Ep 136: Change...Why Is It So Hard?
Episode 136
Published Jul 31, 2026
Duration: 28:07
Episode Summary
Too many agencies discover the hard way that ASIM isn’t a “check the box” event. This episode breaks down why Active Shooter Incident Management training struggles to take hold and how to fix it with joint policy, real partner engagement, layered training, and a clear maintenance plan.
Episode Notes
If you’ve ever tried to line up law enforcement, fire, EMS, 911, and schools around one ASIM plan, you know the real friction isn’t the curriculum; it’s everything around it.
In this episode, Bill Godfrey, Kami Maertz, and Brian Beechner look at why ASIM training so often stalls out after the first class and how to design a program that actually sticks. They organize the problem into four buckets – policy, partners, training, and maintenance – and share what they’ve seen work across jurisdictions.
They cover how to use inverted thinking (“let’s list all the ways this could go wrong”) to get honest engagement, why one joint policy anchored on the ASIM Checklist beats a stack of siloed SOPs, and how to build a tiered training plan for line personnel, first‑line supervisors, and incident managers. They also dig into the long game: roll‑call refreshers, integrating ASIM elements into everyday calls, budget planning over multiple years, and tapping emergency management and grants so the program doesn’t quietly fade.
If you’re a chief, sheriff, fire/EMS leader, 911/PSAP director, emergency manager, or school/system leader charged with readiness, this conversation gives you a practical roadmap for moving beyond once‑a‑year classes to a sustainable ASIM capability.
For questions or support with ASIM in your region, reach out to our team and we’ll talk through what makes sense for your agency mix and budget.
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:So you've decided that you wanna implement Active Shooter Incident Management program for your agency. That's great. Now what? Turns out it's not as easy as just making one decision. Kami, what are some of the things that get in the way of implementing an Active Shooter Incident Management process?
Kami Maertz:
So we really have four buckets. We have policy, partners, training, and maintenance. And that's where we're trying to pull from. That's what we're trying to organize and address when we're considering implementing Active Shooter Incident Management.
Bill Godfrey:
Why is that something that people miss when they say, "Okay, I wanna implement this." They just tend to focus on the training and schedule up a couple of training classes and think it's gonna magically solve itself.
Brian Beechner:
Yeah. It's like, you know, we do this once a year. This is a once-a-year training and this is not a high probability, it's a high consequence, but it's not high probability it's gonna happen in my jurisdiction. So a lot of times, it falls to the wayside. And, you know, then we're like, "Oh, we gotta stand up this training." And we always go to training. We're gonna do some training. But we forget about, okay, do we have the policies in place to go along with that training? Are we engaging our partners? And more importantly, are we keeping up with that training and moving forward?
Bill Godfrey:
The partner one's a really interesting question and, argue for argument's sake, might even be the first step, 'cause here's the problem, of course. No matter what size of agency you are, you're not handling one of these on your own. Whether you invite other people to show up or not, doesn't matter. They're going to show up. So having everyone in your region on the same plan is a huge component of this success. So should this actually start with just getting your first organizing meeting of the region and getting people pulled together?
Kami Maertz:
That really is. It's really coming to the table, everyone with a stake in the game, right, which is a lot of different entities that are gonna come together. But everyone sitting down and saying, "Okay, this is what could happen and we have to plan if this happens. What is our piece in this? How do we own this? How does this work together to create the overall structure of the actual incident management system?"
Bill Godfrey:
And Brian, from your perspective, so you're trying to get, Kami said get everybody in the room. So we're talking law enforcement, fire, EMS, emergency management, 911, maybe schools. May even be some other partners in the community. Certainly if you've got a large presence of federal partners in your area, you get them all in the room and have a conversation. How does that work when half the people in the room don't like the other half of the people in the room? They don't even know why they're there. I mean, do you have to start by getting everyone to agree that it is a problem and an exposure?
Brian Beechner:
I think that is absolutely the first thing. Okay, we all know that this is a problem, that this could be a problem. And we have to get them to believe that if this happens in our area, we're all gonna be working together. So we have to, beforehand, get together in a room. We have to build those relationships so then we're in that room. And then we have to come up with a consistent policy. Get us in a room, start talking about it, build those relationships. Because again, the first time you wanna see these people is in an incident command post in one of these incidents, and we have to realize that, you know, the pre-planning of it is gonna make this so much more successful on the back end.
