Firefighting, for the uninitiated, involves running around in a panic, solving problems that pop up unexpectedly that require immediate attention, and usually could have been prevented with due diligence. Firefighting can take the form of responding to a frantic email at 2 am because a on site server has gone down, or calling a last-minute meeting to address a cybersecurity attack.
Firefighting is time-consuming and extremely exhausting because it doesn’t allow you to get into a consistent rhythm.
With most organisations spending 40% of their time on operations and 60% of their time on firefighting.
Making Time for Innovation and Strategic Planning
For the strategic planners out there – you’ve noticed that 60% firefighting + 40% operations = 0% left for strategy.
This should be cause for alarm, a fire alarm.
But everyone is left in this Groundhog Day situation, right? Don’t all business leaders wish they had time for innovative initiatives, but never get to them?
Now imaging e if companies allocated their time as 20% of time spent on daily operations, 20% on firefighting, and 60% on continuous improvement / innovation / strategic planning.
Think about that for a moment.
Companies with the biggest growth on average, reduced the time spent firefighting by 40%, enabling space to spend 60% of their time on the most important thing – innovation.
What percentage of your time do you think you spend on firefighting vs. strategic planning / innovation?
Combatting Operational Pressure
We deal with many clients advising them on operational planning and what we find is that most firefighting is related to operational pressures.
The issue with a laser focus on operations is that you spend all of your time worrying about the problems that impact how your organisation functions today, instead of looking ahead to areas of which you’re not currently taking advantage.
While you’re optimising what you already have, one of your competitors will do their best to out-innovate you.
One analogy is that you can only get so much added efficiency out of a horse, but it will never turn into a car. If you spend all of your time trying to make your horse run faster, someone will eventually beat you with their vehicle.
Who Started the Fire?
In order to reduce the amount of time you spend firefighting, you need to better understand the root cause of your problems.
When a house burns down, the fire department does an extensive investigation to better understand why the fire started in the first place. Was it arson? Was it the fuse box? Was it you leaving that frozen pizza in the oven overnight?
You need to take this same approach in your business. Learn from your mistakes to ensure you improve future results. If you’re only taking the time to run from fire to fire, you’re not spending the time you need to actually improve, and evolve past your competition.
What do you plan on doing to reduce the amount of time you spend firefighting? What would you be able to do with an extra 60% capacity in your workload?
One area that might be smoking up into a fire is your Technology support, Cyber Security or Reporting. Do you have a way to see trends before they burst into flames? If you’re interested in seeing how ACUTEC can help get in touch with our team.
Our team would love to hear from you.
Our specialist team of tech consultants look forward to understanding your business requirements in more detail. We have three easy ways to get in touch.
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