If you look beyond knowledge work, one thing becomes clear very quickly: well-designed systems do not aim to run at full capacity all the time. They plan for slack. In many sectors, this is so fundamental it is barely questioned. In others, particularly office-based and professional work, the same logic is oddly resisted. How other…
When conversations turn to wellbeing, they often drift into the personal. Resilience. Self-care. Better boundaries. While these matter, they can also obscure a more uncomfortable truth. Persistent stress and burnout are rarely individual failings. They are signals that a system is not working as designed. Firefighting extracts its cost from people In a firefighting culture,…
When organisations talk about risk, they usually focus on the visible and technical. Cyber security. Compliance. Financial controls. System resilience. These are all important, and all budgeted for. What is rarely treated as a risk is the absence of capacity. And yet, lack of capacity is one of the biggest drivers of failure, stress, and…
One of the reasons firefighting persists is that its true cost is hard to see. On the surface, work still gets done. Deadlines are met, reports are delivered, emails are answered. From the outside, the organisation appears functional, even efficient. But this apparent productivity is misleading. Firefighting shifts costs away from budgets and plans and…
In many organisations, especially in professional services and higher education, firefighting is not an exception. It is the default mode of operation. Urgent emails, last-minute data requests, unexpected issues, looming deadlines that should not be looming. Everyone is busy, everyone is reacting, and somehow this is treated as normal. Over time, constant urgency becomes background…