Kami Maertz:
And the stakes are really high.
Brian Beechner:
The stakes are high.
Kami Maertz:
The stakes are really high for us all to come to the table. No one wants to fail. And failure on one side is a failure across the board. And so it's recognizing this is bigger than your own agency. It's bigger than your entity. This is talking about the entire community and what we owe to the community as first responders or schools, administrators, all of us coming together and realizing if we fail on one side, we fail across the board and we fail and we lose lives.
Bill Godfrey:
Is that first meeting, because it's so hard to break through to people, is that first meeting a ripe opportunity for inverted thinking? The idea of just before you get into the meet, you just say to everybody, "We're here to talk about an active shooter event in our region, our area. Let's make a list of all the ways we could screw it up.". Is that good?
Brian Beechner:
I think that's even... When you're sending out the invites, it's like, okay, you don't wanna participate. Well, what happens if you don't participate? You know, are we gonna be successful if you don't participate? If the school board doesn't wanna get in board, well, what happens if there's a shooting at your school? How successful are you gonna be? And then that inverse thinking, once we get them in that meeting, we can still continue on that inverse thinking discussion.
Kami Maertz:
And I think that's where they can see that if they're not a part of it, it will be their own failure, right? So it is that inverted thinking that says, "If you drop the ball on your side, that's gonna be the failure." So if this doesn't work and you weren't there at the table, you have created the failure. That is something that you have to own on your side by not doing that, right? So when we're talking about inverted thinking, we're like, "How do we fail?" Well, we don't communicate fire rescue and law enforcement. We don't communicate. That's a way we can fail. And then if they don't come to the table, that's something that they own on their own end.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, the whole overconvergence, 'cause we don't use staging. We're just gonna roll right in. We're gonna do our own thing. I think all leads to it. Okay, so we get past the first organizing meeting, and generally speaking, the regional leadership agrees, yes, there's a problem. And I think that getting agreement that as a region, you've got an exposure, you got a problem, I think is a huge step forward. Because once you acknowledge that, it gets hard to put your head back in the sand, doesn't it?
Kami Maertz:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And to realize, right, that you were offered the opportunity to come, and so that's something that you have to own after that, right? So if you're the one who steps back and says, "I don't wanna be a part of this," that's where your failure is. And so I do think that bringing those all to light and saying, "We are all gonna meet across the table for this." And so giving everyone the same opportunity. And I do think, like, letting them know they have a huge stake in it whatever entity they are.
Brian Beechner:
I think a lot of people have reluctance to get involved to begin with. They're like, "Oh, it's not my wheelhouse. It's never gonna happen in my area." Those all other things. But then once you get them together and you start really addressing these issues that could happen, they're like, "Wow, this was really important and we need to continue this and we need to create policy and have training and do all those other things."
Kami Maertz:
Yeah. And it may be that. It may be one person maybe that doesn't get along with everybody else. So have the meeting anyways. Have the meeting anyways and whoever does get along with that person, call them and say, "Hey, this was a really important meeting. This is what we learned." So when you have that next meeting, that person wants to come. That person realizes that they should have been at that table. So don't lose hope. Don't say, "Well, they didn't show up for that. We're never inviting them again." Continue to have those opportunities. Continue to have those conversations.
Brian Beechner:
Continue to send them the emails about the meetings that we're gonna be having because they're gonna be like, you know, I need to be involved in this.
Bill Godfrey:
Okay. So let's move down the road a little bit. We got general agreement among the leadership that we've got a problem. We need to do some work. And we need to at least some policy guidance before we really launch off on training. We may be able to do a little bit of introductory training, but we need to get into the policy stuff pretty quickly. That's a place where I think emergency management is the right vehicle to coordinate a policy across multiple agencies, across multiple disciplines across a region. That's kind of the definition of emergency management. And they also tend to have a non-threatening approach in the way that they begin to coordinate policy. But I think my guidance would probably be pick a process that already exists, you know? And I realize that people that are listening are saying, "Sure, they're gonna talk about the Active Shooter Incident Management Checklist."" Well, of course, we are. We believe in it that's why we created the thing. It is designated as the national standard by the National Tactical Officers Association. They kinda know their way around critical law enforcement issues. It has been validated and it's been used in real life successfully. So this becomes a blueprint for where to go, including a sample policy that we have that covers law enforcement, fire, EMS, and is, in its entirety, three pages long.
