If you're solving the same problem every week, you don't have a task problem. You have a structure problem. It's one of the clearest patterns I've learned across four startups and a lot of advising rooms: recurring firefighting is almost never about the fire in front of you. The same issue keeps coming back because something in the system — how work flows, who owns what, how decisions get made — keeps producing it. You can put the fire out beautifully every single time, and it will still be there next Tuesday. W. Edwards Deming made this point decades ago, and it still holds. In Out of the Crisis, he estimated that about 94% of the problems in any operation belong to the system, not the people — only around 6% trace to a true one-off. Read that again: the overwhelming majority of what looks like individual failure is actually structural. So when the same thing breaks over and over, blaming the person doing the task is the most expensive mistake you can make. The fix is slower up front and far cheaper over time. Instead of solving the instance, you step back and ask what keeps generating it — then you change that. Redesign the handoff. Clarify the ownership. Remove the step that keeps failing. Do it once, at the structural level, and the symptom stops recurring instead of demanding your attention forever. Firefighting feels productive because it's visible and urgent. But a leader's real job isn't to be the best firefighter in the building. It's to build something that stops catching fire. What's the problem that keeps coming back no matter how many times you solve it — and what structure might be quietly producing it?