The Six Fire Starters

"We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem." - Russell L. Ackoff

I had lunch recently with a CEO I've known for years. He showed up fifteen minutes late, still on the phone in the parking lot. Something had blown up that morning.

I asked how the quarter was going.

The numbers were fine. Then he talked about his week. Every day had gotten away from him. Problems nobody saw coming, and none of them could wait.

"I spent the whole week putting out fires," he said. "We're just so reactive right now."

His phone buzzed twice while he said it.

At some point, most of the teams I work with land on some version of that sentence. "We're too reactive." Or "We need to be more proactive."

Different companies. Different industries. Ten employees or five hundred. Whole companies and single departments.

And in every one of those conversations, reactive was never the root issue.

Reactive is what the team can feel. It's the smoke. So it's what they name.

But nobody can execute "be more proactive." No owner, no first step, no finish line.

So it goes on the list of what's not working, and the team tells itself to push through.

"We need to get past this stretch. Things will settle down."

Sometimes they tell themselves that for a year. The sentence stays on the list until the cost gets high enough to make them look underneath it.

You can't solve the smoke. You have to find the fire.

Fires Have a Source

Every company has fires.

A key employee suddenly resigns. A customer leaves without warning. A vendor misses a deadline everything depended on. Healthy companies deal with that too.

The difference is how often.

In a healthy company, a fire is an event. In a reactive one, fires are the norm. Maybe it's the same fire every quarter. Maybe it's a different one every week. Something is always burning.

Firefighting feeds itself. Every hour spent putting out a fire is an hour not spent fixing what caused it, so the work that would end the fires is the work you never get to.

What turns a fire into a pattern is what happens next. You address the symptom and leave the cause alone. Then it happens again.

When the fires never stop, something keeps feeding them.

Which means there's an arsonist.

It could be you.

Not on purpose. That's what makes it hard to see.

The source is almost always in one of six places. Most teams find more than one.

I call them the Six Fire Starters.

1. No Clear Direction

When the destination isn't clear, everything looks equally urgent.

Every request competes on volume instead of importance, so the loudest person in the building sets the agenda.

It shows up externally too. A customer asks for something outside what you actually do. Nobody in the room can say why you'd turn it down, so you take it. Six weeks later it's a fire burning people who were already full.

Direction is what makes a "no" possible.

Ask each member of your leadership team where the company is going. If you'd get five different answers, you don't have a shared filter. Either the destination was never set, or it never landed.

2. More Than You Can Deliver

Capacity is people, time, money, and the tools to do the work.

It gets exceeded in two ways. A list with too many things on it. Or a short list with things bigger than the company can currently pull off.

Either way, something gives. It shows up as the escalation, the rescue, the weekend nobody planned on.

I asked one CFO what could come off the list. "It all has to get done," he said. "We don't have a choice."

That quarter ended with three of seven priorities finished.

So the must wasn't real.

That's ambition running ahead of capacity, and it cost more than the four that slipped. Seven priorities of pressure landed on a team that could carry three. And a quarter that ends with four commitments unmet teaches everyone that commitments are soft.

Look at what you committed to last quarter and what actually got delivered. That gap is the best evidence you have about what this team can carry. Plan the next quarter against it.

3. The Wrong People or Structure

People and structure start fires three ways.

The first is the person who leaves messes. Work comes back wrong, commitments slip, people get run over, and someone else drops what they were doing to clean it up. That's unplanned work landing on people who already had plans. Everyone can name the person, yet nobody is coaching them up or out.

The second is a people structure that no longer works. What worked at twenty people doesn't at sixty. One seat is carrying three jobs. A handoff that crossed a desk now crosses four teams. Work falls between seats and sits there until it's urgent.

The third is you. Holding onto work you should have handed off makes you the place decisions wait. You can only catch so much, and everything past that becomes a fire.

Take the last few fires you put out yourself. Ask who should have owned each one, and what kept them from owning it.

4. No Early Warning

Most fires smolder before they catch. Somebody has to be watching early enough to act.

Let's return to the customer who left without warning. They cut usage two months earlier. Support tickets climbed in the spring. The check-in calls got shorter, then stopped. The warning was there. Nobody was watching the numbers that would surface it.

Revenue tells you what already happened. Pipeline, on-time delivery, and open tickets tell you what's coming.

