By Ed Ballam
Our December issue has traditionally been dedicated to predicting the future. I can tell you if I could do it with accuracy, reliability, and predictability, I’d be a wealthy man.
And, as much as I love my job, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here trying to write this editorial. Predicting the future is hard, and I haven’t found a reliable crystal ball or a tarot card reader worth the money.
The truth is, most of us can’t tell what is going on in the next minute, forget about the next year. There are too many variables that influence each and every action, each and every second of the day. When you think about it, everything from the moment we wake up in the morning until we put our heads back down on the same pillow at night is a series of random events that are strung together to make up our days. We can have a schedule and a routine, but there will be constant variations.
We can also make a plan, follow it, and have results just the way we anticipated. Good on us for that ability. However, I guarantee there are dozens of major or minor interferences that needed to be resolved or dealt with before we achieved the final goal. Weather, a telephone call, personal issues, co-workers’ issues, family issues, mechanical failures, simple indigestion, and 10,000 other things that we never even recognize make up the fabric of our daily lives.
Think about what it’s like running a multimillion-dollar company with hundreds of employees and dozens and dozens of vendors. The variables that influence the future of those kinds of businesses exponentially increase over time. That is why only the best and most nimble survive.
We all know how unpredictable things can be in the fire and EMS world. You can go from napping in a recliner to fighting for your life and the lives of others in the blink of an eye. The only thing predictable for those in the emergency services is unpredictability. A good day means everyone makes it home with no injury and no serious equipment failures. Anything beyond that is a gift.
Predicting the future is really an art. Some people are good at it; most are not. It’s certain no one can do it with absolute clarity. I believe the best we humans can do is make educated guesses based on information, history, knowledge, and experience. That’s what weather forecasters do every day, and that’s for only a few hours or days at a time. Wall Street brokers do the same thing. And in our personal lives, we try to predict what’s going to happen using information and our intuition or gut feelings, but none of us knows what’s going to happen for certain.
No matter how we arrive at our predictions, they really are just educated guesses. From that, we can paint a picture of what the future might look like. That painting will be an impressionistic image, kind of fuzzed out. Photographic images of the future, as we know, are not possible—at least I can’t do it.
So, as this editorial is about what 2023 is supposed to look like, let me squint my eyes, gaze into the future, and pull some predictions out of someplace deep within. I know what some of you are thinking, and that’s probably exactly where they’re going to come from. Here goes nothing.
I predict ridiculously long lead times for equipment and apparatus. Everybody in the fire service industry says the same thing—supply chains issues, labor issues, and inflation are all causing price hikes and delivery delays from hose to tractor-drawn aerials and everything in between. As time goes on, there seems to be a snowball effect at play too with the issues getting bigger and pulling in more and more facets of the industry.
I predict there will be further consolidation and shifting in the fire and EMS industry while the aforementioned is not guaranteed, thinking about the current business climate. Even the strongest and oldest businesses in the marketplace are being challenged. It just seems likely that given the right offer, some might choose to merge or find a partner. If there are not outright mergers, there will likely be partnerships and collaborations as similar industries with similar interests look to each other for opportunities. Like the old saying goes, there’s safety in numbers. Besides, everyone in the fire service industry knows everyone else, and many are friends.
I predict we won’t see big, revolutionary new products come to market in 2023. Too many businesses are focused on surviving at the moment to expend resources on research and development. With that said, I do believe there will be some evolutionary, incremental changes and improvements to existing products, especially with electric and alternative fuel vehicles. There seems to be an appetite for that technology as more residents of this small planet realize that we can’t keep polluting the place where we live at the alarming rates of the past.
I’ll make one final prediction, and that is when I sit down and write a similar editorial for December 2023, I’ll realize there was only one true great prophet in history, and that is our great statesman Benjamin Franklin, who famously said, “… In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”
