Day 25 in MIT Sloan Fellows Class 2023, Organizational Processes -1 firefighting
Firefighter syndrome
You can find the article about Firefighting in Product Development
https://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/TippingV2_0-sub_doc.pdf
This syndrome has several critical disadvantages.
It destroys your "normal" processes and decision-making. Also, it consumes ridiculous amount of resources because everyone is in light panic. Worstly, it easily affects other projects and is contagious to other organizations.
Mechanism
This feedback structure describes how one delay affects both future products and current products. And successful firefighters ( remarkable engineers etc) would resolve this problem. However, if it becomes successful, it consequences more problematic.
Tipping point is quite sensitively balanced and if you put more weight on either side by 20%, it easily goes to emergency period.
Also, increasing the workload by over 25% would worsen the situation.
Solutions
The solution is simple.
- Don't increase the workload.
- Stop some inefficient projects.
- Don't increase the number of projects.
- Don't award firefighters.
Three lenses for organizational problems
- Strategic design
- Political system
- Cultural system
The professor introduced three dimensions to classify the problem of firefighting and why people are hesitant to change themselves.
I will these points in the later blog posts.
