Stop fighting fires

Fire fighting is an old, familiar way of doing business, especially when de veloping new products and ramping up manufacturing. But fire fighting consu mes an organization's resources and damages productivity. People rush from task to task, rarely completing one job before being interrupted by another . And serious problem solving degenerates into quick-and-dirty patching. Ma nagers must perform a juggling act, deciding where to allocate overworked p eople and which crises to ignore for the moment. What factors underly this destructive pattern? Fire fighting isn't an irrat ional response to high-pressure management situations. Rather, it derives f rom what seems like a reasonable set of rules investigate all problems, for example, or assign the most difficult problems to your best troubleshooter . Ultimately, however, fire-fighting organizations fail to solve problems a dequately and forgo so many opportunities that overall performance plummets . Some companies never fight fires, even though they have just as much work a nd just as many resource constraints as other companies do. They have stron g problem-solving cultures. They perform triage. They set realistic deadlin es. They don't tackle a problem unless they're committed to understanding i ts root cause and finding a valid solution. And they don't reward fire-figh ting behavior. Transforming a fire-fighting organization into a problem-solving one is not easy. But them are tactical, strategic, and cultural methods for pulling y our company out of fire-fighting mode.