I Teach Fire Prevention to People Whose Houses Are On Fire: Firefighting Culture at Work

There is a specific guilt I often feel in a leadership classroom.

I'm at the front of the room. Before me is a room full of managers with 10-40 direct reports (yes... 40), a stack of open crises, 812 unread emails, 3 double-booked meetings, and a phone buzzing in their pocket. And I am asking them to sit still for the next three hours and learn how to be better leaders.

What I'm actually thinking is this: I know your house is burning down. I know every minute you spend in here with me is a minute you're not out there saving someone or something you're responsible for. But come on. Come out here with me anyway. I'm going to teach you how to prevent fires.

It can feel almost cruel. Like handing someone a glass of water to throw in a bonfire.

The thing is, I feel conflicted. I know these tools were helpful. I know that if we could do things like have clear communication, set expectations, provide feedback effectively, and show empathy, we'd have fewer fires. I also know that these tools are the first thing to be discarded when the smoke detector goes off.

The Downward Spiral of Firefighting

The people closest to a broken process see exactly what's wrong with it. The frontline worker drowning in workload and edge cases could tell you in ninety seconds which three fixes would save the team ten hours a week. They have the clarity. They do not have the authority. Nobody is handing this frontline worker a budget and free calendar time to fix an issue; their job is to take care of the next customer, phone call, widget, etc.

The people with the authority are the managers. And the managers are on fire. Back-to-back meetings, pulled out of one crisis to triage the next, writing the actual policy at home at 9 p.m. because the office is where work goes to get interrupted. They have the authority. They do not have the time. And sometimes they've been fighting fires for so long, the clarity from the front line is obscured by the smoke.

So the fix lives in the gap. The people who can see it can't reach it. The people who can reach it can't see it. And the boring, un-sexy, long-term fix that would help everyone never gets started. Nobody here is lazy or stupid. The system is just built so that no single person has both a clear view and a free hour to act on it.

Two MIT researchers, Nelson Repenning and John Sterman, published a paper in 2001 with the finest title in management literature: "Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened."

Their finding, in plain terms: firefighting feeds itself. Less time on prevention means more fires, which leaves even less time for prevention. The spiral continues downward.

But the genuine disservice here is the reward. Organizations celebrate the firefighters. The hero who saves the doomed project at 2 a.m. gets the bonus, the visibility, the promotion. The person who quietly built a process so the project was never doomed gets nothing, because you can't point at a disaster that didn't happen. "Crisis Preventer" doesn't usually appear on an employee appreciation award.

Over time, leadership fills up with war heroes. People promoted for being brilliant at fighting fires, who now run the place, who reach for the same instincts and reward the next round of firefighters. The organization becomes world-class at the exact thing it should be doing less of.

Repenning and Sterman named an additional lighted match, and it explains why even a willing leader stalls out. Fixing the system usually makes things worse before they get better. Pull people off the fire line to build the prevention, and for a while, you've got fewer firefighters and a half-finished system. It gets hotter before it cools. A leader staring at that dip will reasonably decide they can't afford it and reach back for the hose.

So Why Do I Keep Handing Out Water Glasses?

Here's the conflict I opened with, now with the research stapled to it. I'm not wrong that the tools work. I'm also not wrong that they're the first thing dropped when the alarm sounds. Both are true, and the paper explains why: the loop rewards the drop. Every instinct in a burning building tells you to put down the leadership binder and grab the hose.

Which leaves a genuinely burning truth. The only people who can break the loop are the managers. And the managers are exactly the people the fire has stripped of time, slack, and a clear view. The fix requires the one resource the trap exists to consume. You can't hustle your way out of that.

So no, a glass of water will do nothing to a bonfire. I know that when I hand it over, but the bonfire makes you forget two things that a good class does.

The first: those tools change how many fires get lit next week. Fewer matches, fewer 2 a.m. blazes.

The second is the one I've learned over time. The glass can get bigger. Not by itself, and not because of a slide deck (no matter how good those slides are).

The glass grows when two things meet: a class built around tools a leader can actually use on Monday, and a leader willing to look up from the fire long enough to consider that the tool in their hand might not be the biggest one available. Training without that willingness is a binder on a shelf. Willingness without good training is a stressed leader staring at a fire with no new options. Put the two together, and the glass becomes a pitcher. Keep going, and it's a bucket.

And a bucket still won't put out a bonfire. That was never the deal, and I will never make that promise.

What a bucket does is catch the small fires while they're still small, before any of them grow into the kind no amount of water was ever going to touch. You can, however, get good enough at the small fires that fewer of them ever become big ones.

And there are two moves small enough that even a manager in a wildfire can try:

Protect a sliver of prevention time, then guard it like a five-alarm blaze, because the un-started fix is what's stoking next month's fires.

Give loud, public, on-purpose credit for the fire that didn't happen. Praise the person who fixed the thing nobody noticed was about to break. Heroes are made by what leaders reward, so spotlight the prevention work when you can.

Okay, so...

I'm going to keep teaching the class.

I'm going to keep feeling a little guilty about the timing, and I've made peace with that, because the guilt and the work aren't fighting each other.

They're both just true.

The managers in my room would love to prevent fires. The system they work in pays them to fight the fires. So I'll keep handing out water glasses that might one day grow to be a bucket. And I keep reminding leaders that the only firefighting that ends with fewer fires is the kind you do before it becomes a bonfire.

A leadership class with applicable tools + a leader willing to pull back for a moment to try a new tool = bigger and stronger firefighting tools alongside fewer and smaller fires.

Then I let them get back to their 812 emails.

Come out of the burning building for three hours. I know exactly what it costs you. But I'm asking anyway.

The Research (click to expand)

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254

Repenning, N. P., & Sterman, J. D. (2001). Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened: Creating and sustaining process improvement. California Management Review, 43(4), 64–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166101