FIRE INSIGHT
Waiting is the safest decision there is.Chapter 13 · Heat
The Fire Path · for teams
Then there is usually no motivation problem and no culture problem. Then the fault isn’t in the execution but in the drawing.
We go and find that drawing, and then we redraw it.
The difference
Chapter 27 ends with the question this programme is about: you can do this alone, but how do you teach it to a team?
The answer isn’t more training days. Somebody can master the triangle perfectly and still get stuck, because the proposal process, the reporting or the meeting structure asks something of people that doesn’t add up. Then the training is a plaster over a design flaw.
A design flaw that fails completely gets found. One that half works stays for a hundred years.
Chapter 8 · The design flaw
That is exactly why these programmes exist. The process we go looking for half works. That is why it is still there.
The programme
I don’t sell a twelve-week programme before I know what is going on. That would be step three before step one, and this whole book is about order.
Individual conversations with six to ten people from the organisation. Not in a group, because in a group nobody says what they really think. Alongside that I sit in on real processes: proposals, conversations, meetings, reports.
At the end there is one document: which of the three is structurally missing, where the design flaw sits, and what the smallest step is.
It can stop here. If the diagnosis says this isn’t a design problem, you hear that from me and we go no further.
One session with the team and with whoever designed the process. Three questions: what assumption about people sits underneath it, who ever checked that, and what are we actually measuring?
This can get uncomfortable. That comes with it, and that is why their presence isn’t a detail but a condition.
Nobody is doing anything wrong. Everybody is doing exactly what the design asks.
The process gets rebuilt. The proposal route, the job advert, the reporting, the meeting structure — whatever the diagnosis pointed at.
At the same time the Fire Card becomes standard in the team. Fill in what you know before the conversation, add what was literally said during it, and afterwards look at what stayed empty.
Small steps. And we measure whether they explain anything, not whether they look good.
Someone from the team takes over the exercises and becomes the Firemaker. They run them, I sit in and say less and less.
The sessions become less frequent until they are no longer needed.
By the end of phase four I am redundant. That is the point, not a side effect.
Two versions
Both start with the same diagnosis. The difference is whether the team takes it over afterwards.
excl. VAT and travel · team up to 8 people
excl. VAT and travel · team up to 12 people
Or start with the diagnosis alone
Phase one can be taken on its own for € 2.500. Four weeks, one document, and then you decide. If you continue, that amount comes off the programme.
This is the smallest step from exercise five, applied to my own offer. I find it hard to explain why you would commit to six months before anybody has looked at what is going on.
Terms
Three things have to be in place. If one is missing, I would rather say so now than in month three.
Presence
Whoever designed the process is in the room. Otherwise we are talking about somebody who isn’t there, and that changes nothing.
Mandate
The team is genuinely allowed to change the process. Exposing a design flaw nobody may touch is cruel and otherwise useless.
A design, not a conflict
If the real problem is a conflict between two people, this programme cannot solve it. Then you need somebody else.
Also on its own
Not every situation calls for months. An offer that doesn’t land, a proposal that sits there, a change that doesn’t take — one day can be enough for that.
Individual days, no retainer, no agency around it.
The first step
No proposal, no presentation. The Fire Diagnosis is here, and at the end you know which of the three is missing in your team.
Sometimes the conclusion is that there is no hurry. That happens more often than you think, and then I simply say so.
Start with question 1 on the right
Not there yet
Describe in one sentence what isn’t moving and Henk works out which of the three is missing. It may turn out you don’t need a programme at all.
FIRE INSIGHT
Waiting is the safest decision there is.Chapter 13 · Heat