The Firefighting Tax: Why Reactive Teams Struggle to Scale

We’ve all experienced a day that starts with a plan, a good plan. And maybe a to do list you’re excited to tackle.

Then you settle in and the first message comes in where a customer needs an answer. Someone shoots you a text who is waiting on a decision. A morning meeting creates three new actions. A diector sends an email that adds another priority that needs attention before the end of the day. None of those requests appears unreasonable on its own, so the team adjusts and keeps moving.

By afternoon, the original plan barely gets touched and the workday doesn’t end up anything like the original plan. Really, you can’t recall what you actually finished. You just moved from one thing to the other.

I have worked in environments where changing conditions are part of the job. Good operational teams have to respond and they cannot ignore a developing problem simply because it was not on the morning schedule. What concerns me is the point where responsiveness stops being something the team does when conditions require it and becomes the normal way the operation runs.

There is a cost to that pattern. I think of it as the firefighting tax.

The tax shows up in unfinished work, repeated calls back to people, changing priorities, and delayed decisions because I couldn’t focus on one thing start to finish. What really costed me most was the mental effort required to constantly reorient. People can be working hard all day while the amount of completed work tells a very different story.

Microsoft’s 2025 workplace research gives us a sense of how fragmented modern work has become. In its measured population, employees were interrupted by meetings, email, or messages roughly every two minutes during core working hours. In Microsoft’s global workforce survey, 48 percent of employees described their work as chaotic and fragmented. (Microsoft)

Lokalise found a similar signal in its 2025 survey of knowledge workers. Twenty two percent estimated losing at least two hours each week to tool fatigue, while 56 percent said alerts, switching, and redundant platforms negatively affected their work. (Lokalise)

Those numbers suggest that a lot of organizations may be paying for coordination in ways they do not measure.

Too much work can hide behind busyness.

One of the first things I would want to understand on a reactive team is how much work has actually been started.

Starting feels productive and feels good. Besides, we all heard taking the first step is the hardest. Then all the tasks get assigned, someone takes ownership, and items begin moving. The problem develops when work enters faster than it finishes. Every new request becomes another open loop that someone has to remember, track, coordinate, and eventually return to.

Sophie Leroy’s research on attention residue helps explain part of the cost. Her experiments found that people can have difficulty fully shifting their attention away from unfinished work, which can reduce performance on the task that follows. (ScienceDirect)

That finding resembles what I have seen under operational pressure. A person may be physically working on the next task while part of their attention remains with the issue they just left. Multiply that across a team, across several days, and the work begins carrying a lot of mental inventory.

By Thursday, the team may have fourteen top priorities. At that point, priority has become more of a motivational adjective that people just laugh at.

So what can help? Sometimes the team needs to get the work out in the open doing a 30-day operating reset. That starts by getting that work visible. Leaders need a shared picture of what is active, what is waiting, what is blocked, and what new demand continues to arrive. The exact tool matters less than the discipline of using it consistently. I have seen enough technology implementations to know that a whiteboard people trust can outperform an expensive platform everyone avoids.

Finishing requires a tradeoff

Visibility creates a useful pressure because it becomes harder to add work without acknowledging what the team already carries.

The next discipline is deciding how much can reasonably remain active at one time. When an urgent request enters, someone has to decide what happens to the work already underway. If nothing ever moves out, the team is not prioritizing, they are just accumulating work and something is going to drop.

That decision belongs with leadership.

Without clear tradeoffs, employees are forced to make those decisions individually. They begin guessing which deadline is flexible, whose request can wait, or which supposedly critical task is safest to ignore for a few hours. The organization still makes a priority decision, but it makes it at the lowest possible level.

I use RISE when I think through this kind of problem. Radiate asks whether the team can see what it is trying to accomplish and what deserves attention. Innovate pushes us to examine how work is actually flowing and whether people have enough space to finish. Serve looks at what in the surrounding system creates friction or helps remove it. Endure asks whether the new way of operating holds and whether the evidence begins to change.

The framework gives leaders a way to examine the system. It does not make the tradeoffs for them.

Rhythm gives the work somewhere to go

Visibility and focus will not survive for long if the team has no predictable way to make decisions, coordinate work, and deal with changing conditions.

Research across 1,885 teams found a moderate positive relationship between team planning and team performance, although the authors also found that context influences the relationship. (PLOS) That seems reasonable. Planning works when it helps a team coordinate action. It becomes less useful when the planning process creates more work than it organizes.

A healthy operating rhythm gives routine decisions a place to go. The team knows when priorities will be reviewed, where blockers will be raised, and when completed work will be examined. The purpose is to reduce the number of issues that need to arrive as interruptions because there is no other reliable way to handle them.

This requires restraint and a team already drowning in coordination probably does not need eight new recurring meetings. If the solution to meeting overload requires another calendar color, we may have misunderstood the assignment.

Over several weeks, the rhythm also begins revealing patterns. The same work may repeatedly wait for one decision maker. A certain request may constantly arrive without warning. One process may generate the same rework every week. Individual fires begin to reveal where the matches are coming from.

Sometimes the workload simply does not fit

A 30 day reset can expose another possibility that leaders may not enjoy confronting: the team might already be carrying more demand than its available capacity can support.

Better focus can reduce waste. Clearer priorities can improve decisions. A predictable rhythm can reduce unnecessary coordination. None of those practices creates unlimited capacity.

If a team can reasonably deliver 50 units of work and the organization continues sending 80, a better operating system will eventually make the missing 30 impossible to ignore. That is valuable because an invisible capacity problem often gets mislabeled as a productivity problem. The team gets told to move faster when the more important conversation concerns what should stop, what should wait, what process should change, or what additional capacity the work requires.

What is a more scary answer I hear is when managers don’t know how much work their people can handle.

After 30 days, I would not expect a reactive team to become immune to surprises. I would want the leader to have something more useful: a clear view of what the team is carrying, what matters most, where work repeatedly stalls, how often unplanned demand enters, and whether the expectations placed on the team are realistic.

Firefighting will always have a place in operations. The danger appears when fighting fires becomes so normal that nobody has time to examine why the same areas keep catching fire.

A disciplined operating reset creates enough visibility to start that conversation.