Simple words that save lives: lessons from “expert talkers”
bbc.com
bbc.com
It's my understanding that some people are particularly sensitive to cursing and aggressive language, while others don't really care much. When we read something like the above, both our worlds collide. The language sensitive people will relate with the dispatcher, while others will think what the hell, because it seems that she was not listening to what was being said, but rather focusing on how it was said.
In society it's each person's responsibility to be civil and courteous, but emergency dispatchers should not expect this from callers. Not everybody is polite, but everyone deserves to expect help when they call for it, regardless of the way they talk. Emergency response is not customer service, where you can just tell a client that you'll have to drop them because they berated one of the phone clerks and that's against company policy.
I'm not playing devil's advocate for bullies, nor saying that people who hate swearing shouldn't do certain jobs. But I believe that if the work is to be a public respondent to emergency situations, maybe learning to not take things so personally should be part of the training.
Why should emergency dispatchers not expect a civil working environment?
I do not condone the response of the emergency dispatcher here but I genuinely want to know why an emergency dispatcher must be required to withstand hostile behavior as part of their job?
Emergencies make people stressed. Stressed people often curse.
They're not required to interpret a caller's phone voice as 'hostile' either. Unless the caller actually says something like "I'm going to come find you and kill you or your family" or something along those lines, I don't think there's any reason anything a caller says should be interpreted as 'hostile' to the dispatcher. If they're agitated/upset - well... they're having an emergency.
Should medical staff not expect "sick people" in their office/hospital?
Someone who can't handle someone yelling or swearing on the phone should't be in a dispatcher role, and... yeah, I think it's gotta be stressful for them too, and they probably shouldn't do it a whole lot, as they'll burn out quickly.
* firemen often risking their lives approaching (and sometimes entering) buildings in fire. It's a hostile environment, but it's their duty, whether they are paid or not (volunteer firefighters).
* policemen answering a call in a dangerous/hostile neighbourhoods (or just roaming). It's hostile environment, but it's their duty to be of service there.
Compared to the above, expecting dispatchers to emotionally detach and not take anything said personally is a smaller ask, in my opinion.
It depends on the country and culture too. Here in Scotland, swearing is basically part of the vernacular, especially if you're in informal terms with each other. For example, if I help out a friend, he might say "ta, you're a good cunt!", and it's a way of saying "thanks".
It still has negative connotations, but in a much lesser way so it becomes part of friendly banter.
Another example would be if I told a friend something incredulous, they might respond with "get tae fuck!" (meaning, "fuck off!"), or "awa' an shite!", (meaning "what a load of shit!").
Because there would be violence involved.
Seriously though, the tone, context and body language would be completely different.
Too much familiarity with someone you don't known is a highly aggressive challenge. "What's up motherfucker" to some guy at the bar won't make any friends and might end in a fight.
I'd rather my friends call me a cunt (as the closest ones do) than mate, because the thin veneer of politeness in mate implies distance if not contempt (from strangers / acquaintances).
No it isn't. It's often hilarious, as in the above example. And in that one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You wouldn't use it in mixed company, but if you know your audience you can say any number of horribly offensive things.
If you're not offended, I have to try harder to convey my indignity, you naughtyhead.
Some people interpret the very act of cursing as incivility, regardless of the purpose, and some people only view it as uncivil if it is meant to be uncivil.
Personally, I don’t agree that the only reason to curse is to offend. In my mind, curse words have a very specific meaning and sometimes they are by far the most appropriate word for a situation.
I would liken it to using words that describe parts of the human anatomy. There are some people who would never say the word penis in polite company, but sometimes it’s just the only word for the job.
Also, I’m not suggesting that my interpretation is the only reasonable one, just that I think there are widely varying positions.
Of course it depends on the social context. I'm not going to be swearing much at all at work and still feel a little startled (not offended, just surprised and maybe vaguely uncomfortable) when my manager drops an F-bomb or two. Yet around friends and family, F-bombs (and C-bombs [1] around close friends!) are almost used like exclamation points, purely to draw emphasis and attention to a statement.
I can only conclude it's one of those cultural things. So while I respect that some people find swearing deeply offensive and particularly only useful to offend, that's a really alien concept to me.
[1] F-bomb and C-bomb are slang terms referring to f..k and c..t respectively.
I recommend nonviolent communication, the book and the practice. Teaches the ability to “translate” highly charged conversations into basic human needs and feelings.
