Some years ago, I was hosting a friend for tea in the kitchen of our hundred-year-old house. I had just gotten up to pour the kettle when I caught a faint but unmistakable smell of smoke drifting from the stairwell.
“Do you smell that?” I said.
I set the kettle down and ran up the back stairs.
By the time I reached the third floor, the air had thickened. Smoke pressed upon me—gray, heavy, and disorienting. I shouted downstairs, “Get out. Call 911,” and moved toward the source: a bathroom where smoke pulsed out in dense, irregular bursts.
A voice interrupted my momentum: Karen, Get out. Now.
Minutes later, firefighters arrived. Clad in heavy gear, they entered carrying axes and hoses, moving quickly but not frantically. One of them moved upstairs with measured speed, his eyes tracing the walls, the ceiling, the path of the smoke.
We waited outside.
When he came back down, his face flushed with heat, he looked at me and said: “Thirty seconds more, and this would have gone through the roof.”
A ceiling fan had been smoldering into highly flammable material. It was seconds away from breaking into the breezeway that ran the length of the house. Once there, the fire would have spread fast.
What made this so memorable, beyond a brush with a full house fire, was our difference in response.
I moved on instinct. They moved with trained perception, reading the structure of the house, the pathways, and the likely direction of the fire.
Between those responses was a narrow margin–seconds, really–but on that margin hung the outcome.
That margin is where practical wisdom operates.
In schools and organizations, that margin shapes what happens next. A student challenges a grade after class. An innocent mistake turns into hours in damage control. A conversation takes a turn you didn’t expect.
Your first reaction comes quickly and convincingly. It comes with a ready interpretation: this needs to be addressed now.
The risk isn’t that the reaction is wrong. It's only partial.
Act too quickly, and you move before you understand the structure of what’s happening. You may resolve the immediate issue while setting something else in motion, eroding trust, escalating tension, missing what matters.
Most leadership missteps are not failures of expertise or intention. They are failures of perception and timing.
It’s 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.
You feel the pull to respond immediately–to explain, clarify, and correct. The argument is already taking shape.
Speed feels efficient. But it pulls you into action before you see the full picture–what the other person is actually saying, and what you most need to understand.
The first reaction isn’t the problem. It tells you what feels urgent. But it is only part of the story.
Wise leaders create a small space between their initial reaction and a considered response–just wide enough to ask a few questions: “What am I reacting to? What might I be missing? What am I aiming at? And whose voice, perspective, and agency need to be engaged?”
That space does not delay action. It directs it.
Most leadership decisions are made under pressure, in compressed moments, with incomplete information. In those moments, the difference between reacting and responding may be no more than thirty seconds. But thirty seconds can be the difference between a contained problem and one that finds its way into the structure and spreads before you understand where it’s going.
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 professions.