A rescue story begins at the emergency; the conditions that created it may have started much earlier.

Rescue stories begin at the emergency because that is where the drama is. The conditions that produced it, the underinvestment, the deferred maintenance, the warning ignored, started years earlier and make poor narrative. So the story tells the exciting hour and leaves out the decade.

When you hear about a crisis, ask what was happening before it. That is where prevention lives and where responsibility usually sits. And in your own situations, the same holds: the emergency you are managing today probably had a long and undramatic origin, and that is the part worth examining once the immediate thing is handled.