I'd imagine that as much as anything, this is about 911 dispatching being a thoroughly unnatural role. On one end of the phone, it's a life-and-death crisis, but on the other it's the twelfth call of an eight-hour shift. Miscommunication across that kind of gap seems inevitable.
For the dispatcher, the question was sensible because "I don't know" is one fork in triage that helps separate from answers like "she's diabetic so maybe her blood sugar dropped". For the caller, it feels like he's expected to have an answer and isn't getting helped by the dispatcher, particularly if he already knows that he doesn't have any useful information.
From a completely dispassionate view, the dispatcher still got his answer: no known cause, continue to step 2. But as far as training dispatchers, it raises all kinds of questions: Can you reorder the questions to get the caller's observations and then their knowledge? Can you rephrase 'why?' so that "I don't know" feels like part of the process and not a breakdown of it? Can you prepare the dispatcher better to deescalate or ignore the hostility instead of worsening it?
Emergency Medical Dispatch is a fascinating case study of technical communication in general. Lots of jobs train people to communicate urgent information clearly, but EMD has exceptionally specific limitations. Only one side of the call is trained, so you can't rely on rehearsed protocols like EMTs or police officers would. And the priority of information is completely unintuitive to most of us because it's not just importance, but sequencing: info needed to dispatch an ambulance comes first, then info to help the caller do first aid, and only after that the seemingly crucial stuff like "what's actually making them sick".
Some of her ad hoc instructions included telling people to jump in a pool or pond. This saved numerous lives [1].
She is now literally rewriting the script for how dispatchers respond to wildfire emergencies [2]:
"Her boss, Aaron Abbott, said that on several occasions “KT gave life-saving instructions to citizens in situations that were so unique that no emergency fire dispatch protocols existed for them.”
1 - https://www.pressdemocrat.com/specialsections/rebuildnorthba...
2 - https://www.pressdemocrat.com/specialsections/rebuildnorthba...
EDIT for 1:
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/9586767-181/sonoma-storie...
Bad language in my brain wiring triggers fight or flight responses in me because in the wrong context, it sounds f’ing aggressive and violates all kinds of gentlemen’s codes.
It’s not the words themselves though. I can watch standup comedy with lots of bad language for hours. Another example is Jon Favreau’s character in Chef who curses liberally but his personality is so teddy bear like it doesn’t do anything to me. Joe Rogan? No problem.
But if I meet someone in a corporate setting who looks stern (especially a young insecure guy) and starts to let fly with bad language, I’m likely to cut the person down — because my brain interprets it as aggressive posturing and puts me in a mood to attack this person.
I need to work on my responses (I’m not justifying them), but I also want to share so that folks know how bad language can come across in the wrong context.
That's obviously far less about the profanity, and more about the power dynamic and tone. My guess is the same response could be triggered with no actual profanity in that setting.
I've never been a dispatcher, but I have worked in on-site assembly plant tech support, and I've seen the problem with escalating interactions quite a bit. The way I approach it, people who call in are upset and excited about their problems, not mad at me. Other people heard the raised tone of voice and took it personally.
I recommend nonviolent communication, the book and the practice. Teaches the ability to “translate” highly charged conversations into basic human needs and feelings.
The person swearing was a random 911 caller attempting to receive help; we can't expect every caller to know nonviolent communication, or to recall it in life-or-death situations. The person upset by the swearing was a 911 dispatcher; if they have involuntary triggers around language then a job that absolutely requires remaining composed while talking to frightened strangers is dangerously poor fit. And I don't think it would actually be good for the dispatcher to practice NVC - whatever its merits, it's not a process meant for rapidly transferring vital information.
Safety and emergency-response communication is an entire topic of its own, and emergency medical dispatchers already get specific training on how to achieve the goals of that work.
My point being. Yes there are limits to what emergency response should put up with.
Second, your story does not support your point, it just adds words to it with no apparent relevance.
This is hard to imagine, actually. An incredible dereliction of duty by the hospital.
> Yes there are limits to what emergency response should put up with.
And your conclusion, as applied to the context you provide, is clearly wrong. Of course there are limits to what emergency response should put up with, but that doesn't even come close.
Was this a delivery facility in the USA?
Because if so, I'm 99.999% sure they broke the law. Just by way of example, recently, in one of the hospitals my S.O. runs, a gentlemen was cursing and racially berating a black nurse for attempting to treat his wife. Extreme vulgarity. (They had come in because the wife was having a baby. So emergency situation.) The hospital simply asked that the husband leave, and made sure that no black, hispanic or asian caregivers treated the wife.
