firefighting
[FYE-er-FYE-ting]
noun
1. the activity of stopping fires burning
2. spending time on problems that need to be dealt with quickly, instead of working in a calm, planned way
At precisely 4:45 PM on an unremarkable wintry Tuesday, two very different alarms went off. A fire service unit was called to a lights-and-sirens emergency, and a marketing team received a heavily marked-up version of an already-designed annual report, which their CMO had ‘finally gotten around to reviewing thoroughly.’
The fire crew had five minutes to respond. The marketers had five days until the report’s launch date… but the CMO needed all changes implemented before tomorrow’s leadership review. If one unit said no, people died. If the other did, an arbitrary internal deadline would be missed. Yet, they each mobilized with equal urgency, thus triggering two very different response protocols—one to handle an emergency, the other to create one.
The annual report that had peacefully existed in its final form for weeks would quickly be marked “CRITICAL” in the project management system, and with that, a delayed round of feedback would turn into an all-hands crisis. By 7 PM, two copywriters would be rewriting headlines that had already gone through three rounds of approvals, while a designer swapped out imagery that had been signed off as perfect just days ago. Meanwhile, the fire crew across town would be pulling someone’s grandma out of a collapsing building. And while in reality, only one team would spend their night putting out an actual fire, the other would later tell themselves that’s exactly what they’d done, too. But the next morning, the fire crew would sit down for a mandatory critical incident debrief—a structured session with trained professionals to process what happened, assess their response, and identify ways to improve it for similar scenarios in the future. Back at the marketing office, however, the late-night content crew would gather around the coffee machine, still riding high on cortisol. They’d hilariously call last night’s [objectively sad] scramble an emergency response, pat themselves on the back for their exceptional ability to handle pressure, and proceed to trade battle stories about the night they saved the annual report for the whole next quarter. Worse, the organization itself would likely fuel this whole dysfunction further by celebrating the same frenzy as a shining example of hard work and dedication while completely disregarding any effort to review the process that created the emergency in the first place.
In an off-the-record talk, the fire service officer who’d later come to share some thoughts for this piece listened carefully while I explained in detail how corporate teams often act like their work is the most nerve-wracking effort underway at any given moment. “I’ve heard it’s actually dentists’,” he quoted one of the many studies out there, “and next, it’s ours.” Now, you’d think if anyone could claim ultimate authority on urgency, it’d precisely be someone in his line of work. Go figure. Instead, he looked at me like he’d just learned something new and said, “I didn’t know marketing was that stressful.” I wanted to say, “Because it isn’t,” but ultimately didn’t, since, yeah, well, explain that to your brain. Biochemically, it’s likely that both our crews’ bodies reacted in much the same way that ill-fated Tuesday. Their fight-or-flight response spiked their heart rates following the same pathways; in all probability, their digestion didn’t discriminate—it simply shut down for the time-being. The human brain doesn’t fact-check crises, and that’s what makes artificial urgency literally toxic. While emergency services are built to handle these temporary peaks in our bodies’ automatic survival response with straightforward protocols, planned recovery periods, and systematic debriefs, an unfortunate corporate team, just trying to do good work, could keep themselves in crisis mode indefinitely…
…And, oddly, take pride in it. Humans weren’t built for sustained emergency responses, and just like a stressed respiratory system pumps extra oxygen to the muscles, the subconscious mind searches for coping mechanisms (sorry, not sorry). Like cognitive reappraisal, or—for our story’s purposes—reframing undue stress as vigorous commitment. Or even developing whole professional identities around “treating impossible deadlines as a personal challenge” and “going above and beyond,” without ever stopping to think whether that’s even needed. And like most trauma responses (not even sorry), this one is self-sustaining, too, because the more teams glorify self-imposed pressure, the more they trap themselves in it. The fallout is no surprise: people start making mistakes they’d never make under normal circumstances; decisions get progressively worse; simple tasks take twice as long; the quality of work tanks precisely when it’s supposed to matter most.
Okay, but then how come first responders don’t completely screw up every emergency scene they visit? Well, when asked what his team does first upon arriving at a fire scene, the actual emergency responder I spoke with said, “We locate the way out.” He meant it quite literally, but there’s a certain poetry to it that corporate crisis-makers might want to consider. In life-or-death situations, where every second truly matters, they still make time for some clear thinking before taking action. “We pause and assess,” he explained. “We take a moment to observe the situation and map out our approach.” Because they know that acting without a plan, even with the best intentions, often does more harm than good.
So, at precisely 4:50 PM on an unremarkable wintry Tuesday, two teams took two very different approaches. One stopped to think inside a burning building, and the other acted like the house was on fire. Except this house is always on fire, like that’s just how houses are supposed to be—because when every deadline is essentially “ASAP” (in red letters), when every random piece of stakeholder feedback requires “immediate attention,” when every project innately starts off as “URGENT,” this is no longer an emergency. It could be a number of things, but more often than not, it’s simply a shortcoming of basic organizational competence. Crises, by definition, are rare. They’re the exception, not the rule. And they certainly don’t follow a marketing calendar. Then, if everything somehow feels like an emergency, is anything actually one?
When I started writing this article, one of the things I asked our firefighter was how he prioritizes who gets help first. Originally, it didn’t make the cut, but now I think it does deserve its place. He looked me in the eye and said, “If a person’s skull is showing, I’d prioritize them.” So I suggest that next time the Chief Growth Officer’s absolute top-priority ROAS reporting visuals need to be done ‘immediately’ on a Friday afternoon, you take a step back and ask: is their skull showing?
Safe to say, it’s highly unlikely.
