We talk endlessly in business about firefighting.
The urgent issue.
The all-hands call.
The late-night messages and emergency decks.
Firefighting is celebrated. It’s heroic. It’s visible.
It’s also exhausting — and usually a sign that something failed earlier.
What we rarely talk about is what comes after.
Because beneath all the language about resilience and recovery sits a quieter fear:
If the fire happens… is everything lost?
I was reminded of this reading a short piece on Interesting Facts about the California “fire poppy” — a plant that appears only after wildfires. According to the article, its seeds can lie dormant in the soil for decades, waiting not for rain or sunlight, but for smoke. Only once a fire has burned through — clearing dominant growth and changing the chemistry of the ground — do the flowers bloom.
(Source: InterestingFacts.com – Fire poppy flower only grows in California after fires)
The plant is real: Papaver californicum.
Fire, for it, is not destruction. It’s the signal.
Business failure works in much the same way.
Most organisational “fires” don’t create weaknesses. They reveal them. Brittle operating models. Assumptions that went unchallenged. Systems propped up by habit rather than design. Cultures optimised for appearances instead of resilience.
When something finally breaks, the instinct is to contain the damage and move on quickly. Rebuild. Rebrand. Rewrite the story.
But fires also do something else: they clear space.
After a serious failure, organisations often have fewer illusions and sharper priorities. Long-protected sacred cows suddenly look optional. Conversations that were impossible before become unavoidable — and therefore possible.
Not everything survives a fire.
But not everything should.
The uncomfortable truth is this: failure doesn’t guarantee renewal. But it creates the conditions for it. Whether anything grows afterwards depends on what seeds were already in the ground.
So the question isn’t only how we prevent the next fire.
It’s what we’re prepared to grow once the smoke clears
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If you’ve experienced a professional or organisational “fire,” I’d love to hear what came after. What did it expose? What did it make possible? Share your reflections — or pass this on to someone who’s currently in the smoke.
#Leadership #BusinessFailure #Resilience
#TechnicalDebt #CrisisLeadership #GrowthAfterFailure #TheThirdHalf