You Are Not a Firefighter. Please Stop Dressing Like One.
If most of your week goes to putting out fires, working harder isn't the fix. Working differently is.
Every founder I've ever coached has, at some point, described their week using the word "firefighting" without a hint of irony. It's such a common metaphor that we've stopped noticing how strange it is. You didn't start a company to spend your days rushing from one emergency to the next with a metaphorical hose. You started it to build something. And yet here you are, extinguishing the same three fires on a loop, wondering when you'll get to the actual strategy.
Here's the uncomfortable math nobody tells you when you're starting out: firefighting and strategy compete for the exact same hours. Every fire you personally put out is an hour you didn't spend on one of the two or three decisions that actually move your company forward. This doesn't fix itself with more effort, more coffee, or a more heroic attitude toward your own inbox. It only fixes itself when fewer fires reach your desk in the first place.
HBR called this in the year 2000, and it still holds up
There's a classic HBR piece by Roger Bohn called "Stop Fighting Fires" that I think about often, and yes, it is old enough to vote. Bohn's argument is almost embarrassingly simple once you see it: there are always more problems than anyone has time to properly deal with, so leaders default to treating the loudest one and moving on. The underlying cause never gets addressed, which means the same fire, or a close cousin of it, comes back. Fight fire, no time left for prevention, more fire. It's a loop, and loops don't resolve themselves just because you're tired of them.
The reason this piece has aged so well is that firefighting isn't really about being bad at your job. It's what happens by default in any organization that hasn't built the structure to catch problems before they escalate. Which means the fix isn't a personality change. It's a design change.
Getting out of the loop
Escaping firefighting mode doesn't mean doing less. It means building the leadership foundation, at every level of your company, so that problems get handled where they actually happen instead of automatically escalating to you. That's a different kind of work than putting out today's fire, and it's the kind of work that quietly buys back your time and attention for the decisions that actually need you: the ones about where the company is headed, not which small crisis is loudest this week.
This is also where diagnosis has to come before strategy, not after it. You can't build the right prevention structure on a guess about where the friction is coming from. You need real data: which teams, which roles, and which behavioral mismatches are quietly generating the fires you keep putting out. Predictive Index's Diagnose module is built for exactly that, which is honestly a little on the nose given that "diagnose" is also the first step in how I work with every client. I can give you 21 days of hands-on access to it, no commitment required, so you can see what it surfaces for your own team. If you'd rather start smaller and just get a read on yourself first, I'll send you a free PI Behavioral Assessment instead.
The exercise: track your fires for one week
For the next five business days, keep a running list of every "fire" that lands on your desk, no matter how small. At the end of the week, go back through the list and ask, honestly, how many of them needed you specifically, versus how many just landed on you because that's where things have always landed. Most leaders are surprised by the ratio. It's usually a lot lower than they expected, and that gap is exactly where your strategic time is hiding.
You don't need to do less to get out of firefighting mode. You need fewer of the wrong things to need you in the first place. What's one recurring fire in your company that keeps coming back no matter how many times you've put it out? That's usually the best place to start looking.
Kristen Illes is the Principal of 3D Leadership Solutions, where she partners with founders and executive teams at growth-stage companies to build the leadership practices that let them scale.
Comments