The Fire Isn't the Problem. The Dry Forest Is.

Most teams fix what's on fire.

The best ones ask why it caught so easily.

Fires are dramatic. They demand urgency, draw attention, justify all-hands meetings.

But by the time you're reacting, the real problem already happened. Quietly.

High-performing teams don't just respond fast. They look upstream.

Not at the blaze, but at the fuel.

A few patterns I've learned to spot:

• A missed handoff that became a pattern
• A shadow process that kept growing
• A "temporary fix" still holding two quarters later
• An ownerless workflow that quietly became business critical

These aren't random glitches. They are dry brush. Low-grade friction that accumulates until it ignites.

Spotting it takes rhythm, not heroics.

Build review cycles that surface the silent strain:

• Where are we compensating with effort instead of solving with design?
• What would break if we doubled the volume tomorrow?
• What tasks keep reappearing in post-mortems?

Clearing dry brush isn't glamorous. But it's how systems stay healthy.

This is how real operators think.

They don't celebrate putting out fires.

They study how not to build a forest that burns.