Some years ago, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I was hosting a friend for tea in the kitchen of our hundred-year-old house. I had just set the kettle down when I caught a pungent, unmistakable smell of smoke drifting from the back stairwell.
"Do you smell that?"
I ran up the stairs. I want to say that running toward the smoke was foolish, and it was. But in that moment I needed to know what I was dealing with. Was it serious or not?
By the time I reached the third floor, the hallway was already thick with smoke, the air gray and disorienting. Only as I moved down the hall could I see it pulsing in dense bursts from a bathroom doorway.
A voice from below cut through. Karen. Get out. Now.
My friend, whose father is a fire chief, had already evacuated the house and called 911. Within minutes, two fire engines pulled up outside. Seven firefighters filed in with axes and hoses and headed straight to the third floor.
We waited outside on the sidewalk.
About half an hour later, they came back down, faces flushed with heat, beads of sweat across their foreheads. One of them looked directly at me and said,
"Thirty seconds more and the roof would have gone up in flames.”
The smoke I had been running toward wasn't the fire. A bathroom fan had been smoldering in the ceiling, seconds from igniting the rafters and the breezeway that runs the length of the house.
What stayed with me was not simply the brush with disaster. It was the difference between what I saw and what they saw. I reacted to what was directly in front of me. They were reading the smoke: its color, its density, its movement.
Between those actions was a narrow margin. Seconds.
That margin is where practical wisdom operates. For a leader, that margin is the difference between reacting to what is visible and responding to what is actually unfolding.
In schools, the space between hearing a student’s harsh remark and deciding whether to correct publicly, ask a question, or wait is only moments.
It is just after ten on a Tuesday evening. You have already closed your laptop once. You open it again to check one last thing, and there it is: a five-paragraph email from an angry parent accusing a teacher of humiliating her son in class. You feel the pull to respond immediately, to ask why the parent didn’t reach out to the teacher first, given the school’s clear channels of communication. The reply is already forming in your mind before you have spoken to the teacher, the student, or invited the parent in to meet.
Our first reaction arrives quickly and convincingly. The risk is not necessarily that the reaction is wrong. It is that it is only partial.
The work of a wise leader–the fire chief, school principal, parent–is to create a small space between our first reaction and a considered response, just wide enough to ask:
What am I reacting to? What might I be missing? What am I aiming at? Whose voice needs to be part of this?
That space does not delay action. It makes wiser action possible.
Most leadership missteps are not failures of expertise or courage. They are failures of perception and timing. Move too quickly and you address what is most visible rather than what matters most. You may resolve the immediate issue while setting something else in motion, eroding trust, escalating tension, and missing the fire already moving through the rafters.
Speed can move us into action before we fully understand what is actually happening: what the parent is really asking, what the teacher will need in the morning, what the student is carrying beneath the appearance of indifference.
Our first reaction is not the enemy. It tells us something important about what feels urgent. What it doesn't tell us is what matters most. The discipline is to press pause just long enough to test our initial read before acting on it.
Most leadership decisions are made under pressure, with incomplete information. In those moments, the difference between reacting and responding may be no more than thirty seconds.
The goal is not to slow down, but to read the smoke before you fight the fire.
Karen Bohlin is the author of "The Practical Wisdom Framework: A Compass for School Leaders." She leads the executive education program Wisdom at Work: Revitalizing Formative School Leadership and coaches leadership teams in higher education and across professional contexts.
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