Kami Maertz:
Yeah, you don't have to reinvent the wheel, right?
Brian Beechner:
That's what I was gonna say.
Kami Maertz:
We've created a wheel and it's functional. It works. And so it is something obviously for it, but you're right, we believe in it. It is a functional process, but beyond that, beyond instructors for it, right, this has been used in After-Action Reports and it has shown that it is effective. It is a national standard. And it keeps you from having those conversations and saying, "This is only my idea." Right? So fire rescue's coming and saying, "This is my policy. I want you to do it this way." This is from the outside source. This is outside source, something that's already functional, already works, and says, "Implement this. Change what you want to make it fit your community, but this is a way that's already been done."
Brian Beechner:
And that usually happens when you get a whole group of people in the room is everybody has their own ideas. And sometimes it's like, okay, there's so many ideas, we just don't know where to begin. Well, we have a map of here's where you can begin, here's some things you can do, and then integrate them into it. So there's already a starting point.
Bill Godfrey:
It's a common template, common language, common process. And the other thing that I would say is because it... Where does your region start and stop? You know, for example, you might say, "Hey, okay, we're just gonna work on our county and the mutual aid agencies within our county." But the likelihood is that mutual aid agencies across that county line are gonna show up and participate. Well, if you're adopting a program, a national program that's a national standard, it makes it a lot easier to then communicate to these other regions that may not be directly involved in your training. "Hey, look, this is what we've adopted. This is what we're doing. This is what we're moving for." And everybody can get on the same page without having to go to the same training session.
Bill Godfrey:
And if anybody's ever written a policy for their agency, usually step on is I'm gonna email all of my friends to say, "Hey, do you have a sample policy that X?"
Kami Maertz:
That is what we do.
Bill Godfrey:
That's exactly how we write policies. And we're gonna piggyback off of that and use that as our template.
Kami Maertz:
Yeah, we adapt it to our own communities. That is a common practice.
Bill Godfrey:
Okay. So policy doesn't have to be that complicated. It does need, in our opinion, to be one joint policy for law enforcement, fire, EMS, all the agencies, which is one of the reasons we advocate for emergency managers to be the holder of this. Even at the county level, they can put it into the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, which in some jurisdictions carries the weight of being statute or law at the local level. In some places, it's voluntary. But the point is, is that you've got a common placeholder that everybody subscribes to and says you know, "In your SOP, we use this policy and then here's the policy." It keeps everybody on the same page. Now let's talk about the training. And this one gets a little complicated, doesn't it? Because it's not just training line people. It's not just training first line supervisors and it's not just training the managers.
Kami Maertz:
Yep. And it's not just training movement. It's training management, right, the entire incident management process of how we all function together, what our role is, and how we are gonna do it? From that initial response, what that movement looks like. Who comes over and takes control? How do we get controlling that chaos? How do we work together? Where does fire rescue come in and meet with law enforcement? How does that all operationally work? And so it's training to the incident management standard.
Brian Beechner:
I think we miss that a lot of times is every time we go to an active shooter training, it's usually, okay, cops are going to take care of the bad guy. Fire and EMS are gonna go take care of the patients. Everybody gets transported. Boom, we're good. But how did those people get there? Who's managing the people that are in that hot zone and in that warm zone? And we don't usually train enough on the incident manager, like you said, Kami, incident management piece of that. We're always on the tactic side of it.
Kami Maertz:
We're training high enough. So sometimes what we'll see, right, is they'll train the response teams, contact teams. They'll train tactical triage and transport. And they're like, "Well, we don't have any command people here, so we're not gonna train command." That's a mistake. Everyone should be training. Everyone should understand everyone else's roles. Even putting people who may never be in command or not for many years, put them in that role. See what they need. Why are they asking for things? Same thing with tactical. Put a brand new officer in tactical. Help them through the process, but put them in that role so that they can realize what they need down range, right? They can't see and hear everything. Same thing with triage. They can't hear and see everything 'cause they're not down range, but there's a reason they need that information. Why is all that important?
