Prize prevention. Although it is generally understood that crises cost more to deal with than to prevent them, many companies reward great firefighters instead of recognizing and rewarding those who prevented the fire in the first place. If you want to focus on prevention, be sure to reward those who get past the symptoms and get to the root causes, preventing future occurrences.

Part of the challenge is making sure you know when a problem is prevented, the rewards are earned, and the investment in prevention pays off. Here are some ideas that may help:

o Define the problems explicitly. If you are starting from a firefighting crisis situation, define the problem in such a way that a comprehensive solution should prevent future occurrences as well as address the immediate crisis. Recovering stability after a crisis is important but should not count as a solution to the problem.

o Include an impact statement in your problem definition. Indicate as precisely as possible how much the problem costs your company. This should include lost income, out-of-pocket expenses such as key staff time or travel, etc. Demonstrate in a measurable way the importance of the problem. Include not only the cost of a single incident (that’s the firefighting mode), but also the ongoing cost of the problem.

o Use measurable success criteria to define a complete solution. Doing this underscores the impact of the issue, but also gives everyone an objective way to determine when the issue is actually resolved. This, in turn, provides an opportunity to reward problem solvers.

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