Max Henry explains why constant firefighting in organizations backfires: teams skip post-mortems, miss root causes, and make worse decisions. Quick fixes create a cycle where the same problems keep returning instead of getting solved.
The real cost is the ability to think. When you're firefighting, you're not really solving problems, you're just solving what the challenge at hand is, right? And when that happens, I'd break it down into 2 things. So you lose the quality of decision-making if you don't go back to it. So you eventually just pacified the fire and eventually moved on. And the institutional learnings, because that postmortem is where the learning comes in, right? What happened, why it happened, and how do we make sure it doesn't happen again? So every— I think every decision that you make during that firefighting is like a shortcut. What can I do in this instance to pacify this?