Why?
Because it's unethical not to treat the sick, it's illegal in most states, and it will get you into serious problems with medical review boards everywhere in the US. All that then starts impacting things like Joint Commission, etc etc etc.
Of course, if the facility is already full and operating at legal capacity, that's one thing. But it doesn't sound like that's what happened in your anecdote.
The conversation is fascinating and frustrating to read. The paper breaks down the interactions to try to find out where exactly communication failed.
> Our investigation revealed that the participants had rather different understandings of what was happening and different expectations of what was supposed to happen in this conversation. Over the course of the interaction the talk of both caller and nurse-dispatcher (and her supervisor) operated to extend and deepen this misalignment. This misalignment contributed in a fundamental way to a dispute that contaminated and transformed the participants' activity: the eliciting and giving of information concerning the condition of the caller's stepmother was displaced by the activity of arguing. We were thus able to show when and how words can "fail," not in the sense of failing to be heard or comprehended but in the sense of failing to achieve the "meaning" they might be perceived as semantically conveying.
The paper is paywalled, but can be accessed with Sci-Hub [2].
[1] http://www.jstor.org/stable/800591
[2] https://sci-hub.tw/https%3A//www.jstor.org/stable/800591%3Fs...
Fascinating indeed.
Also, I'm grateful Sci-Hub exists!
That's why it's good for customer service and their management to push back when people are rude and not accept excuses. Besides making life dramatically better for customer service, it helps train people to be courteous as a matter of course. They learn courtesy works and will tend to build an unconcious habit that's more likely to exhibit when they're in an emergency.
Baffling to me that people who are meant to be dealing with human beings going through stressful moments, perhaps the most stressful of their lives, believe policing civility should be part of the package.
One concern I have about it is that it is a useful "letting off steam" step before an increase in physical aggression or temper.
When that step is removed due to it becoming a form of punctuation, the escalation to physical becomes potentially easier or quicker.
Correcting my pronunciation of a street name is fine in most contexts, but it seems like an awfully trivial thing to spend time on while my friend is bleeding profusely.
Fortunately, I managed to flag down a passing ambulance and a paramedic intervened. This seemed to calm things down for a while until the police arrived.
However, one of the officers had the same effect as I had and the situation became quite desperate. His female colleague intervened though and that's when the situation turned around.
I ended up sitting in the ambulance with the paramedics while the drama unfolded. Eventually, the policewoman came over and said the guy was willing to get into the ambulance so long as 'that man' is not there (meaning me). So I bid my farewell to my new paramedic friends and left the scene.
I doubt he was going to jump initially but I wonder, if it was left to just me, whether the outcome would have been more tragic?
Unlike me and her colleague who did, more or less, the exact opposite.
Do you think it differed at all to the paramedics and policewoman?
The policewoman did have the advantage of being able to close the bridge to traffic though, which also helped calm things down.
Unfortunately, it is also counter to intuition for many, who just want to help and tend to swarm around the problem.
This is a dangerous myth and it kills people. https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/support-and-infor...
[this story has no lesson, sorry]
I guess
So, my teenage self decided to teach this guy a lesson. When I started driving towards him, before he could jump at me I turned my car at him and drove right in his direction. It scared him half to death and he jumped backwards.
However, whose "burden of proof" is it? Should "OP" provide evidence to their claim or you to yours? If no claims are provided, what should the "default action" be?
I argue that, in face of the extreme consequences of the proposed action ("burdening" instead of "no burdening"), "no burdening" should be the default action, unless there's evidence that "burdening" works (which none of us in the conversation have so far provided).
You're wholeheartedly endorsing the idea I was using to mock you:
>> Every strategy has its successes and its failures. If that were a reason not to do something, you'd never do anything.
The consequences of, in your terminology, "no burdening" are just as extreme as the consequences of "burdening". That's obvious, because they are exactly the same consequences.
And the evidence that people will avoid doing things they might otherwise do, even at significant cost to themselves, for the sake of their family and close friends, is abundant.
Rational people, maybe. People on the verge of suicide are not acting rationally.
Where's the citable evidence for the claim that "shaming/guilting/burdening suicidal people makes them less likely to commit suicide"?
https://www.popehat.com/2016/04/21/what-empathy-looks-like-t...
With that level of public openmindedness, the citable evidence (of which this is a part) is guaranteed to dramatically understate the actual effectiveness of the approach.
