Not All Fires Are Worth Fighting

Insight from… Me!

During a coaching call last week, a Series A COO said something that made me pause: "I saw these three issues coming last quarter. I deliberately chose to tackle only one."

Five years ago, I would've questioned his judgment. I was the classic overworked operator - the guy whose Slack notifications buzzed through dinner, through weekends, through family time. I thought that's what excellence looked like. And I thought he was being lazy.

He wasn't being lazy. He was being strategic.

In ops, we often treat exhaustion like a badge of honor. We swap stories about emergency deployments and weekend firefighting sessions as if they're medals of valor. The more fires you put out, the better you are at your job, right?

But here's what separates great operators from good ones: they know some fires should just burn.

This is where the 2x2 matrix becomes your decision engine. Not as another MBA framework, but as permission to be selectively inactive.

Think of it as your fire dispatch system:

• Low Impact, Low Uncertainty – The office printer is acting up again. Let it burn.

• High Impact, Low Uncertainty – Your top engineer is about to quit. Fight this fire now.

• Low Impact, High Uncertainty – That new competitor might steal some small clients. Let it burn.

• High Impact, High Uncertainty – Your biggest client is unhappy. Fight smart, not hard.

Here's how to stop being a reactive firefighter and start being a strategic operator.

Step 1: Name Your Fires

Look, we all have that running list of "oh shit" moments keeping us up at night. Write them down. All of them. The client who's always complaining. The team that's burning out. The dashboard that keeps breaking. Get it all out of your head and onto paper.

Step 2: Sort Your Smoke Signals

Some of these fires are actually just smoke. That Slack channel full of complaints about the coffee machine? Smoke. The engineer threatening to quit because you switched project management tools? Now that's a fire.

Group similar problems together. Tech issues in one pile, people problems in another, market threats in a third.

Step 3: Plot Your Battleground

Now for the fun part. Take each group and ask two questions:

• How bad would this hurt if it went wrong? (Impact)

• How sure are we about what's going to happen? (Uncertainty)

Plot them on your matrix. Be honest with yourself.

Step 4: Choose (and Defend) Your Battles

Here's where most ops people mess up. They try to fight every fire. Don't.

Instead:

• High Impact, Low Uncertainty: These are your priority fires. The outcome is clear if you don't act. Fight these first. Think deployment pipelines, key employee retention, core infrastructure stability.

• High Impact, High Uncertainty: These need strategy, not just action. Build contingency plans. Watch for cascade potential

• Low Impact, High Uncertainty: Monitor from a distance. Don't waste resources here. Set clear thresholds: "We'll only act if X metric drops below Y."

• Low Impact, Low Uncertainty: Let. Them. Burn. That buggy internal dashboard? The clunky expense system? Document your decision and move on.

But here's the tricky part: your fire response strategy needs to evolve with your company. At seed stage, fight anything threatening product-market fit.

By Series A, you can let non-core fires burn while proving scalability.

In growth stage? That's when you'll need to increase your firefighting as systems professionalize.

When stakeholders push back (and they will), don't frame it as ignoring problems. Instead, show them your matrix.

How do you know if something's truly a fire versus just smoke? Look for these tells:

• Does it compound over time? (A delayed deployment gets exponentially riskier)

• Does it affect core business metrics? (Not just comfort metrics)

• Could it trigger cascade failures? (Think customer trust, team morale)

• Would it damage something hard to repair? (Like client relationships)

Look, I still catch myself reaching for the fire extinguisher when I spot smoke in the distance. Old habits die hard.

The next time you're staring at your endless task list, heart racing, remember: Your job isn't to maintain perfect order.

It's to keep the important things from burning down while building something great.