"How to Properly 'Put Out Fires'"

This article is Lu Canwei's 80th original piece.

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After thinking for a long time, I still want to discuss how to solve scarcity in organizations.

Imagine a hospital with 32 operating rooms that performs over 30,000 surgeries each year. The utilization rate of the operating rooms reaches 100%, and the probability of emergency surgeries during scheduled operations is about 20%. Because the number of surgeries far exceeds the capacity of the operating rooms, doctors often have to perform surgeries at 2 AM, and they frequently wait several hours for a two-hour surgery, with staff often working overtime without preparation.

Employees suffer from sleep deprivation and strict work regulations, leading to further declines in work efficiency. In this situation, rescheduling surgeries would exacerbate the scarcity issue, as the hospital would waste some of its limited resources on rescheduling surgeries.

It seems that the only option left to solve this problem is to increase the number of operating rooms...

At this point, the hospital's management consulted scientists, who proposed leaving one operating room on standby. When the doctors heard this proposal, they thought the scientists were crazy.

If you imagine this situation as a poor person in debt, it reflects a lack of spare capacity to deal with emergencies, which is akin to having extra money. In the above case, it is the operating room resources. The hospital is always busy because they spend most of their time repaying debts, filling all the operating rooms. Once an emergency surgery arises, it creates a debt that compounds, ultimately exhausting everyone.

After the hospital adopted this approach, the surgery acceptance rate immediately increased by 5.1%, and the number of surgeries after 3 PM decreased by 45%.

This situation is also known as the firefighting trap. The firefighting trap has several common characteristics:

First, there are too many problems in the organization, and time is insufficient.

Second, the organization addresses urgent issues, while non-urgent matters, regardless of their importance, are postponed.

Third, this behavior leads to a cascading effect, causing the workload to become increasingly larger.

In simple terms, it is a continuous cycle of firefighting, with new fires constantly emerging because no one has time to prevent them.

When a project falls behind schedule, the immediate response is to assign more people to solve the problem. If time is tight, then everyone works overtime to catch up. This seems to be the simplest approach when resources are limited.

However, this creates another type of bandwidth scarcity, completely ignoring the negative impact of bandwidth strain. Originally, we could produce high-quality outputs, but working overtime leads to poor quality, resulting in more time spent on repairs, and ultimately, it may become irreparable, necessitating a complete restart.

When we feel that we don't have enough time each day, we choose to sleep less, which leads to a decline in productivity. The truly effective approach is to maximize bandwidth by allowing for downtime. When a person is burdened with bandwidth, they make a series of poor decisions, leading to more severe scarcity, which in turn increases the burden on others' bandwidth.

Speaking of firefighting, I looked up how to extinguish forest fires online:

It can be seen that if we engage in firefighting behavior at work, the first step is to prioritize, handling core services well before addressing non-core services. Then, control the spread of issues, prepare contingency plans in areas of spread, concentrate resources on core services, and appropriately sacrifice some local services to minimize the impact on users.

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