14 - We Will Seek out and Run Towards Fires
~ We Will Seek out and Run Toward Fires ~
### There are always fires. We are drawn to them. We run to them to understand them. We embrace the urgency. We stay on them until we’ve learned from them. Understanding their causes, and their impact, consume us. We move quickly to apply what we’ve learned from them with the goal of avoiding their re-occurrence. WE NEVER IGNORE, OR RUN FROM THEM. NEVER.
Fires abound. Just look around. They are everywhere. Outside our walls, and inside. Nothing works perfectly in an ever changing organization and world, and many things are far from perfect.
Do we know what’s going on around us? If we cannot comfortably answer this question, we know we are failing. Ignorance is not bliss in this profession, and we know that if we fall victim to this bliss, its temporary.
Thus, we have a keen sense of fires. We discover, obtain, and assess the output of various apparatus that indicate smoke and fire. They are key parts of our SYSTEMS OF WORKING Principle. They enable our continuous contextual awareness of the happenings around us. THEY KEEP US AHEAD AND IN THE LEAD.
We also know that this awareness is just half the battle. We cannot ignore the fires we see. Does a firefighter ignore a blaze while inspecting a building for compliance with fire codes?
The situation is URGENT and requires our urgent action. Something is obviously broken. We run to it to understand what happened and why. We ask TOUGH questions to get to the HEART of the MATTER. We don’t leave until we’ve fully understood this.
And still we know our work is not done. We must determine what can be done to prevent this from occurring again. We must ask ourselves tough questions. Why didn’t we see this coming? Did we overlook something?
We then update our systems of working. We also make sure, as much as possible, that such an event cannot occur again.
We run to fires. We extract all the knowledge we can from them. We learn from them and apply our learnings to ourselves and to others to protect the organization from experiencing it again.