My interpretation from your link is that "watching videos of someone playing games helped a viewer not commit suicide".
How's this evidence for advocating berating people while (not after) they are suicidal?
The streamer was also suicidal, and responded to the viewer's note with his personal viewpoint on committing suicide. ("People who do it are selfish and weak" -- pretty much the same viewpoint we're discussing here.) Note that, since the streamer was alive, that viewpoint successfully prevented him, the streamer, from committing suicide.
For sharing his successful views, he was made a pariah.
Even if it did, the suicidal person themselves thinking suicide is selfish is a totally different thing than someone else saying it to them, especially in a moment of crisis.
Here's a transcript: https://www.kent.gov.uk/social-care-and-health/health/releas...
They already feel immense amounts of shame. Adding to that shame just re-affirms what they already think, it confirms their distorted thinking that everyone would be better off without them.
The distorted thinking runs something like: "Only an arsehole would kill themselves and leave their family to deal with it, and I'm thinking of killing myself, therefore I am an arsehole. And I'm so terrible that they would in fact be better off without me."
Watch the video on this page: https://www.kent.gov.uk/social-care-and-health/health/releas...
People already feel huge amounts of shame about the pain that they're inflicting upon other people. Calling them selfish just re-affirms what they're already feeling, makes them feel worse, and increases the risk that they'll die.
"If he feels like shit, maybe making him feel worse will help?"
----
"TV taught you how to love, it showed you what love looks like, feels like. But when you're actually in love, it doesn't look like that, so you secretly suspect you don't have the capacity for love, that there's something wrong with you.
Same goes for sadness. And it's worse when you're in the presence of someone else's sadness, you have no idea what to do. All you really know about experiencing these emotions is the script you got from TV. "Oh your husband died!? Oh my God, that's terrible! I'm so sorry for you!!" But you don't feel any of that. Nothing.
So you think to yourself, what the hell is wrong with me? This woman's husband died-- sure, I can fake it, but am I such an empty monster that I feel nothing?
Of course you feel nothing. Why would you?-- it's not your loss. What's wrong isn't your lack of feeling, but that you think you have to feel something, that you have to tell this woman, remind this woman, how horrible is her loss. You think the only way to connect with people is to have their emotions. You think she wants to connect with _you_. You think she wants _your_ help.
The problem isn't your lack of feeling, it is that you think that unless you feel it's not real. You forget that she has a life that doesn't have you in it.
What you should say is, "I'm very sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do?" and that's it. But that feels insufficient. You think this because you think that there is something you can do, that the sadness is not real for you so it must not be real for her and you thus have the power to change it.
She's not looking for you to be sad, she's not looking to you for anything, her loss is bigger than you. If she needs anything from you, it's sympathy, not empathy.
But no one taught you this. So you fall back on the character "man helping grieving widow." Action!
----
What's wrong isn't that you don't know what to say to save him, it's that you think there is something you can say which can save him.
I'm not suggesting you simply walk away and let him die, I'm suggesting that if your reason for not walking away is "society would judge /me/ if I walked away" then you're framing the situation in terms of you. And if your reason for staying is "maybe I can save him, I have to try", then you're framing the situation in terms of you. Only God can save him or bring his son back, you or I cannot, and he knows it - although we might not know it, and act as if we can.
Subconsciously framing it as if the most important part of this man's grief over his dead son is the part you play in it, and how it affects you, is screwy, and it's what we're all taught (by TV and media) to do.
What can you do instead? "I'm very sorry to hear that."; acknowledge to yourself that maybe his grief /is/ enough to justify suicide. Acknowledge to yourself that it /is/ a tragedy that cannot be fixed by the right words, if only you knew them. Release yourself from the bondage of having to save him, and from the responsibility of thinking you potentially can save him (and get the credit), and free yourself up to focus on him, listen to him, be there with him. Or to leave if you're only going to make it worse. Because if leaving helps him, but makes society think worse of you .. surely you can endure the hit to your ego to help a grieving man, right?
Maybe the best thing you can do is help him die with dignity and without pain, carry a message to someone for him. That's what people say they want from a true friend, isn't it? Someone to help bury the bodies, someone who can and will put a bullet in me to stop me suffering?
Or maybe the best thing you can do is let him know that you understand his suffering is bad and you would do those things for him.
