If you're new here: this is It's Not Your Emergency, leadership writing for managers who'd rather triage than optimize. The introduction to the book is sitting in your inbox from when you signed up. Every other week I send one short essay like this one. Here's the first.
The first thing they teach you in EMT class isn't how to stop bleeding. It isn't CPR. It's two words you say out loud, every call, before you touch anyone.
Scene safe.
Before you reach the patient, you stop and read the situation. Is there traffic still moving? Downed wires? A dog, a fire, a second patient nobody mentioned? The instinct — the human instinct, the good instinct — is to run to the person on the ground. The training exists to override it. Because a responder who rushes in and becomes the second patient hasn't helped anyone. They've doubled the problem and removed the one person who was supposed to fix it.
You are no good to the patient from inside the wreck.
It took me fifteen years of leading teams to understand that this is a management principle, and I learned it backwards — by violating it, over and over, before I ever heard the words said aloud.
A launch is failing. A key person just quit. A VP is suddenly unsure about a direction he championed for two quarters. The instinct is to run in. To absorb the problem, match its urgency, start moving fast because moving fast feels like leadership. And like the rookie sprinting toward the patient, you don't notice that you've made yourself part of the emergency instead of the person managing it.
In the field there's a discipline for this. Before you touch the patient, you read the scene. I've built that read into a 5 letter acronym that the book unpacks in full. Here's the first letter.
B is for Background: what happened before you got here.
Every team you inherit has a history, and almost none of it is visible on your first day. The people who carry it won't volunteer it. So you go looking. What were the earlier attempts to fix this, and why didn't they land? What did the last leader do that the team is quietly relieved is over — and what do they miss more than they'll admit? What got promised that isn't written down anywhere?
This is the part new leaders skip, because it feels slow and the urge is to start driving change on day one. But the background is not gossip. It is scene data. You cannot safely approach what you don't understand, and you cannot understand a team without understanding what it has already survived.
Walking onto a scene without reading it first is how a responder becomes the second patient. Walking into a new team the same way is how a leader spends their first ninety days solving the wrong problem at full speed.
Scene safe. Then in.
David
P.S. What's your version of reading the scene before you act - the question you ask first, or wish you had? Hit reply. I read every one.