Brian Beechner:
That's a good point.
Kami Maertz:
Building out that structure.
Brian Beechner:
If you're a contact team or an RTF and I know the person I report to is going to need, then I can help him.
Kami Maertz:
So much easier.
Brian Beechner:
I can help him while I'm down there. Hey, he's gonna be asking for this. I have this information ready. He's gonna ask us to do this. We can start planning for this because I already know what that person, what tactical's gonna ask or triage or transport.
Bill Godfrey:
I think one of the other key elements that training officers constantly miss just because they're inundated with how much that they've gotta get done day to day, and I get it, is the long-term view. This is a long game. It's a long game. The line people you train today, five years from now are gonna be your first-level supervisor. And your first-level supervisors that you're training today, five years from now are gonna be your incident commanders and your incident management team. So you've gotta kind of look at it that way is that this is a long-going, long-running investment that is going to take time to get from starter to competency to maturity on the training program. And I think when you look at that holistically, you say, "Okay, we need to target everyone." But not everyone needs the same training. And I think that's part of where you need to trust your training officers to let them put together a plan and say, "Okay, the line people need this level of training. Our first-line supervisors need this level of training. And the incident managers need this level of training. So how do we roll that out? What tools do we have?" So for example, we've got the Active Shooter Incident Management QuickStart program. ASIM QuickStart, which is online, free, takes 42 minutes to complete the whole thing, but puts everybody on the foundational information about the terminology, the roles, and how it comes together. It's a great start, but in and of itself, not enough.
Brian Beechner:
Correct. And that could be the precursor to our exercise that we're gonna do. Hey, we're gonna have this exercise on this particular day. I need everybody to run through the QuickStart, which would be fantastic. Which gives everybody on the page with a common terminology and what to expect in that exercise. And that's just a start.
Kami Maertz:
And it's sending people to train the trainer, right? It's getting trainers for your agency who are trained and operational to come back and teach this and push it out through, make sure that every year, whatever time your training is, right, that you're continuing to push the message, continuing with the updated training, that you're making sure you're following up, right? If the training's changing from one time to the next, you can't go and say, "Well, I did Active Shooter Incident Management 10 years ago." It's changed. It's adapted. You have to keep up with that to make sure that you are maintaining the highest level of training for your agency.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. And I think before, because I do wanna jump into maintenance a little bit. Before we leave that, I do also think that we need to remind leadership and the training officers and everybody out there who's an influencer within their organization, yes, this is going to cost money. But I assure you the money that you're going to spend on us or somebody else to come in and do your train the trainer and do help with some foundation material and things like that, you're going to spend far more money on your cost of training your own people. The cost of organizing it, the pulling people off the streets, rotating them through, setting them up, focusing on that, that money that you're spending to put your people in the seat for training is at least 10 times more expensive than what you're gonna spend on some outside help. So get some outside help. Whether you're a do-it-yourself organization or you want some outside help to come do it with you, or whether you want outside help to come do it for you, those all have different price points. And you can kind of mix and match to get where you need to be to make your organization successful. But don't underestimate and don't think you're gonna do this for free. You're not. But the bulk of the money you're gonna spend is gonna be... Your cost of training your own people, it's not gonna be the cost of bringing somebody else in to help you.
Kami Maertz:
And you would-
Brian Beechner:
And then-
Kami Maertz:
Go ahead.
Brian Beechner:
I'm sorry. And then when you do that is you can identify the gaps and then you take those gaps and now there's your maintenance plan. Now how do I fill in those gaps? 'Cause I've just had this. We've done ASIM advanced and now I've identified these gaps in my organization or on our jurisdiction. And the maintenance program is now, "Hey, we're gonna fix this little problem. We're gonna fix this little training problem. We're gonna fix this little training problem." And that's how I use that.
