Happy New Year! I hope 2026 has started well for you. The newsletter is back after a brief pause while we focused on streamlining a few things behind the scenes. Over the coming weeks we’ll be sharing stories, lessons, and updates from across The CTO Playbook community. If there’s something you’d like to see more of this year, let us know.

You’re everywhere. 

Board calls. Incident reports. Stand-ups. Hiring meetings.

You clear blockers. You approve budgets. You answer every “quick question” before it derails someone else’s day.

It feels like if you take your eyes off the team for a day, everything will catch fire. So you stay in the burning building.

But the truth is, you don’t have a people problem.
You have a priority protection problem.

And here’s the cost: If you keep living in firefighting mode, you’ll never have the space to design the systems that prevent fires in the first place.

Your best engineers will burn out.
You’ll become the bottleneck everyone tiptoes around. 
And your influence at the exec table will quietly shrink..

It’s addictive. Every time you jump in, you get a hit of progress. You’ve “fixed” something.

But firefighting doesn’t scale. It trains your team to bring you flames instead of fireproofing their own work.

One CTO I coached was spending 60% of his week in unplanned problem-solving. He thought he was keeping things moving. In reality, he was slowing them down.

Urgency gets the glory. Strategy pays the bills.

If every decision routes through you, you’re not leading. You’re bottlenecking.

The most effective CTOs I’ve worked with deliberately make themselves less available for low-stakes calls.

It forces the team to solve more problems without them — and it frees their own time for high-leverage work.

If your calendar has no space to think, you’re managing tasks, not building the future.

Block time. Guard it like you guard production systems.

Use it to ask better questions:

Before you grab the hose, ask:

You’ll be surprised how many “emergencies” solve themselves.

👉🏼 What’s one “fire” you’ll ignore this week so you can work on something that actually moves the business forward?

Talk soon,
Adam.

This week on The CTO Playbook, I’m joined by James Webster to explore how small organisations can grow their digital maturity without overcomplicating things. From messy spreadsheets to mismatched expectations, he shares grounded insight using metaphors, maps and a “three mountains” model to guide sustainable progress.

🎧 Tune in on your favourite podcast platform or listen on the podcast page.

Build the habits, systems, and focus to step beyond execution and grow with influence, alignment, and real strategic impact. Join the waitlist for the next cohort starting in early 2026. Sign up here for your waitlist-only discount.

If you’re ready to work through these transitions 1:1, let’s talk about my coaching programme for leaders in technology who want to escape firefighting and lead strategically. Book your call with me here.