Are You a Leader or a Firefighter? 5 Signs Your Organisation is Stuck in a Reactive Loop.

You’ve just had the chance to sip your morning coffee, but before it can even take effect and wipe away the fatigue that still lingers from yesterday, you’re hit with multiple “urgent” requests, and there goes your morning, dousing three different fires…again. Sound familiar?

We know it does, our Founder, Nina, has multiple coffee chats a week, and these for-purpose leaders tend to have some common threads, one being that they feel stuck in the day-to-day, firefighting unforeseen problems that simply crop up. This can be exhausting, especially if it becomes a nagging trend. These scenarios often pull you out of the work that drives your purpose and vision forward, and instead keep you in the now, or sometimes take two or three steps backwards. It’s not a nice feeling; we can a hundred percent put our hands on our hearts and share that we’ve been there, and some weeks are harder than others, but where some may feel this is a sign of incompetence, we understand it for what it really is: a broken system at play.

In this blog, you will be able to identify if you and your organisation are caught in a reactive loop. More importantly, it will show you that this is a systemic problem, not a personal one, and that there is a structured way to break free and get back to driving the outcomes that will scale your impact.

The Five Telltale Signs of a Firefighting Culture

Sign 1: The “Fix” Never Seems To Stick

You’re being pulled into the same meetings, attempting to solve the same or very similar problems. It feels like the conversations that you are having with the rest of the leadership team are just that, conversations, and when there is action behind it, this fix doesn’t seem to solve the issue at hand. This is a classic indicator that you're only addressing a symptom rather than the root cause.  

Sign 2: Urgency is the main nature of your work

Your to-do list is driven by what's loudest, not what's most important. Long-term strategic work is constantly pushed aside for immediate demands. This creates a culture where urgency consistently overtakes importance. If we stop and reflect on what it really means for our service delivery long term, the more we rush to act, the more likely the work will be of a poorer quality. We do our best work when we have space to do what we call deep thinking.   

Sign 3: Your Team Is Reactive, Not Proactive

Your team waits for problems to occur before acting. There's little time or mental space for planning, innovation, or anticipating future challenges because everyone is consumed by the present crisis. So we continue to loop, instead of breaking the cycle, feeling like we cannot get on top of the issue.

Sign 4: Solutions Create New Problems

You implement a quick fix in one area, only for an unexpected problem to pop up somewhere else. This happens when we have blinders on to everything else and can't see the interconnectedness of the system. As for the reason that this occurs, read Sign 5.  

Sign 5: You're Constantly Zoomed In

Your focus is perpetually on individual things rather than stepping back and actually thinking about what the bigger issue is. Your perspective is tactical and narrow, not strategic and broad. If we act on one area, how does it affect everything else? This is one of many questions we should be asking ourselves, because what affects your team probably has some ramifications on other teams. So how do we zoom out? How do we see past what’s right in front of us, demanding our attention? Continue reading to learn how to break the cycle.

It's Not You, It's the System

If you found yourself nodding along to the signs above, you might be feeling a mix of frustration and exhaustion. We get it. But here’s the most important thing to understand: this constant firefighting isn’t a reflection of your leadership or your team's ability. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. You're caught in a system that is perfectly designed to produce the exact results it's getting, which in this case is creating more fires.

In the world of systems thinking, there's a name for this common trap: the "Fixes That Fail" archetype. It describes how a seemingly effective short-term solution creates unintended long-term consequences that, ironically, make the original problem even worse. The first step to escaping this trap is to actually see it. Once you acknowledge it, you can then begin to understand it. At Three6, we use our Causal Loop Tool to visually map these hidden dynamics.

Here’s a simplified version of what that looks like:

Path 1: The Quick Fix (The Balancing Loop)
This is the cycle you see and feel every day. It provides temporary relief.

Path 2: The Unintended Consequence (The Reinforcing Loop)
This is the hidden cycle that makes the problem worse over time.

Let's break that down. The top loop is the one you live in. A problem appears (the symptom), pressure builds, and you apply a quick fix, which makes the symptom go away. For a little while, it feels like success. But hidden underneath is the second loop. That same quick fix creates an unintended consequence, and perhaps your team burns out from constant urgent tasks, or quality dips because you skipped proper planning. This consequence slowly makes the original root problem worse, which in turn creates even more problem symptoms. The cycle begins again.

As you can see, the very action you take to solve the problem in the short term is what fuels the fire in the long term. This is why you feel like you're running at speed and not getting anywhere; you're putting in all the effort, but the system's design keeps you stuck in the same place.

Breaking the Cycle

We wish it were as easy as drawing this Causal Loop and the problem vanishes; however, with anything worthwhile, it takes space and clarity to design a solution that works for all of the moving elements of your organisation. This requires you to adopt a system lens. The goal is to move from fixing individual components to understanding the whole picture of your organisation. This way, you can pinpoint where things need to shift, and once shifted, what it affects on an ongoing basis. This is how leaders become proactive with their approach, rather than what we see in the Causal Loop in the above; reactivity leads to quick fixes that, in turn, create more of the same problem.

So, how do we do this? We first shift from asking the question, “How do I fix this?” to instead focusing on asking, “Why is this happening, and how does it fit into our overall system?” This shift from a reactive to a strategic mindset doesn't happen by accident. It requires a disciplined process of 'stepping back.' This is why we developed the Impact Navigator. 

Where the Causal Loop magnifies the trap you’re in, the Impact Navigator is the map that highlights the way out, and to put time into scaling your impact. Our Impact Navigator is a structured framework that encourages you to adopt a holistic view of your organisation. It guides leaders to analyse their entire system from purpose, strategy, service delivery, culture and risk. This gives leaders and us a better understanding of what’s really happening inside the organisation and gives you the next steps to design a solution that works for your needs.

Your First Step Towards Proactive Leadership

The constant pull of the "urgent" over the "important" is exhausting. But if there’s one thing to take away from all of this, let it be that this is a clear sign of a systemic issue, not a personal failure. You’re not trapped because of a lack of effort; you're trapped by a reactive loop that is perfectly designed to keep you there. Escaping this cycle, as we've seen, is entirely possible. It doesn’t require longer hours or more frantic work. It requires a new way of seeing and thinking about the problems you face. It means consciously choosing to zoom out from the immediate flames to see the whole system that allows fires to start in the first place.

That decision is your first real step. It's the choice to trade doing things the way you have always done and instead give yourself permission to move from asking "How do we fix this now?" to "Why does this keep happening, and what needs to shift?".

It’s time to stop running at speed just to stay in the same place. Reclaim your time, refocus on your vision, and lead your organisation back to driving the outcomes that will scale your impact by downloading the Causal Loop and Impact Navigator tools.