Kami Maertz:
And having an outside entity come in and train, it gives outside perspective, right? Something that you're not seeing in your local agency. It gets out of that this is the way we've always done it mentality and allows you to have some training and experience to come in from different places, different people who have seen different things, even trained in different manners to be able to come in and really advance your training. So I do think it's important. I know it's always, let's just do this in-house. Let's just build a scenario. We can get lazy in that, but we also cannot continue to push ourselves to advance that knowledge and experience base.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, I completely agree with one of our instructors. I love him death. He has a way with words. And he used to say to people on a fairly frequently basis when this would come up, he'd say, "Well, I understand that's not the way you do it around here. It'd be pretty silly for me and these other five instructors to get on a plane and fly in here to tell you how you already do it."
Kami Maertz:
Exactly.
Bill Godfrey:
You know, it just doesn't make sense. So let's talk a little bit more about maintenance. And one of the things that I wanna address is retention. So there is varying degrees of retention depending on the training they received. For example, the ASIM QuickStart, free online, 42 minutes length, that's going to have one level of retention. And it's probably gonna be shorter than the retention level of somebody that goes through the four-hour ASIM Basic course, which is going to be very different than the retention of the person that goes through the three-day Advanced class doing 10 or 11 full-scale scenarios for three days in a row. What are some of the other maintenance issues that you think are gotchas that people need to plan for and make sure that they've got their eye on?
Kami Maertz:
I think it's just having some type of plan, right? It's not just leading it up to, well, we'll see if we do it in a couple years. It's making sure that you have a plan, making sure that you realize the importance of it. And whether it is sending somebody else to outside training continually, going back and advancing that training continually every year to where you're bringing that information back and updated information, whatever type of plan it is, that you're making sure that you're not just getting back into your silo, that you're training bigger, that you're training for the entire incident.
Brian Beechner:
And just remember, this is that low probability, high consequence type of incident. And it's the redundancy of it. So if I only train on this once a year, the likelihood that I'm gonna forget a lot of information is greater, so I need to periodically, I need to have that built into my training program that, hey, we're gonna address this on a quarterly level or a monthly level. All the way from just on a company-level training or, you know, law enforcement-level training, all the way up to that incident management, and maybe like a, some type of larger scale with several companies and mutual aid partners and everything training once or twice a year for that.
Bill Godfrey:
You know, the interesting thing about retention is the more frequently you retouch it, the less time you have to spend touching it. So for example, the patrol sergeant who once a month at roll call, pulls out a Counterstrike board and says, "Everybody come around here. We're gonna spend 10 minutes running a scenario real quick." If he does that every month, he or she does that every month, that 10 minutes is going to yield huge results. But if you let it sit for a year, two years, three years, and then say, "Okay, we're gonna take a massive bite of the beast and put everybody back through it," you absolutely can do that, but your retention has drained out. And so you're not starting over from zero, but you're gonna have people that are a lot more rusty and you're gonna have to put a lot more effort and energy into it. And I'm not saying that one is right or wrong. It's not that. You've gotta decide what fits your circumstances and your agencies. But I think it's just important for those first line supervisors in law enforcement, the sergeants, the corporals, and then at the firehouse, the company officers, to remember five or 10 minutes sitting around the table, talking through who does what and reminding everybody goes a long way.
Brian Beechner:
And just remember, our attention span is about five to 10 minutes.
Kami Maertz:
That's very true.
Brian Beechner:
So that's why I always joke, you know, at the kitchen table, bring out the checklist at the kitchen table in the firehouse. Or, you know, bring out one little component. Watch one little QuickStart video at the kitchen table and then you can just expand on that.
Kami Maertz:
Yeah. And you don't have to wait for a major incident to practice these skills, right? So we used, you know, staging was kind of foreign to us on law enforcement sides. We started using it on missing people. We started using it when we were going to, like, higher priority calls. We didn't want everyone responding directly to the scene. And so we started utilizing staging. Now people in our agency are used to hearing that term. On any type of major incident, maybe that it hasn't risen obviously to an active shooter, but if we have a higher level then for command, fire rescue comes to command. They go down to a talk position for us. So all of those things are already happening for us.
Brian Beechner:
I think that's a great point to where if you can start implementing these little pieces into your daily lives of what we do.
