The United States military distills some of their most complicated - and most important - concepts into a single word...

Duty
Honor
Country

This fits into the value system for the people who are the most important to me as well...

Love
Family
Home
Firefighter
Paramedic
Friend

One of the smartest people I know is Mick Mayers. Mick deals with a lot of state and national-level planning and response issues. He creates and implements a lot of huge top-down solutions that on the surface seem to be the antithesis of what I'm saying here. They are not, because he applies the KISS principle - he uses management systems that focus on simple solutions like get enough manpower to handle big problems and use an incident command system that breaks down a huge problem into a bunch of smaller, more maneagable problems.

So, why is it that fire-rescue and EMS people go to a fire or emergency and proceed to make things more complicated?
We're supposed to be the department of simplifying other people's problems. Some of the bad things we do seem simple, but add unnecessary complexity and danger to our jobs. Things like...

Freelancing
Ego
Prejudice
Arrogance

Morris Simpson, the Rescue Training Director Emeritus for the state of Tennessee, once told me that the most important emergency services concept is "Don't make it more complicated than it is." His message was that most of what we face is actually fairly simple, as long as we take a few seconds, size up the problem, and break it down to the basics. Morris' statement includes "Don't injure or kill responders". In addition to the other problems, LODDs and LOD injuries distract everyone, remove resources from the incident response, and escalate something that may have really been simple to begin with. Another concept that this includes is "Anticipate what your next action will do FOR and patient, but also anticipate what it will do TO the patient." If you extricate patients from vehicle crashes without protecting them from glass fragments, explosive failures of vehicle parts, or without first stabilizing the vehicle, you're taking a big chance that you're going to add a dangerous complication into your incident.

Some of the most important things we do fit into this concept as well...

Al Brunacini often says "Things usually get easier if you put the fire out."
It's pretty rare that incidents get more complicated after extinguishment.

Vincent Dunn tells us to stay out of buildings with truss roofs and well-involved fires in the truss void.
He's been proven right over and over again.

Frank Brannigan (RIP) told us "Know your enemy" when referring to burning buildings.

Tom Brennan told us "You can go to 1,000 fires, or you can go to one fire a thousand times." In other words, he said "Critique".

Simple concepts, all.

If you have a complex set of problems, simple solutions often make things a lot easier, and in a hurry.

Extinguish the fire
Stay out of Born Losers
Don't breathe smoke
Stop the bleeding
Teamwork
Respect
Training

In the end, it comes down to the Phoenix FD five-word mission statement...

Prevent harm, survive, be nice

If we can do that for 25 years or so, we can look back at another simple concept...

Success