Sarah is staring at a red cell on a spreadsheet that shouldn’t be red. It is 8:54 AM, and the air in her office already feels recycled, heavy with the phantom scent of ozone and desperation. Her phone vibrates-a rhythmic, demanding pulse against the mahogany veneer. It is a client, one of the big 44, and they are not calling to offer a compliment. They are calling because a technician didn’t show up, or because a part is missing, or because the world is simply tilted three degrees to the left and they need someone to scream at. Sarah picks up. She performs the ritual of de-escalation. She is good at this. In fact, she is the best. She spends the next 114 minutes hunting down a rogue van that, as it turns out, was parked behind a warehouse because the GPS sync failed at 6:14 AM. By the time she hangs up, her coffee is a cold, oily disk and her actual job-the strategic expansion of the regional corridor-hasn’t been touched.

I realized this recently in a very small, physical way. I had a splinter under my fingernail for 24 hours. It wasn’t a catastrophe, but it dictated every movement of my hand. I couldn’t type properly; I couldn’t grip a mug without a wince. My entire world narrowed down to that tiny, invasive sliver of wood. When I finally pulled it out-a clean, sharp extraction-the relief wasn’t just physical. It was cognitive. Suddenly, the horizon opened up again. Most managers are walking around with 14 splinters in their thumbs, wondering why they can’t seem to paint a masterpiece. They think the pain is part of the art. It isn’t. It’s just a splinter.

The Wildlife Planner Paradox

Take the work of Bailey D.-S., a wildlife corridor planner I met while researching the impact of fragmented ecosystems. Bailey doesn’t deal with spreadsheets; she deals with apex predators and the 444 miles of highway that stand between them and a viable mating ground. Her job is the definition of ‘Important but Not Urgent.’ If she doesn’t map the culverts today, the cougars won’t go extinct by Tuesday. But if she spends all her time dealing with the ‘Urgent’-the broken fence at the trailhead, the angry phone call from a local rancher about a missing calf, the 14 emails about the departmental holiday party-the species will eventually vanish.

Bailey once told me about a season where she spent 84 percent of her time in what she called ‘The Reactive Loop.’ A sensor would go down, and she’d drive four hours to reset it. A gate would jam, and she’d spend the afternoon with a crowbar. She felt like a hero because she was ‘in the weeds.’ But at the end of the year, she looked at her maps and realized she hadn’t moved the needle a single inch on the actual corridor. She was just a very expensive, very overqualified repairman. The system was broken, and because she was so good at fixing the symptoms, nobody felt the need to cure the disease.

This is the paradox of the high-performer. If you are too good at manual workarounds, you become the obstacle to systemic improvement. If Sarah is a wizard at pacifying angry customers, the company will never fix the scheduling software that angers the customers in the first place. Why spend $44,000 on a new system when Sarah can just work an extra 14 hours a week for ‘free’? We treat human resilience as a substitute for operational integrity. It is a theft of time, and it is a theft of the future.

The Highway Analogy

When we talk about information flow, we usually talk about it in the abstract, like it’s some kind of digital river. But in reality, it’s much more like the wildlife bridges Bailey D.-S. builds. If the information doesn’t have a clear, automated path to get from the field to the office, it will try to cross the highway. It will get hit by a truck. And then someone like Sarah has to go out and scrape the remains off the asphalt.

We need to stop asking our employees to be heroes. Heroism is a failure of planning. A truly great organization should be, in many ways, boring. It should be a place where things happen as they were intended to happen, where the ‘urgent’ is a rare anomaly rather than a Tuesday morning. This requires a brutal reassessment of what we value. Do we value the person who stayed late to fix the reporting error, or do we value the person who built the automation that ensured the error could never occur? Usually, it’s the former, because the former is visible. The latter looks like they’re just sitting there, staring out the window at the 24 trees lining the parking lot.

The Staring, Building Genius

I’ve been guilty of this. I once spent 54 consecutive hours rebuilding a database because I’d ignored a warning light for three months. I felt like a titan when I finished. I wanted a parade. I wanted people to tell me how dedicated I was. It took a very blunt mentor to point out that I wasn’t a titan; I was a janitor who had let the trash pile up until it caught fire. I had traded 54 hours of my life for a problem I had personally manufactured through neglect. It was a humiliating realization, but it was the most important lesson of my career.

In Bailey’s world, the corridors are finally starting to connect. She stopped fixing the fences herself. She hired a local contractor for the ‘Urgent’ and spent her 204 days of annual funding on high-level data integration. She can now predict where a cougar will be before the cougar even knows it’s hungry. The ‘fires’ have been reduced to embers. The system handles the noise, and she handles the vision.

The Predictable Crisis

If you find yourself at 5:04 PM realizing you haven’t done a single thing on your to-do list, don’t buy a new planner. Don’t drink more caffeine. Don’t resolve to ‘work harder.’ Instead, look at the fires you put out today. Trace them back to their source. You will almost always find a lack of clarity, a manual process that should be digital, or a piece of information that got stuck in a silo.

Building the Machine That Lasts

We pretend that business is a series of unpredictable crises, but that’s a lie we tell ourselves to feel important. Most crises are entirely predictable. They are the 114th iteration of the same mistake. They are the result of choosing the easy, urgent task over the difficult, important work of building a better machine. We have to stop being proud of how much smoke we can inhale.

What would happen if your office went a week without a crisis? Would you feel successful, or would you feel redundant? That is the question that haunts the reactive manager. If the fires stop, who am I? You are the person who is finally free to build something that lasts. You are the person who can finally look at the 44-year plan instead of the 44-minute disaster. You are the person who can finally breathe.

The splinter is gone now. My finger feels strange-light, almost too sensitive. But I can type. I can create. I can think about something other than the sharp, nagging pull of a tiny piece of wood. It’s time to stop romanticizing the pain. It’s time to put out the matches and start building something that doesn’t need to be saved.