Gregory Shepard uses firefighting to explain why companies stuck in crisis mode focus on urgent tasks instead of important ones. Firefighters contain fires rather than extinguish them immediately, just as leaders should prevent crises instead of constantly reacting to them. When meetings have everyone on their phones, that's a sign your organization is drowning in urgency.
Chapters
I want to talk a little bit about urgent versus important. There's a lot of scenarios where somebody is doing the right thing the wrong way, or they're doing the wrong thing the right way. And urgent over important is an example of that. So, you know, there is a fire department, one of the people that I— or the groups actually I interviewed for the book. And What they told me is I interviewed them and I was trying to figure out how do you deal with these really gnarly situations where everything you do matters and you can't afford to make any mistakes and there's a fire burning. And they said, we don't actually try to put out the fire. What we do is we contain the fire. And that means fire lines. So in a square, you know, one line would be 25%, another line would be 25%. So you have 50% containment. And so sometimes you have to let the fire burn to make sure that no other fires get lit. If these guys went to try to put out the fire, it would just chase in front of them the whole time. So instead what they do is they contain the fire and then they close in on it. So as an entrepreneur, if you're in a business where everybody's running around with their head on fire, everybody's panicking, if you're in a meeting and people can't put down their phone and pay attention to the meeting, Or they can't get off their computer, you have a problem. That is a bad business. Every time I go into a business and people can't even focus on a meeting, I'm thinking, all these people got together at their wage, costs a lot of money to get into a meeting, and they're all doing something else and not paying attention to what's in the meeting. That's a dysfunctional company. Usually that is a red canary in the mine saying, listen, you have a company where people are operating on panic, and that means that they're doing the urgent instead of the important. The important being something that prevents the urgent from happening in the first place. I hope that's helpful.
