The chronic firefighter

It's 9 on a Monday. In the room there are seven people and a projected spreadsheet: the week's list of stocked-out SKUs. The same ones as last week. And the ones from the Monday before. For almost two years this committee has met to review the same list and close it the same way: a rush order, an extra freight run, a supplier asked to "work miracles". By 9:40 the problem is "solved" —until next Monday.

In two years, no one asked why those SKUs always run out. Asking would have been heresy: here we act, we don't hold endless meetings.

To anyone new in that room, the pace is reassuring: there's decision, there's action, no paralysis by analysis. But stay a couple of months and you start to notice something odd. The list changes in order, not in content. The same eight or ten SKUs rotate up and down, week after week, like a carousel no one dares to switch off.

This isn't a replenishment problem. It's a ritual —and like every ritual, it survives only because no one asks what it's for.

If this scene feels familiar, it's no accident. It is, almost with textbook precision, the symptom of a system that works exactly the opposite of how we think it does.

The one who fights fires is seen. The one who prevents them isn't.

The phrase that holds up the stockout committee —"here we act fast, we value people who solve problems"— sounds like a virtue. In most companies we know it's said with pride, almost as a calling card. The trouble is that it confuses two different things: speed of reaction and problem-solving ability. They're cousins, not sisters.

Friday at 8:10 pm, while everyone leaves, Martín is still on the phone sorting out the shipment that fell through. On Monday he's praised in the meeting: "a star, he saved the month". Three desks over, Laura six months ago adjusted a replenishment setting so that shipment would never fall through. No one noticed. At the next performance review, Martín gets promoted.

It's not that Martín doesn't deserve recognition —under pressure, he solved something real. The problem is the asymmetry: Martín's fire has witnesses, a start time, a story to tell in the managers' meeting. Laura's prevention has no such narrative. There's no metric that shows the shipment that never fell through. Roger Bohn named it in Harvard Business Review back in 2000: when there are more problems than time, serious problem-solving degenerates into "quick and dirty patches" and the team jumps from fire to fire without finishing anything.

And that jump has a mechanism; it isn't indiscipline. Repenning and Sterman named it in 2001, in the California Management Review, the "capability trap": no one gets credit for the problem that never happened, so everyone rushes to put out the one already burning —and the circle never breaks. The less you invest in prevention, the more fires there are; the more fires there are, the less time is left to prevent. The trap closes on itself, and pays bonuses on top.

This is what we call the chronic firefighter: not a person, but an incentive system that —without anyone designing it on purpose— makes visible whoever puts out the fire and invisible whoever prevented it. It settles in quietly, and once settled, it perpetuates itself.

Who did you last promote in your company: the person who put out the fire everyone saw, or the one who kept it from happening? And more important: do you have any way to see the second one? If the answer is "I couldn't tell you", you already have the diagnosis.

That said, even when someone decides to stop firefighting and actually solve, they run into something more uncomfortable: almost no one properly defines what they're trying to solve.

The problem isn't solving: it's discovering what the problem is

Go back for a moment to the stockout committee. Each Monday's "solution" —extra freight, rush order, a supplier under pressure— was never preceded by a simple question: why does this SKU, and not another, always run out? No one asked, because the committee isn't designed to diagnose. It's designed to act. And there lies the real bottleneck of almost every firefighting organization: it isn't bad at solving. It's bad at understanding what it has to solve.

When Harvard Business Review surveyed 106 executives from 17 countries in 2017, 85% admitted their organization is bad at diagnosing problems —and 87%, that the failure is costly. Not an unlucky minority: the norm. The reason, per the study itself, is predictable: managers jump into "solution mode" without verifying whether they truly understood the problem.

The cost of that jump isn't anecdotal. Paul Nutt studied 356 decisions in mid-size and large organizations: half ended in failure, and two out of three had been made with the tactics most prone to fail —imposing the solution, not seeking alternatives. Put another way: in most cases, someone already had the answer before having the question.

We already saw it applied to change: in "Why change initiatives fail" we showed that "people resist" was the symptom cited from memory, not the real cause —almost always a design that adjusted neither incentives nor workloads. That wasn't an exception peculiar to organizational change; it's the general pattern of how we confuse symptom with problem, in any function and any industry.

Before assigning resources to "solve" something, write in a single line what the problem is —without naming any solution in that line. None of "we lack safety stock" (that's already a disguised solution); something like "SKU 4471 runs out 3 of every 4 weeks in the north warehouse". If you can't write that line without slipping a solution inside, you don't yet understand the problem. It's free, it takes five minutes, and it filters out half the stockout committees in the country.

Why do we fall for it again and again, even good managers? The answer lies in how the brain processes under pressure.

