by Berend Booms, Associate Editor, Future of Assets
In moments of crisis, there is a particular kind of energy that emerges. It’s a kind of sharpness that cuts through the noise of everyday operations and replaces it with urgency. In asset-intensive environments, this is where some teams come alive: something fails or breaks down, production is impacted or halted, and suddenly everyone knows where to focus and what to do. The right people are mobilized, and when the issue is resolved, there is an overwhelming sense of accomplishment that is difficult to replicate in any other context. “Saving the day” as a maintenance engineer might make you feel like you are in control; in reality, this is often the moment where control is lost.
In asset management, firefighting is one of the most persistent and misunderstood patterns I see across organizations. It creates a perception of effectiveness because the work is highly visible and the outcome measurable: something breaks down, and something is fixed. But beneath that surface lies a sometimes uncomfortable truth: operating in a constant state of reacting to failure is not a sign of control or maturity, but a reflection of its absence. It is resource-intensive, highly disruptive to operations, inherently unstable, and ultimately unsustainable, despite the continuous stream of small, short-term victories along the way.
The way we respond when systems fail, and the tension between perceived and actual control that follows, is worth exploring. It reminded me of an event in which firefighting took place in its most literal form.
Reacting to Failure: Firefighting in Its Most Literal Form
When I was in university, I lived on campus in student housing. These were large blocks of dorms, filled entirely with students. The living situation this enabled was a mix of chaos and the general assumption that things would somehow work themselves out.
One night, I was woken up by one of my friends banging on my door. She had woken up and noticed there was smoke in our unit. Interestingly, there was no alarm going off, nothing telling us what to do but pure instinct and the kind of uncertainty that triggers your fight, flight or freeze response.
It was wintertime, so thankfully I had the clarity of mind to throw on my dressing gown or “freeze” might have taken on a very literal meaning. As more people gathered outside, it became clear that the unit next to ours had caught fire. As with most fires under these circumstances, what had started as something small and insignificant had escalated into something far more serious.
I only found out about the circumstances leading up to this event later. The unit next door had a party the night before, and some people had been smoking shisha. As the party faded out and people headed off to bed, one of the shisha coals had fallen onto their couch. We had some really cheap furniture in student housing, which I am sure wasn’t fireproof. The coal started a slow, smoldering burn that went unnoticed until the couch eventually caught fire.
While all of this happened almost twenty years ago, a few moments of that night have stayed with me since. Interestingly, not a single fire alarm went off in our unit. Technically, there was only smoke, but that sort of distinction did nothing to comfort us at the time. The early warning system specifically designed to create time and space for a controlled response had failed entirely.
I was also very unprepared for the proceedings of that evening, as were my friends. In the absence of structure, people reacted instinctively. While the flames were growing in the unit next door, it became clear that not everyone had made it out yet. One of our next-door neighbors was still inside, disoriented by the smoke and flames. I cannot imagine what it must’ve been like for him to wake up in the middle of chaos. When he was seen stumbling around in the downstairs area, two of my friends were trying to get his attention by banging on the glass of the porch door, trying to guide him out. A fire marshal shouted at them to step away, and less than a minute later, the glass shattered. What felt like the right thing to do in the moment was actually adding more risk to an already dangerous situation. Eventually, the guy managed to cover his face with a wet towel and crawl toward the door and into safety.
At the same time, we figured out that one of my best friends had not come outside with us, and was still inside our unit. When we had woken him up, he assumed we were trying to mess with him and went back to sleep. It took a considerable amount of time before we realized he was still inside.
The Smoldering Coal and the Missed Signal
We all got out unscathed, but there was nothing controlled about what had happened. It was a sequence of reactions, each shaped by limited information and rising pressure. What I keep thinking about most is not the fire itself, but the events that had led up to it. The coal that fell onto the couch did not cause immediate danger; it started this slow, almost invisible shift from stability to risk. There was a window of opportunity where intervention would have been simple and effective, but that window passed unnoticed.
In asset management, we encounter these “smoldering coals” more often than we might like to admit. These could be small deviations in an asset’s performance or minor anomalies in the readings it produces, all early signals that something is beginning to change. The challenge is almost never the signals themselves; most organizations are surrounded by information. Sensors transmitting information, inspections capturing information actively, historical records serving as a baseline, and performance metrics to establish the range of acceptable output are all commonplace. The real challenge lies in interpreting the data: recognizing which signals matter, understanding what they represent, knowing what to do in case of an “emergency”, and having the discipline to act before urgency forces your hand.
When these signals are misinterpreted or misunderstood, the progression is almost inevitable. What begins as an early warning evolves into a failure, and that failure pulls the organization into reactive firefighting mode. At that point, the conversation shifts from prevention to recovery.
Why Firefighting Feels Like Control
One of the reasons firefighting is so persistent is because it delivers something that more structured approaches often struggle to provide: immediate feedback. A problem is found, you intervene, you fix the problem, and you see the result. That direct line between action and outcome creates a powerful sense of effectiveness.
On top of that, it makes the role of maintenance highly visible. When production stops and throughput is under pressure, maintenance is looked at to save the day and restore operations. These heroics are easy to recognize and will often be celebrated internally; it is, however, a form of visibility that can be highly deceptive.
Reactive environments often create an illusion of control because they make the role of maintenance highly tangible. Once something breaks down, the only way forward is fixing it, and action might seem almost immediate. The problem is that responsiveness is not the same as predictability, and it does not create the conditions for long-term progress.
Left unattended, this dynamic will start to shape behavior. If you are not careful, urgency can start to outweigh importance. Planned work is deferred because there is always something more immediate to address; preventive work starts to feel optional, while reactive work becomes unavoidable. You are constantly moving, but rarely moving forward.
From Reaction to Design
Looking back at that night in student housing, it is clear to me that control is not something you establish in the middle of a crisis; it is something you build long before a crisis can happen. The difference is time: having more of it allows for better decision-making. I find this principle also applies to asset management.
Reactive maintenance will always have a role in asset management, so moving away from firefighting does not mean you will never have to experience sudden failure ever again; that is neither realistic nor really necessary. What it does mean is that we require a shift in how we approach sudden failure: how do we move beyond reacting to events, to designing conditions in which those events become less frequent, less severe and more manageable.
This is where maturity in asset management begins to take shape. It is not in the tools we deploy, but in the consistency of how we apply them; in the governance of our processes; in the quality of our data; in the clarity of our decision-making frameworks. Without those foundations, even the most advanced technologies will struggle to deliver meaningful progress. When discussing “breaking out of firefighting mode”, I am of the opinion that this doesn’t mean doing away with reactive maintenance; instead, it requires adopting a different mindset. You need to start thinking about how you invest in what does not feel urgent, but is fundamentally important; how you focus on signals rather than symptoms; how you recognize that the absence of crises is not a lack of activity or visibility, but a sign that your system is working as intended.
What has stayed with me from the fire that took place in our next-door unit is not the fire itself, but the realization of how quickly situations can escalate when early signals are missed and there is no system in place to provide structure. Firefighting will always have its place. There will always be moments where things go wrong, where intervention is required, and where teams need to step in and respond; however, it should never be the foundation of how we operate. Because if it is, we are not managing our assets in any meaningful sense; we are simply reacting to them.