Letting Fires Burn
You can’t put out every fire right now. Which ones do you let burn?
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One of the hardest parts of leadership is admitting that you can’t solve every problem right away. We are all limited by time, people and resources and we can only do so much. The larger the company the more resources you have, but you also have more problems. No one can solve everything immediately.
You will need to let some problems fester while you solve others.
Deciding which fires to put out right now, and which ones you can let burn for a while is the hardest kind of decision. All of these problems have negative consequences for the business, which is why they are problems! So there are no good choices to be had, just a bunch of bad choices.
It’s common that leaders get stuck on these kinds of decisions, unwilling to let any fires burn. They try to solve everything at the same time, but end up solving very little and making it worse.
Similarly, it’s common that leaders get overwhelmed by the number of fires and can’t make a decision. In these cases the paralysis leads to more problems developing and a vicious cycle begins!
Neither of those is what you want. So, how do you decide which fires to put out and which fires to let burn?
Step 1. Triage
You need to be ruthless in prioritizing the list of problems. If you don’t do this well, you will waste your time solving small problems while major problems wreck the business. How you prioritize is up to you, but important criteria include:
Urgency. Is this problem going to hurt us today or tomorrow?
Impact. Is this problem threatening to put us out of business, or just slow us down?
Damage. Is the problem causing permanent damage to the business, or can we recover?
Blast Radius. Will this problem cause more problems, or is it self contained?
When you’re done, you should have a prioritized list of problems.
Step 2. Scope.
Should you work your way down the list, starting from the top? Maybe! Sometimes there are less important problems that you believe you can solve very quickly with little effort. Knowing how much effort you expect each problem to take is critical for later planning.
At the same time, any scope you provide for a problem is a guess at best. You might be wrong! These scopes are just guidelines on how much time you should spend on a problem before re-evaluating. If you think a problem will take a day, you can spend one day on it until you need to reconsider. You won’t spend two or three days on it, you’ll stop and make a new decision.
So scope the problems with your best guess, realizing that you aren’t making a firm commitment. You’re just getting ready to act.
Step 3. Act.
It’s time to solve problems! Yes, tackle the top problem first. It’s by definition the most important thing you can do.
If you need your entire team to solve that top problem, then that will be all you can do. But that’s rarely the case, as too many people solving a problem brings overhead and slows things down. If you can tackle more than one, what do you choose?
If there are problems with very small scope, consider trying to solve them quickly. Shortening the list will make it easier to focus later. Or, if the second and third problem might kill your company, tackle one of those too. Use your judgement, just because you can’t solve everything at once doesn’t mean you can’t do more than one thing.
Make sure that you keep track of how long you’re spending on solving problems. You should never spend more time than your scope on a solution without stopping and re-evaluating. It’s possible the priorities or your plan will change with that new information.
In short, don’t try to solve everything at once.
Focus on solving the most important problems first and trust that you will solve the rest of the problems later.
The more you do this, the easier it becomes. The best leaders I’ve ever worked with run this process constantly in their head, which makes them seem decisive and calm during emergencies. In reality, they have already moved on to Triage while their team is panicking about the long list of problems.
Like anything, making these decisions gets easier with experience. As a leader, you’ll get a lot of experience very quickly because your list of problems will always be longer than your capacity to solve them.
Success here is not getting better at solving problems. Success is getting comfortable with the fires you let burn, knowing you will solve them later. That comfort comes with stress, but it’s a fundamental part of leadership.
In fact, it’s why we need leaders in the first place!
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