Kami Maertz:
It becomes normal.
Brian Beechner:
You know, if you're going to a large scale event, do we stand up on RTF? And then we have that discussion about-
Kami Maertz:
Pre-planned.
Brian Beechner:
Pre-planning. And then we have the RTF set. So if something happens at this particular incident, this is how we're gonna manage it. And if you start putting those little pieces of the ASIM Checklist or the ASIM program into your everyday responses, you're just gonna remember it more.
Kami Maertz:
And building those relationships, which is really important for training.
Bill Godfrey:
Huge, huge and critical. And I think the final thing I would say to the maintenance is make sure that in your budget planning that you as the chief are telling the city manager, the county manager, "Hey, we're gonna spend an inordinate amount of time getting ramped up, but then I need an ongoing budget for maintaining this capability." And, you know, if you're not gonna spend it equally... Airports is a really interesting example. So every airport that's rated by the FAA for passenger travel has to do a full scale exercise every three years. And they provide funding for that. But in the off years, they have to do tabletops and they have to do functional exercises. And so their spending in the off years is a little bit lower, but the year they gotta do that full-scale exercise, it's like, you know, boom, that goes up. If you know that ahead of time, if you know that's what you're gonna do, tell your elected officials. Tell them ahead of time so that they understand that and then kind of remind them and come back to that with the bosses. Nobody likes to be surprised. And your city and county managers, they're managing a whole bunch of responsibilities and a whole bunch of money demands and money needs. If they know ahead of time that this is what you're projecting three years from now, five years from now, two things are gonna happen. They're gonna know what you need, and they're gonna think you're a pretty smart cookie because you're looking at the long game.
Kami Maertz:
Yeah. 'Cause you're planning for it, right? You have to have that plan and you have to be prepared and reminding them of why it's important. So if you get the pushback, remind them of why. Remind them that in those off years, you are doing smaller scale to get prepared for this large scale, so they're investing in you so that, you know, you get back the reward.
Brian Beechner:
And another reason to have emergency management involved in the whole process because sometimes they have different buckets of money where they can pull from to help you with your training.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. Exactly where you're going, Brian. There are all kinds of grants. There are grants for equipment. There are grants for training. There are grants for violence prevention programs. There's grants for schools specifically to reduce the risk, to prepare. There's always grants out there. You kinda sometimes just need to connect to the right people and lift your head up and look.
So lightning round. Let's do closeout on biggest obstacles to implementation of Active Shooter Incident Management. Brian, I'm gonna go with you first.
Brian Beechner:
I think it's the notion that it's not gonna happen in my area, so it's not that important right now. And they need to realize that, yes, this is the low probability, but I need to be prepared. Just like every incident, I need to be prepared and I need to have everybody in the community because it's gonna be a community response. They all need to be on the same page.
Kami Maertz:
Yeah. I think it's getting everyone in the room, right? So getting everyone to the room, letting them know their own stake in it, but the higher stake that is for the community and getting them on the same page, making them realize how big of a role they have in it, but how it overall affects the entire other response if they're not a part of it. So everyone's really important at the table, but you have to have those communications.
Bill Godfrey:
And I think for me, it's failing to realize the amount of energy that you need to put into a sustainment plan. It's not one battle. You know? It's not one round of huge training and you're good for 10 years. It doesn't work like that. You've gotta have a sustainment plan. You've gotta have your mutual aid partners at the table on the same plan with you if you're going to have the best possible outcome should you get one of these events, which the data clearly shows can occur anywhere. Like you said, Brian, low probability, but a super high consequence. And if it goes sideways, it can literally destroy not just the community. It can destroy the community, destroy people, destroy lives, destroy careers. It can carry prison implications, criminal charges, bankrupt a city. The outcome of the adverse consequence is almost immeasurable. Almost immeasurable.
Brian, Kami, thanks so much for coming in today. I appreciate it. If there's anything we can do to help you on your approach to trying to implement Active Shooter Incident Management, that's what we're here for. Give us a call. Shoot us an email. We're glad to help. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe to the podcast. Helps us out a ton. Thank you to our producer, Karla Torres. And until next time. Stay safe.