Chasing the Ember 

A wildland firefighter’s hardest work starts after the fire’s out. 

The flames are down, the trucks are packing up, and the crew’s exhausted. That’s when the veteran picks up a hand tool and walks back into the black. Not toward anything dramatic. Toward a thin curl of smoke rising off a stump, forty yards behind the line, where the fire’s supposedly already passed. 

To the rookie it looks like nothing. One ember in a field that’s already burned. But the veteran’s seen what one ember does when the wind picks up at dusk and the grass is dry. It throws a spark. The spark finds fresh fuel. By midnight there’s a second fire, and the second fire’s worse than the first, because this time nobody was watching for it. 

So the veteran walks toward the smoke. Every time. 

Here’s what’s strange about that instinct. The satisfying work is back at the houses still standing, the ones the crew saved by getting there in time. That’s where the handshakes are. The ember offers no handshake. It offers a faint smell and a bad feeling, and the discipline to deal with it now, while it’s still small enough to handle with a boot and a splash from the water bottle. 

Every account you work has embers. 

They’re not the people already standing with you. Those are the houses you saved, and it’s tempting to spend the whole day there, being appreciated. The ember’s quieter, and usually pricklier. It’s the person with real weight in the account who isn’t yet convinced, and often it’s the difficult one: the stakeholder who challenges you in the meeting, who pushes back, who’s built a reputation for being hard to deal with. So people steer around them. It feels easier to work with everyone else. 

That instinct is backwards, and here’s why. The person who’s willing to argue is usually the person who can actually move the organization. The same edge that makes them uncomfortable to sit across from is what enables them challenge the way things have always been done. They’re the mobilizer. When they decide something needs to change, they know how to make the organization pivot, and they’ve got a following that moves with them. Agreeable people rarely rise to that moment; when it’s time to challenge the status quo, conflict-averse stakeholders go quiet. 

So the difficult one isn’t just a risk to manage. Left alone, in a dry quarter with a little wind, they catch, and because they carry others with them, the fire they start is bigger than anything you were fighting. But reached early, that same force works for you. 

That’s the trade a real fire never offers, but an account does. When you walk toward that person while it’s still smoke, and you deal with what’s smoldering, they don’t just stop being a threat. Often they become the one standing beside you, watching the line and turning the organization your way, because you were the one who came when no one else did. The weight that was working against you starts working for you. They often become stronger advocates than your original advocates. 

Most of us never make that walk. The person’s prickly, the fire hasn’t started yet, and the handshakes and encouragement are elsewhere. That’s precisely how a small doubt becomes a lost account. 

So change what you measure. Stop counting your progress solely based on the encouraging handshakes. Start counting the smoke you chose to walk toward. And carry the one question a good firefighter never stops asking: 

Where’s the smoke? 

Don’t wait for the fire. Walk toward the ember and put it out.