## Atomic Insight Will Larson inverts the obvious read of a team stuck firefighting: "You rarely get to this place by failing, rather it's almost always a sign that you're succeeding faster than you can sustain." Fire fixation isn't evidence of a bad team. It's what a good team's success looks like once growth outpaces the systems built to absorb it, which is exactly why it's dangerous: nothing about the symptom signals "something is wrong" the way a failure would. Larson illustrates with early Stripe: a small team accomplished a tremendous amount by moving so rapidly between projects that they left an "afterimage" behind them, appearing to be everywhere simultaneously. "As long as you don't ask what the team was working on at a given moment, they truly are doing everything. But if you do ask, then suddenly they're frozen into a single task, surrounded by a sea of unstaffed projects." The very velocity that produced the success is what later reads as the fire-fixation pattern; the common advice to "do things that don't scale" until product-market fit is exactly what sets this up, since the aftermath is often a strong case of it. **Cross-Domain Connections**: [[The Firefighting Reward Loop Outcompetes Durable Engineering Work]], [[WIP Limits Only Work Before Existential Fires Outnumber Your Team]] ## Source - [[Fire Fixation]] — Will Larson, *Irrational Exuberance*, 2019-03-23 — https://lethain.com/fire-fixation/