You’re everywhere.
Board calls. Incident reports. Stand-ups. Hiring meetings.
You clear blockers. You approve budgets. You answer every “quick question” before it derails someone else’s day.
It feels like if you take your eyes off the team for a day, everything will catch fire. So you stay in the burning building.
But the truth is, you don’t have a people problem.
You have a priority protection problem.
And here’s the cost: If you keep living in firefighting mode, you’ll never have the space to design the systems that prevent fires in the first place.
Your best engineers will burn out.
You’ll become the bottleneck everyone tiptoes around.
And your influence at the exec table will quietly shrink.
1. Firefighting feels productive
It’s addictive. Every time you jump in, you get a hit of progress. You’ve “fixed” something.
But firefighting doesn’t scale. It trains your team to bring you flames instead of fireproofing their own work.
One CTO I coached was spending 60% of his week in unplanned problem-solving. He thought he was keeping things moving. In reality, he was slowing them down.
Urgency gets the glory. Strategy pays the bills.
2. You can’t scale urgency
If every decision routes through you, you’re not leading. You’re bottlenecking.
The most effective CTOs I’ve worked with deliberately make themselves less available for low-stakes calls.
It forces the team to solve more problems without them — and it frees their own time for high-leverage work.
3. Strategy time isn’t optional
If your calendar has no space to think, you’re managing tasks, not building the future.
Block time. Guard it like you guard production systems.
Use it to ask better questions:
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What’s changed in the market?
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Which risks are worth taking now?
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What’s the one thing we need to stop doing?
4. The exit plan:
Before you grab the hose, ask:
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Will this matter in 90 days?
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Am I uniquely required?
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If I say no, what actually happens?
You’ll be surprised how many “emergencies” solve themselves.
👉🏼 What’s one “fire” you’ll ignore this week so you can work on something that actually moves the business forward?
Talk soon,
Adam.
Community Updates:
Podcast
This week on The CTO Playbook, I talk with Corey Hart — from cruise ships to call centres to the heart of New York’s asylum crisis. He shares how saying yes in moments of chaos shaped his approach to leading under pressure. It’s a wild story of trust, speed and figuring it out as you go.
🎧 Tune in on your favourite podcast platform or listen on the podcast page.
CTO Basecamp
Join me for a free 1-hour live session! Learn more about the 5 habits of high-impact CTOs and bring your current leadership challenge during the 30-minute Q&A. Sign up here.
CTO Ascent
If you’re ready to work through these shifts 1:1, let’s talk about my coaching programme for leaders in technology who want to escape firefighting and lead strategically. Book your call with me here.
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