By feeling like you are obliged to care, must interject, must save him against his wishes, must say the right thing, you dismiss his grief, disrespect his sadness, appear false, threaten to take away his control over his own life, and push him away. By accepting his grief, sympathising with it, supporting him, maybe you give him room to move.
And maybe he still dies. And maybe he has as good a reason as anyone for it.
And maybe he doesn't, because someone was there listening to how he hurt without trying to change it or fix it or trivialise it, or make it about them. Someone being there with him, while he suffered, without expecting anything more from him. Like a friend would.
[1] https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/01/can_narcissism_be_cu...
isn't that what we narcissistic generations built the "social" parts of the internet for, after all?)
Thanks for the comment btw.
I'm not sure general advice is possible, but if I had to give some it would be the exact opposite: compassion; acklowledging their pain; understanding that they most likely don't want to die -- they just cannot bear living. Be a person they can talk to. Let them know you take their problems seriously, and that they have value to you, just for existing.
My advice would be to say hello, ask what's going on for the person, do not approach until they give you permission, do not dismiss what they're saying but hold hope, tell them that while you don't know them that you care about them and don't want them to die.
Don't for fuck's sake try to make a joke about it. This is one of the worst days of that person's life. They're on that bridge, on that train platform, because they intend to end their life. At that point in time this is the only way out they can see. It's not absurd to them.
I had a friend phone me late at night a few weeks back and it took me a minute to realize what she was saying when she just said "I don't want to be here anymore". Fuck the thought of it is still haunting now.
Thankfully she didn't follow through. Still really really scary.
Once someone's to that point, they either don't want you to help - or don't think they want you to help. If they believed it could be fixed they wouldn't be in this situation. But no-one wants to die alone, so you can offer them someone to listen.
If you know the main strategy of your opponent it to get you talking, your most obvious strategy is to not talk.
- I want to speak with you (instead of: talk to you).
- Is there something else you'd like to talk about? (instead of: anything else).
To ellicit a better response from your interlocutors. The story goes that "talk" and "anything" show only apparent openness to engage in dialogue due to cultural associations/cliches, not actual interest.
In particular they mention the second one in the context of meetings. I think I'll try that one as a very informal experiment as I tend to prefer "anything" when asking that in meetings and I don't get a great response usually.
But that's not even a complete sentence! That's a terrible question! What on earth would you want as a response to that? If someone said to me 'what else?' I'd just think 'what else... what?' What else were you planning to do today? What else did I need to tell you? What else did you need to tell me? What else did I want to ask? What are you asking me 'else' about?
Why do you consider the sentence incomplete when the context of the sentence you quoted is quite clear.
FWIW, it was beaten over our heads in school that merely writing “Yes.” in response to a question is not a complete sentence, but that may have been a pedagogical rule rather than a grammatical rule, to force students to learn proper grammar.
A sentence will generally not make sense out of context[0] anyway.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_(linguistics)#Major_a...
I'm pretty surprised to hear this one. I've never taken that phrase as dismissive, and it didn't occur to me that anyone else would (and it's my experience that plenty of times, others will bring things up upon that question being asked).
DO tell the 911 operator that we live in a house, not an apartment
DO tell the 911 operator that we have five people in our family (omit the detail that our foster child isn't biologically related)
DO NOT tell the 911 operator that, technically, our fish are "pets"
DO NOT attempt to negotiate a Creative Commons license for the recording of the 911 call
We were taught a recommended recipe: Who, where, what. You tell them who you are, where you're located, then what the problem is. The responder can then start asking questions to get the details they need to classify the category and urgency of the emergency.
It's really something that should be widely taught.
I could be wrong.
In the several times I’ve called 911 in an urban area the dispatcher I get is most interested in where to route the call. If medical or fire, they transfer to fire and for everything else they transfer to police. It is almost like they serve as a quick triage and then route to the appropriate place.
Once the actual dispatcher answers they ask a bunch of questions. They waste very little time and can almost seem rude or impolite as they don’t really let you deviate from the “script” but I assume it is because they need to gather the most info in the shortest amount of time.
Thankfully I’ve never had to call with something that requires both medial and police (eg shooting, etc)....
I once called 911 for a traffic accident and I also got flustered when they kept asking for my address (I wasn’t involved) instead of telling me that someone is on the way. Ali l wanted to hear is “we have sent somebody”. Then it would have been much easier to answer other questions.
This is entirely reasonable.
1) Its a stressful situation
2) Your home address is irrelevant to the situation. But because they're asking, you assume they think its relevant[1]. So you're subconsciously worried that they are going to show up at your house because of the miscommunication.
