In my experience, there are two kinds of managers - those who are plan-oriented, and those that are fire-fighters. Plan-oriented managers work hard to organize the resources and approaches for a project, so that the various activities are sequenced properly, and so that each step produces the information required by subsequent steps, and so that the overall work is done efficiently and within required schedules. Their desire and focus is to do extra work up front to avoid problems, believing that such work pays off in the long term.

Fire-fighters, instead, treat troubled projects like fires - once trouble is discovered, they attempt to triage and focus resources on the immediate needs, and hope that's enough to put the fire out. Otherwise, they ring up other fire departments and ask them to send resources.

In a war, the generals and senior staff are plan-oriented, but the sargeant in the fox-hole usually has no alternative to being a fire-fighter. Fire fighters aren't adverse to the idea of preventing fires through better planning, but believe that plans are not irrelevant to the crises which always seem to surround them (and which shouldn't be a surprise). Fire fighters believe the best course of action when trouble arises is to 'scramble' for a solution. The fire fighting manager finds their mode more heroic than fire prevention… unless you are in the building that is burning. Many lives can be lost when too great an emphasis is placed on fighting fires alone.

An article at Infoplease lays out the standard strategy for fighting fires, when the fire is real, and not just a project in trouble:

Fire fighting strategy involves the following basic procedures: arriving at the scene of the fire as rapidly as possible; assessing the nature of the fire by determining its intensity and extent, the type and abundance of fuel, the danger of entering the fire area, and the most effective techniques for extinguishing the fire; locating and rescuing endangered persons; containing the fire by protecting adjacent areas; ventilating the fire area to allow for the escape of heat and toxic gases; and, finally, extinguishing the fire.

In short, there is a lot to do at a fire besides just extinguishing the fire itself, and professionals approach these activities with great discipline. Most of the critical efforts in a fire involves successfully managing issues associated with the environment and the team, rather than pointing out that the building is burning.

When does a project become a 'fire'? Any project which does not have a plan probably does not really know where it is, and is thus prone to spontaneous combustion. Projects become even more susceptible to fires as a result of internal friction. In the absence of adequate planning, projects usually base their predictions of delivery dates and quality on un-bounded optimism and limited negotiation skills, rather than facts and data. In such projects, where there's smoke (the lack of a plan), there's probably a smoldering fire (risks) that are waiting to surprise someone. When added pressure occurs on projects that lack plans, things quickly heat up, and decision-making quickly focuses on short-term results rather than longer-term survival. When this occurs, it's time to think about survival skills.

What should you do when your plans were originally robust, but risk mitigation efforts have not been successful, or the underlying planning assumptions are no longer valid? One guideline to use is to perform an unbiased, objective assessment of the situation. When the likelihood of failure (however that is defined) significantly exceeds 50 percent, without any available relief in requirements or schedule, and without a thoughtful reconsideration of the overall approach and root causes, there's enough heat to warrant treating it like a fire. Left unabated, such a fire quickly can become a full-scale conflagration, in which all occupants suffer through a death march, and lots of people end up with permanent burns. Given this situation, the sooner you can determine the nature and extent of the danger to the project, the more time you'll have to address the real risks which the project presents to the business owners!