The numbers only help if you review them on a cadence. Wait until month end, and they tell you what you missed. Check them weekly, and there's still time to change it. Without that cadence, every problem arrives as an emergency, which is what reactive means.

Pick the last fire that surprised you. Go back and find the week it became visible.

5. No Consistent Way to Do the Work

A process fire is usually one you've seen before.

The same mistake, made by a different person. A delivery that goes wrong the same way it did last quarter. A new hire who guesses, because there was no standard to refer to.

Sometimes the process was never written down, so the work lives in a few heads and leaves with them. Sometimes it was written years ago and the business has evolved. Sometimes it's written and current, and people still execute their own versions.

The first needs a standard. The second needs a revision. The third needs someone willing to hold people to the one that exists.

Take a mistake that's happened more than once. Find out which of the three you have.

6. No Space to Think and Solve

This one is different. Skip it and you feed the other five. Protect it and you starve them.

Finding a root cause takes uninterrupted attention. That's the first thing a week of fires takes away.

At the team level that means stepping out of the fire together to work on the business. A weekly meeting where issues get addressed and resolved instead of just reported. A quarterly day out of the office. Annual planning that's more than a budget.

At the individual level it means quiet time to think about your own area, with nothing else competing for it.

Unprotected, both get postponed by whatever is burning this week.

Nothing here resolves itself.

Look at the next ninety days on your calendar. If none of that time is already blocked, start there.

Where to Start

Many teams find more than one of the six. That's normal, and it's what the list is for.

It's also where this goes wrong. If four of them are true, the temptation is to fix four. That's fire starter number two: More Than You Can Deliver. You'd be lighting new fires while trying to put out the old ones.

So pick one. List your last five fires and trace each back to a fire starter. Then look at which source is costing you the most. That might be a steady stream of small ones or a single fire you're still paying for.

Set objectives against it like anything else that matters.

Then here's the part that takes courage. Waiting for a calmer stretch is how a year goes by.

Stopping to fix the cause while a fire is still burning feels irresponsible. It's also the only thing that keeps the next one from starting.

The first cycle is the slow one, because you're doing root work on top of everything else. But the work compounds. Each fire starter you fix means fewer fires, which gives back time for the next one.

A Pattern Is a Decision

We all value teammates who run toward a fire. Keep them.

When the same people save the day again and again, a tougher question sits beneath the thanks.

Why does the company keep needing someone to save it?

A fire may be bad luck. A pattern rarely is.

Someone added more priorities than the team could handle. Someone kept the person in the seat. Someone let the process go stale. Someone didn't protect the time to look at any of it.

Some of that nobody saw. Some of it everybody saw and nobody touched. Both trace back to choices.

And you can choose differently.

Before we left lunch, I asked that CEO what was starting his fires. It took him a while. Then he named two.

If you want a more proactive company, stop asking people to be more proactive.

Go find what's generating the fires. Then fix that instead.

Related Essays

Building a Long-Term Goal That Works (fire starter 1): How to set a long-term target that shapes real decisions instead of living in a slide deck.

Getting Your Vision Shared by All (fire starter 1): Why a vision only works once it is shared, and the five touchpoints that make it stick.

The Planning Paradox(fire starter 2): Why bold long-term vision requires disciplined short-term execution, and how mastering both is what separates leaders who stall from those who scale.

Parity: When Your Team Isn't Built for the Goal (fire starter 3): What to do when the team you have cannot reach the goal you have set, and the two honest paths forward.

What Are Titles Costing You?(fire starter 3): Why defining the work before you label it creates clarity that titles never will.

The Delegation Dilemma(fire starter 3): Why leaders often become the bottleneck in their organizations and how learning to let go unlocks scale.

The Fixer Fallacy (fire starter 3): Why the leader who keeps rescuing the company is often the reason it keeps needing to be rescued.

Running a Business by the Numbers(fire starter 4): How a weekly scorecard turns your numbers from a report card into an early warning system.

Why Simplification Wins(fire starter 5): Where complexity shows up in vision, priorities, people structure, and operations, and why removing it beats adding to it.

The Courage to Think(fire starter 6): Why making space to think is a courage problem more than a time problem.

Sources & Footnotes

Russell L. Ackoff (1919 to 2009), American systems thinker and longtime Wharton School professor. The line comes from Redesigning the Future: A Systems Approach to Societal Problems (Wiley, 1974), where it follows the sentence: "Successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem."