Manage Your Firedrill Capacity

Ah, the firedrill – that urgent project that your team has to scramble to get done by the deadline.  Everywhere I have been, they are an inescapable fact of life.  “We just got a key customer meeting and we’ve got to have that demo ready!”  “There is a VP review of the project next week and we have to nail it!”  “I need this analysis done tonight for the board meeting – they said we have to cover this compete angle!”  “Our customer’s site is down and we have to get them back up ASAP – drop everything!”

Some of this is inevitable – things come up, so you have to rise to the occasion and get it done.  But some teams seem to exist in perpetual firedrill – life is just an endless succession of crises and it feels like a treadmill; you never get the chance to move forward on the really important projects that could be game changers, because you are running as fast as you can to handle the constant stream of do-it-now projects that bombard you.

How much you can control this problem depends on the role.  If your job is to fight fires (literal or metaphorical), then maybe the firedrill is what you do.  But if your work is more project-oriented, my guess is that a lot of them could have been anticipated and avoided.  That’s been my experience.  Test it for yourself – keep track of the firedrills you are pulled into for a couple of weeks, and look over the list.  How many of them really came out of the blue and could not have been avoided?

The Magic Wand: Designing Good Systems

Systems and processes can make life miserable and are one of the things that people complain most about.  They can get rigid, bureaucratic, and generally suck the spirit and energy out of life.  BUT … they are the critical tool that can eliminate firedrills, if they are done right.  What I’ve found is that you must design them thoughtfully, hone them until they cause the minimum of friction, and throw them out when they are no longer adding value. You probably will benefit from a system when something is predictable, repeated, and complex.

• Predictable: hey, it’s a new year and we have to get our plan landed – wow, who could have seen that coming?  Excuse me, but it’s been on the Gregorian calendar for around 430 years, so this really shouldn’t catch you by surprise.
• Repeated: if you do something once, then designing a system may or may not pay off.  If you do it over and over again, you don’t want to lose the hard-won lessons of the past.  Figure out how to do it well and bake it into a system so that you don’t have to think about it.  We’d never be able to function as human beings if our bodies didn’t do this constantly – we couldn’t walk, talk, eat, read, or write.  We spend much of our early childhood evolving our neural systems to master the key activities needed for life – think about how helpless an infant is.  Reinventing the wheel every time you do something keeps your team in perpetual infancy.
• Complex: if it’s trivial, you may (may!) not need to remember how to do it.  But as things get complex, you are wasting enormous amounts of time and operating very inefficiently if you don’t capture that knowledge into a system.

Firedrills are a great indicator that you need to do something – jotting down a line or two about each one will take you less than a minute a day and looking the list over will help you diagnose places where you have a missing system or a failing one.

Don’t Waste Your Firedrill Capacity

Every team has some capacity to absorb firedrills.  That capacity increases as people are more committed to the mission.  It increases with confidence in the team leadership – people figure that if the leaders say something is important, it probably is.  But if you burn through that capacity too often, or you waste it on things that are obviously just screw-ups in planning that could have been prevented, you’ll pay the price.  People will get grumpy, cynical, burned out .. and eventually will leave the team.

So manage that capacity.  Fill the tank by fostering trust and commitment.  Avoid burning it up on dumb things that you could have avoided with some thoughtful planning.  Come clean when you screwed up and the team has to pay for your mistake.  And then when you really do need them to commit heart and soul to pulling off something heroic, the team will be right there with you, ready to dig deep and gut it out.