Gavin Watts: Mindset development is essential for Emergency Services teams

Gavin Watts is a former Chief Fire Officer with 30 years' experience in fire and rescue. Having served in West Sussex, including as Gold Commander during the devastating Shoreham Air Show crash in 2015, Gavin now brings Red2Blue into his coaching work with the Fire Service College. We chatted to him about how he uses Red2Blue to help fire crews at every level understand that technical training alone is never enough. 
Gavin knew all about Red2Blue thanks to a long-standing friendship with Gazing’s Ian Cochrane, so when Gavin retired in 2019, undertaking the Red2Blue programme was top of his list. "I'd always been very interested in developing staff and the training we did for them," he says. "But when I look back, we never did anything on mindset. We had standard operating procedures and structures coming out of our ears. We trained on the drill yard every day. We never gave a thought to mindset."

Telling people what not to do

That gap, Gavin reflects, was apparent from early in his career. When he was coming up through the ranks, the advice around managing high-pressure situations was often frustratingly vague. "People would always say, 'Make sure you don't get tunnel vision,'" he recalls. "And I always used to think, well, okay, you've told me what not to do, but you haven't told me how to do it." He heard plenty about the risks of information overload and narrowing perception, yet nothing about how to actually manage it. "They gave you all the symptoms, but no option for a cure."

As fire and rescue services grew more aware of the psychological impact of attending serious incidents, the focus shifted towards post-incident support: counselling, debriefs, mitigation after the fact. What they never did, Gavin says, was go upstream. "We didn't think, can we give our people a bit more resilience beforehand?"

Command presence while remaining approachable

Now, working with the Fire Service College at Moreton-in-Marsh, Gavin delivers Red2Blue across a structured series of sessions tied to promotional courses. The first, aimed at newly promoted crew commanders, focuses entirely on the individual. It's a significant transition: one day you're part of the team, the next you're in charge of it.

"As a firefighter you don't have any command decisions to make, you're doing what you're told. And then overnight that changes," he explains. "You know the people you're working with. You've been working side by side with them, and the next day you're in charge. That brings expectations, scrutiny and consequences and the pressures associated with those elements."

The concept Gavin spends time on at this level is what fire and rescue now calls "command presence" – how you are seen and read by others when under pressure. "You have to present yourself in a calm, controlled way, even if inside you're churning," he says. "I've been there, scratching my head, wondering what I'm going to do. But it's really important that your troops don't see that."

At the same time, he is careful to flag that command presence shouldn't tip into untouchability. There is a balance between projecting composure and remaining open to advice.

The Red2Blue language as a neutral framework

The next level up, Watch Commander, shifts the focus outward. Here, Gavin explores how Red2Blue can be used to manage a whole team's performance, including how to hold difficult performance conversations using the language of Red2Blue as a neutral framework. He also spends time on the hot debrief – the quick review that takes place immediately after an incident, before crews return to the station. 

"I've been involved in loads of those, and they have often been less than effective or useful," he says. "Everybody's tired, they want to go home, they're wet, they're cold, they're not paying attention."

Using the structure of the Mental Cross Check, he shows commanders how to get real focus in a very short space of time, and how having a recognised trigger, such as saying "blue heads on" can reset a group quickly and effectively.

"I've gone red, and I need to get back to blue"

The moment that gave Gavin the clearest validation of what he was doing came from one of his students at the Fire Service College, a firefighter from Gibraltar who had been particularly engaged in the first session. During the practical training week that follows the course, students are put in charge of live exercises and scored on their command performance. When things go well, the instructors deliberately escalate the situation to test how they cope.

At a certain point, this student was in the command unit and visibly overwhelmed. He turned to the course lead and said: "I've gone red, and I need to get back to blue." Then he stepped away for a few seconds, did some breathing, came back into the room and got on with it. "That's been the biggest validation I've had," says Gavin. "He'd articulated the problem in a nutshell: where he was and where he needed to get back to. And then he did it."

The risk of inexperience

One of Gavin's broader concerns for the sector is the changing profile of the workforce. Fire services are seeing higher staff turnover, and people are being moved into command positions more quickly than they might have been in previous generations. At the same time, because of successful prevention work, fire services simply aren't as busy as they once were, which means newer recruits aren't building up the bank of experience that older hands could rely on.

"In the old days, you toughed it out," he says. "You watched what others did and you either sank or swam. But now people aren't getting exposure in the same way, and I think that's a huge risk." The potential for younger officers to become overwhelmed in a serious incident is real, and Gavin believes Red2Blue has an important part to play in addressing it – both in fire and rescue and across emergency services more broadly.

He is also passionate about the potential of Red2Blue in large-scale multi-agency incidents, where police, fire, ambulance, local authorities and utility companies all have to operate under the same pressure, often without having worked together before.

"If everybody was using Red2Blue, when they came together, they'd be speaking the same language," he says. "If somebody says, 'blue heads on', everybody gets themselves into that place before they start doing the technical bit."

Stay grounded and be yourself

When Gavin thinks about the best piece of advice he's ever received, it comes back to something simple and enduring: be yourself. "Not trying to be anything other than who you are," he says. "Authenticity. I've always stuck with that, even as I got through the ranks."

It's the same advice he passes on to the people he coaches, because he sees Red2Blue as part of the same idea. "It's about staying grounded, isn't it? Recognising when your behaviour is changing under pressure and finding your way back to who you actually are."

To find out more about the work Gavin does using Red2Blue with Critical Response teams click here. To learn more about Red2Blue click here. If you're interested in becoming a partner or you have any questions get in touch!