At some point in their career, everyone has experienced firefighting - when a company, business unit, department or project team tries to solve too many problems in too little time. Working for a company where firefighting is an ingrained part of the culture can be disastrous to your career; firefighters who jump from one troubled area to another quickly become dissatisfied, rarely solve problems long term and eventually burn out.

As companies downsize and cut costs, problems escalate and the long-term planning that's needed to launch new products and procedures successfully frequently gets short-circuited, according to Roger Bohn, an associate professor at the University of California at San Diego and Director of UCSD's Information Storage Industry Center.

Bohn, who at one point in his career worked for McKinsey - a management consulting firm - has studied firefighting extensively and says it's impossible to completely prevent firefighting. Unexpected problems crop up routinely when a company starts employing a new technology such as a storage area network (SAN). If tightly controlled, firefighting can be a productive way to work through short-term problems. But Bohn emphasizes most managers haven't a clue as to how to contain firefighting or use it advantageously.

In a Harvard Business Review article, Bohn documents what everyone who has received a paycheck knows: "Problem solving is not a fully rational and 'scientific' process; nor is selecting what to solve."

According to Bohn, as an organization falls deeper and deeper into a firefighting mode of operation, the following usually happens:

• People are pulled off one problem to solve another problem;
• After considerable effort has been invested in a problem, the solution is no longer needed;
• People spend a lot of time managing the problem instead of solving it;
• It gets harder to keep track of what's going on. There are weekly meetings just to decide which fires are the most important; and Office politics become much more important. Managers take decisionmaking farther away from the engineers who know what's happening. And, writes Bohn, "Many organizations stick blindly to simplistic rules for problem-solving that, in fact, make firefighting worse: 'Always work on the most urgent problem,' and 'The urgency of the problem is proportional to the rank of the requestor.'"

These easy-to-fall-into traps obviously sap resources and take attention away from long-range activities that make the business better. Can firefighting be stopped?

According to Bohn, there are things an organization can do to reduce firefighting. First, cut the number of problems it attempts to solve. Next, don't reward firefighters and don't push to meet arbitrary deadlines at all costs. Finally, create a culture where employees will know that half-baked patches will come back to haunt them. "The most important thing companies can do to stop firefighting is to make top management aware of the harmful consequences," Bohn says.

When asked what kind of feedback he received from his HBR article, Bohn replied: "Most people told me I was right on, but they didn't expect things will change in their lifetime."