Anusha Umair - 1704002010/17/15

FIRE FIGHTING

Usually, when people are working in teams, they came across a lot more issues than they have the time and resources to deal with. As individuals working in organization, we need to focus our resources and vigor to focus short term goals as well as long term goals and avoid firefighting as much as possible. Usually in firefighting, we allow a problem to grow until it becomes a crisis, and then we use our energy and resources to fix it. Fire fighting consumes an organization's resources and damages productivity. Teams put their problem-solving efforts for a quick-and-dirty patching. They are constantly juggling and deciding whether to allocate overworked people with more work and which activity should be compromised to handle the immediate crisis.

Fire fighting is one of the most serious problems facing many managers of complex, change-driven processes. There are several ways to remove fire fighting. They can be divided into three classes as shown below:

Tactical Strategic Clutural As new problems arose, look for

temporary assistance as short-term strategy

Shut down operations till all are solved. Allow new problem one at a time only when the previous ones are removed.

Perform triage i.e. admit that some problems will not be solved.

Strategic methods take more time to implement but they pay off across a range of projects and over long periods. Few ways are: Outsource some parts of design Solve classes of problems, not

individual problems. Use learning lines. Develop more problem solvers.

Requires changes in the mind-set of the whole organization as well as the behavior of senior managers.

Don’t tolerate patching. Be flexible about deadlines.

Measure development tasks by the number of remaining difficulties

Practice long-term prevention and systematic problem solving.

Curing the fire-fighting syndrome is not easy. A fire-fighting organization needs to transform itself into a problem-solving organization by recognizing that the self-perpetuating fire-fighting syndrome is a set of rules, behaviors and logical practices that must be avoided to build a problem-solving organization. The research suggests that it may be the absence of a vision and plan that cause an organization to be so reactive, and spend a lot of time fire-fighting rather than proactively meeting the needs of their customers. The management need to use standard work practices, create a corrective and preventive action process based on root cause analysis, conduct follow-ups to ensure effectiveness and share lessons from past opportunities so that they are not repeated. If one is able to get things right the first time, there's usually not much fire-fighting later.

Cheetah Team

A cheetah team is a small, elite unit, that is mobalized to solve problem quickly. These teams are always ad hoc in nature only initiated to solve a specific mission and dissolved as soon as that mission is done. The members are committed full-time, and they are fully sponsored by top management. Cheetah teams improves the overall efficiency solving critical problems at the right time in the right fashion. Fast and effective problem solving can save a project from disaster, avoiding costly delays, customer

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Anusha Umair - 1704002010/17/15

satisfaction problems, and dips in employee morale. But like its namesake—the fastest of all land animals over short distances—the cheetah team is most effective as a short-term strategy.

Cheetah teams can generate more difficulties when used extensively. Key technical experts or other critical resources allocated to cheetah teams become unreachable to the rest of the group, which can delay corresponding assignments.

The Hidden Traps in Decision Making:

Bad decisions can often be traced back to the way the decisions were made when less time was spend exploring alternatives, finding the right information and not weighing the costs and benefits against the resources available. But sometimes the fault lies not in the decision-making process but rather in the mind of the decision maker: The way the human brain works can sabotage the choices we make. In this article, following eight psychological traps are discussed:

1. The anchoring trap leads us to give disproportionate weight to the initial impressions or estimates and therefore it adds bias and make subsequent thoughts and judgments very shaky.

2. The status-quo trap biases us toward maintaining the current situation--even when better alternatives exist. Always identify other options and use them as counter balances carefully evaluating all the pluses and minuses.

3. The sunk-cost trap inclines us to make choices in a way that justifies past choices even when past selections are no longer valid.

4. The confirming-evidence trap leads us to seek out information supporting your existing point of view.

5. The framing trap occurs when we misstate a problem, undermining the entire decision-making process.

6. The estimating & forecasting trap makes us overrate the precision of our predictions.7. The prudence trap leads us to be overcautious when we make assessments about uncertain

events. 8. The recallability trap prompts us to give undue weight to recent, dramatic events.

The best way to avoid all the traps is awareness: forewarned is forearmed.

Your Managerial Intuition: How Much Should You Trust It? Can You Improve It?

Today's managers are ever more forced to make decisions at a pace that allows too little time for analysis, and managers are unsure how much importance to give their intuition in making important decisions. Intuition is defined as an inability to articulate the thought process that led to a decision. Intuition is a necessary tool for leaders to be successful. The reading discuss different facets related to relevance, importance, and reliability of using intuition in the decision-making process. Mastery of the field removing distractions and building expertise, keeping a journal or diary, and discussing options with an unbiased adviser or friend is the royal road to reliable flashes of intuition. “You ignore intuition at your peril and you follow it blindly at your peril”

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