3) You can't quite consciously put your finger on why you want them to stop thinking about your home address because its a stressful situation.
[1] See Grice's 3rd maxim https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html
I was at my home and heard it. Ran to a few hundred metres away and as I got there a nurse arrived too who by chance was driving that way. I made the call because I was pretty certain she'd handle the carnage better than I could.
They answered and I explained there had been a head on car crash, the next question was Police, Fire or Ambulance? Which threw me a bit, I don't care who you send that can deal with this! I think I said Ambulance and then they sent all three anyway.
They then asked what road I was on, it was a minor road and I couldn't remember the road name so I was trying to describe where it went from and to and how far along it was. The person answering the call seemed not to know the place names I was giving, my brain was working overtime trying to find references.
It wasn't until the next day that I realised I should've just given my home address and they'd have found us easily.
In the Netherlands I hade the same experience with my only call. I still get angry I had to make that decision. In fact I am pretty sure I got it wrong. In the end no one came and 4 hours later I got a call asking whether I still needed help.
Thank god things had calmed down at that point, but that was pretty much luck. Had I made the right choice between police, ambulance or firefighters, a lot less luck would have been needed.
....dude, _I_ called _you_. Obviously I'm on board with the idea that homeless people need help during emergencies just like anyone else. I get that dispatchers are people and people aren't perfect, and this lady's unprofessionalism didn't end up making much of a difference in this particular case, but I wonder how much gaps in training and competence bigger than these minor examples cost in terms of response time and lives.
[1] Which is pretty concerning if I ever have an emergency...
Non-emergency calls to the police will usually involve working out who you are at some point in the conversation; non-emergency calls to NHS24/NHS Direct will start off by taking contact details and triaging that you really are not an emergency case. If you drop off the line and they can't get back in touch with you, they've got enough information to make sure you're OK.
Can we talk to these people? Give them a phone please. Why won’t they talk? If you continue your complaints, we have to hang up, ma’am. Bye bye.
The guy on the phone was totally right. What if it was that nurse's mother? Why the hell would they think standard protocol was to talk to someone who lay dying. It's nuts. The supervisor is nuts. The nurse was nuttier still.
Sometimes the worst things happening lead to positive outcomes later. That incident probably shook up the entire industry and an outcome is something like that won’t ever happen again.
Kind of like major engineering disasters teach us a ton of stuff and in the end, ironically, make the world a safer place from those lessons.
She asked to speak to the person who couldn't breathe!
incoherent - (of spoken or written language) expressed in an incomprehensible or confusing way; unclear.
Only person here that is incoherent is son. "having difficulty breathing" means breathing but with difficulties. "incoherent" means talking but words does not make sense.
I'm a paramedic, not a calltaker, but if someone is described as "having difficulty breathing" and "incoherent", that warrants an EMS response. Start the rig and ask any other questions you have after that.
What about panic attack? It can be described as shortness of breath (difficulty breathing) and sense of terror, impending death, loss of control (being incoherent). It's not life-threatening and does not warrant EMS response.
I think the talk vs speak and the something vs anything seem so obviously true but I don’t think I would have realized it on my own, even given a lot of time.
How many other small changes in wording can have a profound impact on communication?
https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De...
You might also be interested in looking into nonviolent communication.
Exceptions are suspect gunfire, multi-story "working" fires, and foot chases.
Hearing an officer 10-97 (arrive on scene) at a multi-vehicle accident calmly request multiple 408's (ambulances) code 3 (emergency response) belies the chaos at the scene and the intensity of what s/he is actually experiencing.
And it's weird how your brain picks up on the code and immediately understands the seriousness of the situation. When a 408 is upgraded to code 3, enroute, you sense the urgency. A simple "affirm, upgrading to code 3" tells the officers at the scene that the 408 "gets it" and "hang on, we're hurrying." Usually with the sound of sirens and air horns in the background.
(I work in a system that has (mostly) phased out codes in favor of plain words)
99% plain language yet subtly informative.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/257agn/911_opera...
Do you folks have book recommendations that have tips along these lines? I find these useful while driving hard conversations too (Example: Letting someone go from the team).
I read it after seeing it recommended here a few months ago.
I guess, negotiation happens at a very human level. Taking SOS calls, asking the right questions and making the right decisions is a subtle art.
ML excels at the subtle, as long as the outcome between subtleties is observable.
ML could be used to identify and craft better procedures for the humans.