The email came in at ten at night. One line: "I know what's supposed to start tomorrow. We can't. I need to call you and speak to you urgently."

My heart was racing before I'd even called back. We'd been running this programme for four years, the next cohort was starting in the morning, and whatever this was, it was already too late to fix quietly.

It turned out to be circumstances beyond either of our control. We tried to resolve it fast, calls, lawyers going back and forth, every angle we could find, but none of it worked, and the programme was cancelled. That meant a team I was paying could no longer be paid, and the revenue that was meant to carry the organisation through the next stretch simply wasn't coming.

My instinct was immediate: fill the gap, find the next thing, anywhere I could, as fast as I could. On the surface, that's just sensible: it's what a responsible leader does when the money disappears.

I stopped and once I actually did, I saw what I'd missed while I'd been too busy trying to fix it. What had happened to us wasn't a one-off, unlucky contract, it was a signal that the landscape itself had shifted, quickly and everywhere, and every plan I had for filling that gap had been built for a market that no longer existed.

What I was navigating wasn't a structure fire. It was a wildfire, and wildfires don't answer to structure-fire tactics.

Structure fires behave in ways a trained firefighter can predict: contain it, attack it, control it. Wildfire doesn't work like that. Wind, terrain and fuel change a wildfire's behaviour in ways no structure training prepares you for, which is exactly why fire services run entirely separate training for it.

A structure-trained firefighter who walks into wildland terrain running structure instincts isn't undertrained. They're using the right skill on the wrong fire. Wildland doctrine doesn't say attack harder. It says stop, read the wind and the terrain, then decide, because until you've read the new terrain, moving fast is not the same as moving right.

That's what I'd been doing, fighting a wildfire with structure-fire instincts and calling it hard work.

This happens to you too, probably more often than you'd like to admit. The ground shifts, client behaviour changes overnight, AI changes what your team is even for, a stage of life starts that you've genuinely never lived through before, and your first move is always the tool that worked last time: doing more, adding more, fixing it faster. Most of the time nobody around you questions it, because doing looks like leadership and stopping looks like weakness.

This week, before you reach for your usual fix, stop and ask one question first. Have I actually fought this exact fire before, or am I just running the tactics that worked on the last one?

Three questions, in order:

1. Where in your life right now are you fighting harder instead of stopping to check if the terrain has changed?
2. What tool are you reaching for out of habit, not because it's actually built for the fire in front of you?
3. If you stopped for a week, properly stopped, what would you finally be able to see that the doing has been hiding from you?

See you next Monday.

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