Introduction

One of the most critical factors in crisis management is the skill of the incident commander. This book extends the limited literature on this subject by examining personal experiences of incident command from a range of professions and attempting to reconcile these with an academic analysis of the subject. The editors are a practising fire commander and an academic researcher who has a particular interest in the psychology of incident command. From our two different backgrounds, we had both searched with limited success for case material on incident command, which could be used for training and research purposes. In the available accounts there is some recognition that non-technical or 'soft' skills feature in effective command, but the precise role that these play is often shrouded. This results in the practice of incident command having acquired the status of an art as much as a science, with many practitioners content for this to remain the case.