The Good Consultant · Chapter · Early draft
Fire Seeking
Story
A team I once worked with had just delivered eighteen months of visible, celebrated progress. New features shipped every sprint. The roadmap was on track. The board was pleased.
Six weeks after my engagement ended, the platform failed in a way that took the company three months to recover from.
Nobody had lied about the roadmap. Nobody had hidden the failure. It simply hadn't been looked for. The team was so busy delivering what was asked of them that no one was asking what wasn't being asked.
Observation
Healthy-looking delivery can hide a great deal. A stable roadmap and a busy team are not evidence that the right things are being watched. They're often evidence that everyone has quietly agreed, without saying so, on what not to look at.
The most dangerous risks are rarely hidden. They're just unclaimed — everyone assumes someone else is watching them.
Principle
Good technical leaders do not wait for problems to surface. They go looking for the ones that haven't yet — the recurring workaround nobody has escalated, the dependency nobody owns, the metric everyone has quietly stopped trusting.
Call it fire seeking: the deliberate, uncomfortable habit of looking for trouble before it looks for you.
Approach
In practice, this means asking different questions than the status report invites.
- Not "what's on track?" but "what have we stopped mentioning?"
- Not "who owns this?" but "who would we call at 2am if it broke?"
- Not "is the team busy?" but "is the team busy with the right things?"
None of these questions are complicated. They are simply not the ones a healthy-looking report prompts you to ask.
Reflection
Fire seeking isn't about being the hero who finds the problem. It's about making sure problems get found by someone, on purpose, before the organisation finds out about them the hard way.
The best version of this isn't a single perceptive leader — it's a team that has learned to ask these questions of itself, without needing someone from outside to bring the uncomfortable question into the room.