The Core Principle

Learn to stop fighting fires and start building houses that won't burn - and develop the skills to teach others how to do the same. 

I mentioned this core driving principle in last week's post. What I didn't do is bother going into any particular detail about what that means - or why I've chosen it as my core principle. This week I wanted to take an opportunity to expand.

At some point - I fell in love with crisis. 

 

Perhaps it was in my high school stage crew days - the adrenaline rush of having a few dark seconds to transform a set or having to track down a missing cast member moments before they're intended to go on stage.

Or it could have been during college - doing sports broadcasts out of an ambulance that had been gutted and turned into a TV studio. There's certainly a thrill in jumping out of the back of the truck and sprinting 100 yards to fix a bad connection on a camera.

Maybe it was in the midst of wet socks and long days as a winemaker. 

Or the satisfaction of helping a banking customer through a moment of financial panic.

 

All I know is that when I arrived at my first role with NASA SBIR/STTR - I was already addicted to putting myself in the middle of a tempest - and I had never considered that this was a mistake.

"Problem Solving" was one of the key skills I've used to market myself when seeking employment the past decade. If your back is against the wall - you can trust that Carl will come through to save the day. This is a reputation that I'm deeply proud of and I do not regret building.

Much of my success in my current role has come as a result of my willingness to dive into a mess and get my hands dirty. These skills have allowed me to build strong relationships with other high-performers and have allowed me to stand out as a key contributor. 

But if I'm the guy you call to absorb chaos and produce stability - that means my value is dependent on the continued arrival of chaos! 

As I've gone through my third year with the SBIR program and seen many of the same crises appear - I've come to the painful realization: 

I've never solved a problem - I've just been helping the team survive them. 

Which is certainly a valuable contribution in the moment but often times allows the problem to continue to grow unchecked. If I keep bailing out the boat fast enough no one will ever bother to plug the hole letting the water in.

 

This is not sustainable.   

• It sets a ceiling on my career growth - my team can't put me into a strategic role when they need me for a tactical one.
  
  
• My willingness for late nights and missed meals lessens every time I find myself fighting the same old fires.
   
• I have become a bottleneck for my organization. I'm usually pretty good at staying on top of things - but the longer this goes on the bigger my incoming pipeline gets - and I can only do so much. The opportunity for me to be responsible for a critical failure increases.
   
• I can see the forest - but my time is spent stuck on the trees. I have a front row seat on every crisis and have ideas on how we can prevent them. But before I get a chance to share those ideas I'm whisked along into the next crisis.
   
• My continued success is dependent on continued chaos. 

 

So how do I break the addiction?

It's one thing for me to become aware of the problem with my addiction to firefighting.

It's another to find a way out.

 

To reuse the metaphor from above - how can I stop bailing out the boat without letting the boat sink. This is why learning to 'build better houses' is so important to my growth.

 

The only way that I can stop spending all my time fighting fires is to create an environment where the fires never start. If I can't create that environment - then I need to at least make it so that others can address fires before they start burning out of control.

That means:

• Getting better at documenting my work. Much of what I do is dependent on tacit knowledge or personal relationships that were built on years of trust. I can't easily hand those things to others - but I can document the fires that I encounter and how I put them out.
   
• Learning to design and execute better processes. In a complex environment that means learning to embrace uncertainty. It means allowing and accepting failure and leveraging lessons learned to improve. It means giving up some control in pursuit of emergence.
   
• Analyzing decisions and outcomes independently from one another. A good decision can have a bad outcome. A good outcome can come as the result of a bad decision. The outcome alone is not enough to support the necessary feedback loop.

I can't do it alone.

If I learn to escape this trap and someone else just falls in to replace me, nothing actually changes. The trap is just a symptom of a larger disease that infects most workplaces.

People like me work long hours to keep everything running smoothly - while most people never realize how close the whole organization comes to collapse every other day. We become shock absorbers that allow a broken system to keep running.

So it's not enough for me to just fix my own perspective and solve this locally. I want to help fix the whole chain.

• I want to help my organization (and others) develop resilience.
   
• I want to multiply the impact of the lessons I've learned. One voice is a zealot. Many voices are a crusade.
  
  
• I enjoy this type of work - and I can imagine building a career around these ideas.

I'd love to hear from people if they find themselves in a similar pattern in their life/work. 

Do you find yourself constantly solving the same problems over and over?

Have you figured out how to escape - or are you still in the trap?

CHG