by Lee Fried, on 18 Jul 2007 08:58 am
The Journey
Fire Fighting
Reacting. Something I know a lot about. In a world of processes that are not standard and under control most of us spend most of our time in a reactive mode. Most managers I work with like to describe themselves as “fire fighters” running from one problem to the next. In most organizations those that know how to best react are the ones that are first promoted or given the employee of the month award. In the world of consultants there are armies of smart professionals for hire that can come in and help you react even faster and better as an organization. It truly is fascinating.
There are many reasons why organizations get caught in the frustrating cycle of jumping from one reactive situation to the next. To name a few:
- Short-term incentives that don’t allow for sustainable improvement.
- Management that lacks visibility of the Gemba.
- A lack of focus on stabilizing and standardizing processes.
- Underinvestment in people development.
- Lack of effective measurement systems that all for the identification of root causes.
- Not enough focus on the customer’s needs.
As we move forward with the Model Line work we are doing our best to break this cycle, but it sure is hard. For each of the reasons listed above we have work underway to make improvements. Yet, in the interim we are challenged in balancing the short and long-term. For example, without having standard processes across all of our working units fires pop up all the time, and because we lack an effective measurement system it is often hard to tell how big they are and what bolt of lightning got them started. So our instincts and experience tell us we need to jump to reaction mode. We need to roll up our sleeves and call out the fire brigades. Each time this happens there is an opportunity cost for long-term growth and improvement. We are forced to move resources away from proactive work and because we are in reaction mode we don’t lay the foundation that will lead to sustainability. More then often we find that the “big fire” was not nearly as bad as we thought, but we jumped anyway, because we lacked visibility of what was really happening.
I don’t have an answer to this challenge except to continue to focus on our long-term foundational work and to use our best judgement on whether to fight fires in the short-term or to let them burn for a while.