a deceptively simple argument: Fire chiefs need protected time to think.

He is exactly right.

The concept Kory describes has deep roots in military leadership culture. In the military, protecting a senior leader’s ability to step away from the immediate fight, to zoom out and take a landscape view of the combat landscape, is not simply a productivity practice. It is an essential command function.

Gen. James Mattis is the clearest modern champion of this principle. Mattis identified lack of reflection among senior leaders as one of the military’s greatest deficiencies. Referred to by many Marines as a “Warrior Monk,” Mattis promoted the idea that leaders need protected solitude to examine their assumptions, return to their governing principles, and think beyond the noise and pressure of the immediate situation.

Gen. Colin Powell reinforced the same concern. He warned that years of relentless tactical demands had left military leaders with less time to think, debate, read, and develop strategically. Both generals understood that leaders cannot remain trapped in constant tactical reactivity and still be expected to see what is coming.

When Urgency Crowds Out Judgment

We hire public safety chiefs — both fire and police chiefs — for their judgment, experience, imagination, and ability to see around corners, then bury them under a relentless stream of problems requiring immediate action. If every hour is consumed by what is urgent, there is no mental territory left for what is important but not yet on fire.

A chief may move from a personnel dispute to a budget meeting, from an apparatus problem to a political concern, and then into a conversation about the future of the department — all before lunch. Each situation requires a different mental language, emotional posture, and type of judgment. The chief must be decisive in one conversation, diplomatic in the next, protective in another, and visionary 15 minutes later.

That constant code-shifting is mentally draining. By the time leaders reach the blank space on their calendars, they may technically have time available but very little traction left. But their brains are overloaded, still carrying fragments of the previous six problems.

So yes, we need to protect chiefs from constant interruption. But Kory’s argument opens the door to another question: Once we give our chiefs time to think, what will help them think beyond the boundaries of what they already know?

Solitary reflection has enormous value. It allows the nervous system to settle, patterns to emerge, and half-formed ideas to develop. Yet even the most thoughtful chief is still drawing from a closed pool of information: their own training, experience, assumptions, and established ways of understanding a problem.

You cannot retrieve knowledge you were never expected to acquire.

We would never expect a psychologist — even one with decades of experience working alongside firefighters — to walk onto a fireground and make command decisions about strategy, apparatus deployment, or structural collapse. Why, then, do we expect chiefs and captains to possess the knowledge of someone who has spent decades in the trenches of mental warfare?

Are we expecting them to discern the difference between a firefighter grieving the death of a brother or sister and one who is developing post-traumatic stress disorder?

Are we expecting them to know what to say — and what not to say — when a department member dies by suicide? To develop the right messaging strategy, protect the family, reduce the risk of further harm, respond to anger and blame, and guide an entire department through collective grief?

Are we expecting a captain to give sound counsel when a firefighter in the emotional freefall of a painful divorce begins making impulsive, regrettable decisions — decisions that could cost that firefighter a career, a relationship with their children, or their life?

Are we expecting command staff to know how to move someone into a safe, confidential, culturally competent substance-use program while preserving that person’s dignity, privacy, employment, and trust?

Expanding the Field of Vision

These are not ordinary leadership problems, but rather complex human problems with potentially life-altering consequences. Chiefs and captains should not be expected to solve them from instinct alone.

This is where a certain type of protected thinking time becomes most valuable — not simply when a leader closes the door, but when that leader can open it to a trusted advisor with a radically different body of expertise.

The best military leaders understand this. Strategic thinking in military culture has never meant merely sitting alone in a room. Generals rely on trusted advisors who see the terrain through different lenses: intelligence, logistics, law, diplomacy, culture, psychology, and the likely behavior of allies and adversaries.

They do not seek advisors because they are incapable of thinking for themselves. They seek them because high-level judgment improves when leaders can test their thinking against knowledge they do not already possess. The advisor does not take command. The advisor expands the commander’s field of vision.

The right conversation can reveal that what appears to be a disciplinary problem is actually an untreated trauma problem. What looks like poor morale may be collective moral injury. What appears to be resistance to help may reflect a reasonable fear that seeking help will destroy a career. What looks like one firefighter’s personal crisis may be an early warning of a much larger cultural vulnerability.

This is exactly the work I do with fire-service command staff and peer teams. But it is important to understand what that means, because it is not mental wellness programming. It is not therapy, counseling, or a conventional psychological approach brought into the firehouse. I am not there to diagnose firefighters, encourage everyone to discuss their feelings, or reproduce services already available through an EAP or existing department-attached behavioral-health providers.

My work is specialized human discernment applied to real operational problems.

It means helping chiefs, captains, and peer teams understand what may be happening beneath the behavior they can see.

Is this firefighter grieving, traumatized, morally injured, impaired, enraged, ashamed, or entering a period of dangerous impulsivity?

Is this a personal problem, a leadership problem, a cultural problem, or some combination of all three?

What response is proportionate?

Who should approach the person?

What language might create traction — and what language will almost certainly cause the person to shut down or disappear?

This is where decades spent working in the trenches of mental warfare become useful. I bring a body of specialized knowledge that command staff should no more be expected to possess than I should be expected to direct an interior attack.

Sometimes the work means helping a chief distinguish grief from post-traumatic stress, advising a department after a suicide so avoidable messaging mistakes do not deepen the injury, helping leaders recognize that what appears to be poor morale is actually collective moral injury, helping a peer team reach a firefighter who is making dangerous decisions during a divorce, or identifying a confidential substance-use program—and helping create a path into that care that protects the firefighter’s dignity, privacy, and trust.

Expertise That Strengthens Command

The chief remains the chief. Outside expertise does not replace command judgment; it strengthens it by introducing knowledge that is rarely present within the department’s existing circle of advisors.

Without that kind of expertise in the room, chiefs may spend their protected time rearranging the same facts and producing slightly different versions of the same solutions. The purpose of trusted counsel is not to tell capable leaders what to think. It is to help them see what they could not reasonably have been expected to see on their own.

Kory is right that our chiefs need time to think. Military leaders have understood the importance of that space for generations. But the deeper lesson from military command is that no leader — no matter how capable — should be expected to think through every complex problem alone.

Real leadership does mean that leaders must generate every solution on their own. Sometimes it is recognizing which problems require a different kind of expert and having that person close enough to call before the problem becomes a crisis.

Shauna ‘Doc’ Springer, PhD is a pioneering psychologist, award-winning Military Times podcast host, and one of the world’s leading experts on psychological trauma, moral injury, suicide prevention, close relationships and the unique needs of the military and first responder communities. Doc Springer provides highly specialized consultation and confidential advising to organizations and public safety agencies that support protectors and defenders through her company THIN LINE ADVISORY.