Why the brain pushes us toward the fire

It's worth saying plainly, because the diagnosis above can sound like an accusation: it isn't that managers are negligent. It's that the brain, under pressure, is built for something else.

As Repenning and colleagues explain in MIT Sloan Management Review, under pressure the brain jumps straight from the situation to the solution. It's a reflex that saves you in an emergency and betrays you everywhere else. That jump is pure pattern-matching —the brain recognizes a situation resembling one it lived through before, and automatically fires the response that worked last time. It's exactly the mechanism that lets you brake the car without thinking when the one ahead stops short. It is also, with no change of hardware, the same mechanism that makes a manager answer SKU 4471 with "tell the supplier to work miracles" instead of asking why.

The shortcut works in a real emergency —an actual fire, a furious customer on the phone, a truck stranded on the highway— because there's no time to diagnose and any delay costs more than a wrong solution. But that same reflex fires when the problem isn't an emergency, but something recurring that does have time to be understood. There, the shortcut doesn't save time: it borrows it. The patch "solves" today and sows next week's fire, with interest.

It's the reason the stockout committee can be made up of smart people with years of experience and still fail to break the cycle: it isn't a matter of IQ, it's a badly calibrated reflex no one stopped to recalibrate.

An afternoon's exercise: take the last three fires your team put out and ask, for each, whether they had happened before. No sophisticated system needed —memory and honesty will do. That informal tally, that simple, is the seed of what later in this series we'll call the recurrence rate: the only metric that tells you whether you're solving or just reacting faster.

This is not a pathology of some sloppy small business. It happens at the scale of the country's largest infrastructure.

The chronic firefighter, at country scale

It's worth raising the stakes. In December and January, in the heat wave, the metropolitan power grid lost thousands of megawatts at once: hundreds of thousands of users without power, crews working against the clock, officials explaining the outage on national broadcast. In hours —sometimes days— service is restored. Relief headlines, the emergency overcome.

The underlying cause —grids and substations operating at the limit after years of underinvestment— stays exactly the same. Next summer, the same blackout, under a different storm's name. It's the stockout committee, but at the scale of an entire city: the outage gets solved, never the underinvestment that produces it. Firefighting mode doesn't care about size or management sophistication; it's what happens when any system —a company, a power utility, a country— lets the visible urgency crowd out, year after year, the invisible cause.

And there's a reason this matters especially now, in Argentina. In an economy where company closures and insolvency filings are on the rise, every extra freight run, every rush order, every patch that doesn't attack the cause is money the company has no margin to give away. This is no time to tolerate chronic inefficiency dressed up as "that's just this business". And that drip of urgencies bleeds cash on top: we already showed it in another article on this blog —you can be profitable on paper and run out of cash in practice. The chronic firefighter is one of the quietest ways to get there.

Add one new column to the week's problem list: "has this happened before? (Y/N)". It needs no new system and no budget. It changes next Monday's committee conversation, because it turns the invisible —recurrence— into something everyone sees on the same spreadsheet.

At this point, the phrases that hold up the status quo appear. They're worth facing head-on.

The difficult conversation

"Well, that's how it is: the business is reactive by nature." No. Reactivity isn't the nature of the business —it's the nature of a system that never left any margin to prevent. No industry is born condemned to fight fires; you get there, Monday by Monday, when every free hour goes to the problem that shouts loudest and none to the ones that haven't shouted yet.

"I need people who solve, not people who bring me theory." Agreed, gladly. The missing question is what "solve" means: putting out the same fire every Monday, disguised as a different SKU, or making it stop starting? If the answer your company values most is the first, you aren't rewarding solving. You're rewarding reaction, and they're different things even if they look alike in the managers'-meeting photo.

"If we stop to analyze, we won't make it." There's never time to do it right. But there's always time to do it twice —and a third time, and a fourth, every time the same SKU returns to the committee's list. The question isn't whether you have time to diagnose. It's whether you can keep paying the time it costs you not to.

The committee that closes nothing

Return, one last time, to the Monday room at 9. Seven people, the same spreadsheet, the same list of SKUs. At 9:40 someone says "solved" and everyone moves to the next meeting. But the Monday committee doesn't have a replenishment problem. It has a half-solved problem, every week, forever. And the most expensive part isn't the extra freight or the rush order: it's that no one in that room owns making that fire stop starting.

Before you go, a quick self-check:

Suppose tomorrow you decide to break with this and actually solve, not put out fires faster. There the second trap awaits: you already know the tools —the 5 Whys have hung laminated on the plant wall for years— and the problem comes back all the same. In the next installment of this series we tell why the most widely taught problem-solving technique in the world is also the most deceptive when applied from a desk, and which method does separate symptom from cause.