How many organizations (or individuals) spend a disproportionate amount of time in “putting out fires” of one sort or another? They always seem to be fighting off some looming disaster from a dauntingly difficult task with insufficient resources (time, money, information) and with dire consequences for failure. A frequent byproduct of continuous fire-fighting is the “tyranny of the urgent”: a near-panic-driven focus on addressing the near term — often with counterproductive consequences in the long term. [more]