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In our recent post, we began exploring fire-fighting in business.  Everyone wants to speed up important initiatives, but often companies fail to achieve true speed because their leaders and employees are too busy dashing around with a fire hose.

Instead of telling your people to hurry up, consider telling them:  “Festina lente.”

Festina lente was one of Augustus Caesar’s favorite expressions.  Roughly translated, it means “make haste slowly.”  Today we have similar expressions.  In November 2008, as U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama was assembling his cabinet, he promised to proceed “with all deliberate haste.”  In the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, the court ordered school segregation to be abolished “with all deliberate speed.”  And we’ve all heard the expression “go slow to go fast.”  Most leaders know that real speed requires slowing down when you need to.  Instead of running from fire to fire—festina lente.

Most people think of fire fighting as responding to unexpected crises.  But there are other, more subtle, ways that leaders create a fire-fighting culture: an environment in which fires are common and heroics are the order of the day.  Consider these situations:

• A leader announces an important strategic initiative and drums up a lot of buy-in, but fails to announce the metrics—or even basic signs—by which people will know whether or not progress has been made.
• A leader allows projects to be treated as fads:  People pick up work with initial enthusiasm but then, as it wears off, they’re allowed to drop the project and move on to something else.
• A leader emphasizes one particular activity over all others (such as “doing deals” or “completing customer calls in 2 minutes or less”) and rewards people for the quantity and speed alone.

In these circumstances, people tend to move fast.  Urgency is palpable.  Leaders hand out awards left and right.  But … nobody’s making any real progress.

The mantra of leaders in truly fast organizations is something more like festina lente. Though it translates as “make haste slowly,” slowly fails to capture the connotations of lente, which include toughness and suppleness.  So perhaps we could translate the phrase as:  “Make haste—and at the same time, be intentional.  Be flexible.  Be aware.  Don’t lose sight of what you’re trying to achieve.”  If everyone in an organization behaved that way, fires would have a hard time getting started.

“How can we execute on a strategy if we’re busy fighting fires all day?”

This question came up in our recent webinar on driving strategic initiatives.  Fire fighting is a seemingly bulletproof “yeah, but”:  “Yeah, I know that is the new strategy, but (insert your own ‘fire’ here: the client’s going to walk, we’re out of coffee filters, etc.).”

Some fires simply must be handled immediately.  But others can be delegated, ignored, or even prevented.  Often the problem is that people  unknowingly fan the flames of the very fires that suck up their time.  So, if you are frustrated by fire fighting, think about these questions with regard to yourself and your culture.  Do you  …

1. Find that fire fighting gets your adrenaline going more than disciplined executing on tasks?  Does it provide more of a feeling of worth?
2. Reward people for “responsiveness” more than for execution-oriented behaviors?
3. Often have people scrambling with urgent e-mails?
4. Have enough time/resources allotted to the initiative?
5. Spend time on fire prevention?  That is, debriefing a situation with your team to discuss what triggered the fire and how to avoid it in future.

What do these questions bring up for you?  Do you have any advice for your fellow firefighters?