There are those who love the panic associated with the Crisis. They love the motivating threat of imminent disaster. This is especially true for managers because a Crisis gives them super powers. When it hits the fan, the team can be freaked to the point that they are incapable of making a decision because they don’t want to make it worse. This is why, when the manager shows up and starts making decisions, the decisions are often followed without question. The team is happy, they’re thinking, “Whew, OK, good. Someone is driving us out of this mess.”

The larger question is: where’d the mess come from?

There are two standing goals when managing work that is in Crisis. Goal #1: Make sure the sky doesn’t fall. Goal #2: Figure out how to prevent future sky-falling situations. It’s a balance. You can’t truly perform a post-mortem while holding the sky up, but then again, you can’t truly remember what it’s like to hold the sky up a month after it happens.

When I’m standing in the middle of a Crisis, I’m doing two things at the same time. First, I’m frantically trying to fix the issue by any means possible. I’m also carefully looking to identify the root cause of the Crisis. This is information that vanishes in the joy of no longer being screwed once the Crisis has passed. Sure, we’ll still have a debrief once everyone’s caught their breath, but I’m going to learn more about what actually happened by asking questions at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night after two weeks of not having a day off.

The thing I remind myself throughout the Crisis is: if I’m responsible for resolving this Crisis, there’s a good chance I’m just as responsible for its creation. I don’t want to be grilling anyone at 10 p.m. on Saturday. I want the Crisis to never occur again, which means being Creative.

The panic junkie is the person who is addicted to Crisis and, in the absence of it, will manufacture drama in order to create additional Crisis. Their intent was originally good; they wanted to get stuff done quickly and discovered that the umbrella of a Crisis removed traditional organizational roadblocks. Problem is, they’ve become addicted to the power and momentum granted to them by driving the crisis. As soon as the current Crisis appears to have passed, they deflate, thinking, “Blah, back to the normal,” and immediately start looking for another Crisis. If they don’t find one, they create it.

I was one of these people and burned a lot of calories getting a lot done, but management by Crisis is a losing strategy. You become a corporate arsonist—burning through people and process in your apparent endless hurry, but not actually building anything.

There’s always a Crisis in progress. It’s a statistical fact that in any decent-sized group of people there is one person who needs help with some part of a Crisis. Get used to it. The question I ask myself each morning as I stare at the day’s selection of Crises is: “Am I going to play in the Crisis or the Creative?”

I’m not talking about being Creative about solving a Crisis such that it never occurs again, I’m talking about work that is purely Creative—where you’re actively improving or building a thing. It’s writing that piece of code that nobody but you wants; it’s spending two hours recruiting that guy you’re never going to get; it’s standing in the design room with a variety of dry erase markers and just filling that whiteboard with random.

I’m not talking about impossible tasks; I’m talking about Creative ones. I’m talking about inspired investments in an uncertain future. These are often hard tasks to measure, which means they are equally hard to justify to those sitting around you, but they occasionally, infrequently hit. You get the guy. You find the idea. You build something new.

Given the constant presence of Crisis and things to do, the act of choosing to devote part of your time to a purely Creative activity can be rough, but if you’re going to grow, there have to be times where you let things go further to hell in the now, because you’re choosing to invest in the Creative for the future.

That’s right. You are going to actively ignore a burning Crisis so that you can hide in the design room and doodle on a whiteboard. The panic junkies are going to be pissed. They’re going to walk by, laptops in hand, and wonder, “Why the hell isn’t he all over the Crisis? Doesn’t he know it’s, ya know, A CRISIS?”

Yes, it’s a risky move. Yes, there are crises that can’t be ignored. Yes, if you piss off the wrong panic junkie, you’re going to hear about it—quickly—but the bigger risk is a panic-filled career reacting to disasters, instead of one where you’re recognized for what you’ve built versus what you’ve fixed.