I talked about the tendency for organizations to adopt the bad habit of operating continuously in crisis mode in a recent post, "Never let a crisis go to waste...or maybe not?" I specifically mentioned a LinkedIn post by Andre Ripla ("Navigating the Storm: Identifying and Overcoming Continuous Crisis Mode in Business Leadership"). I also mentioned that what Ripla calls continuous crisis mode, the two High Reliability Organizations experts Kathleen Sutcliffe and Karl Weick call chronic firefighting and collapse of sensemaking, respectively.
There's no question that today's environment requires (maybe forces is a better word) organizations to be agile. Becker's Hospital Review recently published an article calling agility the new C-suite buzzword for 2025! The article asked several hospital and health system executives about the need for agility. For example, Biju Samkutty, Chief Operating Officer at Mayo Clinic said, "The most valuable lesson I learned in the past year is that agility in decision-making is just as critical as having a well-defined strategy...In a rapidly evolving environment, lengthy planning cycles [see below] and excessive consensus-building must give way to iterative execution, data-driven insights, and cross-functional collaboration."
Dr. Steve Davis, President and CEO at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center added, "The pace of change in healthcare is accelerating, making traditional change management approaches inadequate. Instead of rigid, top-down strategies, we must foster agility, resilience, and adaptability within our workforce...Thriving organizations will be those that cultivate a culture of adaptability, empowering teams to navigate uncertainty, embrace innovation, and iterate quickly...Our focus must shift from managing change to building the capacity to sustain it."
While I agree with both Mr. Samkutty and Dr. Davis (full disclosure, Dr. Davis is actually a former boss), I do think that organizations have to be careful to avoid spending too much time in continuous crisis mode or what Dr. Sutcliffe calls chronic firefighting mode. Becker's Hospital Review also interviewed Dr. Cliff Megerian, CEO of University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Megerian emphasized the importance of balance, stating, "...while agility and resourcefulness are crucial, they are ideally utilized in a measured manner...We've seen that it is best to avoid being overly reactive...A disciplined approach to prioritizing is vital so that critical objectives will receive the necessary resources and attention."
With Dr. Megerian's comments in mind, I wanted to re-visit this particular topic in today's post, specifically to answer the question, "How do I know if my organization is operating in chronic firefighting mode?" Ripla lists several organizational signs that suggest a pattern of continuous crisis:
1. Decision-making is largely reactive. While he didn't use these exact words, the management guru Peter Drucker described the key differences between reactive versus proactive decision-making in a 1967 Harvard Business Review article, "The Effective Decision". When decisions are made primarily to address immediate and pressing issues at the expense of longer range objectives, an organization is likely to be stuck in chronic firefighting mode. Similarly, if tactical decisions override strategic ones, then an organization is being reactive more than its being proactive.
2. The so-called planning horizon is shrinking. A planning horizon is the length of time into the future that a plan or strategy considers when making decisions. Organizations that are operating in chronic firefighting mode focus more on short-term outcomes (days to weeks) than long-term outcomes (months to years). Leaders in these organizations simply do not have the time or energy to focus on long-term initiatives or to engage in strategic discussions.
3. Allocation of resources become erratic and often haphazard. Organizations that are always operating in chronic firefighting mode tend to abandon initiatives, shift priorities, and re-direct resources to address emergencies and short-term problems.
4. Meeting patterns shift. If meeting agendas are dominated by problem-solving and/or rarely involve discussions about long-term strategy, then it's likely that the organization has fallen into the habit of chronic firefighting. Similarly, these organizations tend to cancel regularly scheduled meetings in order to hold emergency ones. For example, if hospitals are always activating Incident Command (a formalized system used by organizations to effectively respond to emergencies, such as mass casualty incidents, natural disasters, and pandemics), it's likely that they are stuck in chronic firefighting mode.
5. Communication changes. There is a nuance to crisis communication that is distinctly different from regular communication within organizations. If an organization is always operating in chronic firefighting mode, this style of communication becomes the norm, rather than the exception.
6. Rules around governance change. Standard decision-making protocols, approval processes, and governance structures are routinely bypassed in organizations that are operating in chronic firefighting mode.
7. Innovation declines or is absent. True creative problem-solving rarely occurs when organizations are constantly putting out fires.
8. Organizational learning declines or is absent. Related to the point immediately above, when organizations are constantly in chronic firefighting mode, key learning cycles, post-mortem reviews, root-cause analyses are often abbreviated or eliminated entirely. As a result, the organization loses its ability to develop shared learning, which in turn, adversely impacts development of an organizational memory.
W. Edwards Deming was one of the early founders of the quality improvement movement. He disagreed with chronic firefighting too. Deming said, "Putting out fires is not improvement of the process. Neither is discovery and removal of a special cause detected by a point out of control. This only puts the process back to where it should have been in the first place."
As I mentioned in my last post, when chronic firefighting becomes the default mode in an organization, the organization will suffer. Acting like there's a crisis when there isn't one is exhausting both mentally and physically. It can tax human resources, impair effective decision-making, destroy organizational culture, and ultimately threaten the long-term sustainability of an organization. The important point here is to recognize here is for leaders to recognize these signs of chronic firefighting mode and change their approach accordingly.
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