On the first day of my driving instructor course, I passed my own instructor on the highway.
Not my finest political move.
There were three of us at the Ontario Safety League, new candidates, and Jerzy Kwiatkowski had been assigned as our supervising instructor. He told us to get into our own cars and follow him — about a thirty-minute drive to relocate.
We got onto the highway and traffic was heavy. He was travelling well below the flow. Cars were merging around us, and I was sitting there in the middle of it doing nothing but taking up space and making everyone else solve a problem I'd created.
So I passed him.
I remember exactly what I was thinking as I went by: this is not going to leave a good impression on the man who decides whether I have any business teaching anyone to drive.
He asked me why
When we got to the rendezvous point, he didn't chew me out. He asked why I'd felt it was necessary to pass him.
So I told him. The traffic was merging. His speed was creating turbulence rather than avoiding it. Sitting behind him meant I was part of a rolling obstruction with vehicles making decisions around us. Positioning myself ahead of that mess was the lower-risk choice, even though it looked like the more aggressive one.
He listened to all of it. Then he nodded, thought about it, and told me it was good decision-making.
And that turned into a conversation about the difference between being safe and being compliant.
Those aren't the same thing
That's the lesson, and it took me a long time to understand how big it was.
Everything about how we're taught to drive is binary. The light is red or green. You're over the limit or you're not. You stopped or you didn't. Compliance is easy to test, easy to teach, easy to check a box on.
But almost nothing that actually keeps people alive out there is binary.
Was that following distance too close? Depends on the speed, the surface, what's in front, what's in your head at that moment. Was that lane position, correct? Depends on who's merging and what they can see. Was passing him safer than staying behind him? Depends on everything.
The driving task is mostly grey. And we keep evaluating it like it's black and white.
Jerzy could have looked at that highway and seen a student who didn't follow instructions. That's the black-and-white read, and it's not wrong exactly — I didn't follow instructions. But he asked the question first, and the answer changed what he was looking at.
He was the first person who made me think about driving as a series of judgments that could be examined, rather than a set of rules you either followed or broke.
Thirty odd years later I'm still asking his question
I sit on collision and pursuit review panels now.
An officer does something. Something goes wrong, or very nearly does. And here's what I've learned in that room: the compliance question is almost always the least interesting one. Did they break policy — that's usually answerable in about four minutes.
The question that matters is Jerzy's. What did you do, and why did you do it? What was the plan?
And critically: given the information the officer had at the time, did they make good decisions?
That last part is everything, because we review these with the outcome sitting on the table in front of us. The officer didn't have the outcome. They had a radio, a windshield, and about a second and a half. Judging their decision against information they didn't possess isn't review — it's just hindsight wearing a uniform.
An officer can be entirely compliant and still have made a terrible decision. And an officer can be technically outside the lines and have made the only sensible call available to them, in that moment, with what they could actually see.
If we only ever ask whether the rule was followed, we learn nothing that prevents the next one. We just file it.
What this means in the right seat
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for those of us who teach.
Cones hit. Time elapsed. Stopped or rolled. Those are easy to put on a clipboard. "Was that judgment sound?" doesn't fit on one.
So we evaluate what's easy to measure. And students learn what we measure. Teach a driver that the job is staying inside the lines, and that's the driver you get — one who's fully compliant right up until the day compliance isn't enough.
This is why I ask my drivers to think out loud.
Not as a test. I want to know what a decision was built on. A lane change, a speed adjustment, a position in traffic — why that, why there, why then. And I ask why did you do that far more often than I say don't do that.
Two answers come back.
Sometimes it's a good one. They've read the situation in a way I hadn't from the right seat, their reasoning is sound, and if I'd corrected on instinct I'd have taught them to stop thinking and start guessing at what I wanted.
The other answer is: I always do that.
No plan. No read of the situation. Just a habit wearing the costume of a decision. That driver isn't choosing anything — they're executing something they picked up years ago and never examined. And a habit doesn't care whether today's conditions match the day it was formed.
That's the one that ends up in front of a review panel. Not the driver who made a bad call — the driver who never made a call at all.
You'd never hear it if you didn't ask.
That's the risk with instinctive correction. You're not just occasionally wrong. You're training the driver to look at you instead of the road — and you never find out which of the two you've got.
Jerzy asked the question on day one, with a candidate who'd just embarrassed him in traffic. He could have made an example of me. Instead, he found out I had a reason.
So here's my question for you
When your student does something you didn't expect — do you correct it, or do you ask why first?
Be honest with yourself about it.
I'd like to hear how you handle it. Hit reply.
If you found this useful and want future issues, you can subscribe here:
https://evoc-insider-e5d7ed.beehiiv.com/
Hugh Anderson EVOC Trainer | Author of Emergency Vehicle Operation Instruction: 5 Steps to Enhancing Your EVOC Training Grab the book on Amazon
