Top performers get trapped solving the same problems weekly instead of preventing them. A supply chain team wastes resources on urgent stockouts that could be solved with planning. Real crises demand mental capacity you lose to constant firefighting.
For me, I think the clearest sign is when your best people are spending their most time solving the same problem again and again. Right? So, I'll map it out in a way that you see it in a meeting, usually your regular weekly meetings, where someone is coming up with the same problem again and again and trying to solve it. And eventually, they become the fixers of the department or the company, right? So, anyone who's having that issue is automatically called in. for that issue, and somehow the problem remains. No one focuses on how to eliminate it completely, and what eventually happens is nobody is working on the prevention, and somehow people who put out these fires start getting praised instead of people who actually try to prevent these, and eventually the prevention mechanism is forgotten altogether.
Generally, you'll see firefighting culture In small things like when a branch calls in, we have an urgent stockout, and then instead of checking your replenishment plan, you scramble to get stocks from somewhere else, or you place an immediate PO. So generally, um, it eats up a lot of time. So your best people, instead of doing their best for the operations, they become expediters, they become, um, individual firefighters as well. So it's generally eating up a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of resources for the company as well.
For me, firefighting is not the same as crisis management. And for me, what we all in supply chain are facing right now is incredible increase of genuine crisis that we need to have free resources and mental capacity of our people to deal with. And in order to release capacity for them to deal with true external crisis— could be internal, but true crises— we need to reduce firefighting, because this is what drains our teams.
