The Slide I Never Used

I was two minutes into a customer meeting when I put the presentation away. The deck was prepared. The capability story was coherent. I had been through it enough times to know where the questions usually landed.

The client said something, unprompted, in the way people say things when they have been thinking about a problem long enough that it comes out sideways in a conversation that was supposed to be about something else. A sentence about what was actually keeping them up at night. Not about our product. Not about the specific problem I had told myself they had. Something more specific and more urgent than either. The room shifted slightly. I closed the laptop.

The conversation that followed was more useful than anything I had prepared. What they had described was not the fire I had been designing extinguishers for.

David Ogilvy wrote, in ‘The Unpublished David Ogilvy’ (Profile Books, 2012), what became one of the most quoted lines in advertising: ‘When you sell fire-extinguishers, open with the fire.’ His actual formulation was more specific: ‘People screen out a lot of commercials because they open with something dull. When you advertise fire extinguishers, open with the fire.’ The ‘screen out’ clause matters. The audience does not disengage from a poor opening because it lacks patience. It disengages because the problem has not yet been made real.

Most people have read this as a communication tip. Start with the problem, not the product. Open the pitch with the customer’s pain. That advice is correct. But it is the shallow reading.

The deeper reading is about the lens. Ogilvy was describing an obligation to look at the situation through the most appropriate glass, and to genuinely reckon with the fact that the person across the table may be looking through an entirely different one. The fire extinguisher failure is not primarily a communication failure. It is a failure of diagnosis. The leaders who consistently open with the extinguisher are not lacking in presentation skills. They have drifted away from the fire, or were never quite close enough to it to know what was actually burning.

The Stated Fire and the Real One

Even founders who are genuinely problem-obsessed fall into a specific trap. There are almost always two fires: the stated one and the real one. The stated fire is what the customer describes when asked what they need. The real fire is the thing that is actually keeping them up at night, which they may not even have put into clear language for themselves. Clayton Christensen described this as the ‘jobs to be done’ problem in ‘Competing Against Luck’ (Christensen, Hall, Dillon and Duncan, 2016): customers hire products to do a job, and the job they actually need done is frequently different from the one they describe when asked.

The customers who came to us in the early days of our managed services business told us they needed their infrastructure managed. Data centres, hardware, connectivity, cost. That was the fire they could describe, in the vocabulary available to them, which was the vocabulary of the procurement process they knew how to run. What they actually wanted was for someone to run their applications. The whole operation. Not the plumbing underneath it, but the system itself.

The infrastructure was implied. Of course, it would be included. But it was never the point. The customer was trying to describe an application problem but could only express it in infrastructure terms because that was the language the procurement conversation had used. One framing produces a commodity negotiation. The other is a different business entirely.

We did not understand this immediately. The signal that told us we had eventually found the real fire was not a conversation. It was behaviour. Customers started expanding their scope of work with us without being asked. Not because the pitch had improved, but because the offer had shifted to answer something they had been trying to describe for a while. You know you have found the real fire, not from what customers say. From what they do.

CB Insights, in its analysis of startup post-mortems, found that approximately 42% of startups cite insufficient market demand as the primary reason they failed. That figure is usually treated as a market observation. It is more accurately a diagnosis observation. The market existed. The fire was real. The founders had built an extinguisher for the wrong one.

When the Fire Becomes a Report

The fire-identification problem becomes increasingly difficult as organisations grow. In the early stage, the founder feels the fire directly. Customer conversations happen every week. Feedback arrives unfiltered. The heat is immediate.

As the organisation scales, the founder moves away from the fire. They receive reports about it. Summaries, averages, quarterly reviews. The information is accurate but mediated. What they are working from is last quarter’s fire, averaged across a customer base, filtered through teams with their own incentive structures, presented in a format that strips out the ambiguity and the specific detail that would tell them whether the fire has moved.

This produces a failure mode that is not obvious from the inside. The organisation continues to build and improve extinguishers. The extinguishers get better. The market moves on. The fire is in a different room. The team hired around the old diagnosis, the capital allocated to the existing extinguisher, the strategy justified by an assumption that has not been tested in eighteen months, all of it creates what Karl Weick, in ‘Sensemaking in Organizations’ (1995), would recognise as an action-legitimating narrative: the frame you have already built determines which incoming information counts as signal and which becomes noise.

The investors who backed our managed services business honestly illustrated this dynamic. They brought genuine value: organisational rigour, process discipline, operational structure. Real extinguishers, well-made. But they had limited fluency in the specific world we were operating in. The tools were not wrong. They were calibrated for a different environment, and the resulting friction was not a failure of effort. It was a mismatch of lenses.

The Instinct That Just Shows Up

Military operational planning is structured, at the doctrinal level, around understanding the threat before designing the response. The intelligence picture precedes everything. Before a plan is written, before forces are allocated, before objectives are named, the question is: what is actually happening? Where is the threat? What is it likely to do?

The response comes after. This sequencing is not optional. It is doctrine. A plan that opens with ‘here is what we can do’ before establishing ‘here is what we are facing’ would be returned with one comment: you have not described the threat.

Corporate strategy inverts this as a matter of habit. John Boyd’s OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) frames the cost of that inversion precisely: organisations that shortcut the observation and orientation steps, rushing to decide and act, risk moving fast in the wrong direction. The deck that opens with the capability before the problem. The board paper that leads with the proposed solution before the market analysis. The investment thesis is built around what the organisation has rather than what is broken in the world. None of this would survive contact with a military planning process.

For me, the discipline stopped being conscious a long time ago. It just shows up: in which question I ask first in a client meeting, in what I notice is missing from a proposal, in the instinct to close the laptop when a customer says something that tells me the fire is not where I assumed it was. That is a different thing from someone who has read about the principle and tries to remember to apply it. The discipline practised long enough to become invisible is more useful than the discipline that has to be recalled.

What Capital Actually Follows

When I invested in ProvisionPoint and took a significant stake in the business, it became clear within a short time that the founders had been focused on the technical solution with a limited understanding of the fire they were actually positioned to fight.

They believed they were solving provisioning problems for Office 365. A real and practical pain in medium and large Microsoft environments. But what they were actually sitting next to was an organisational governance problem: who has access to what, and how do you audit and control it at scale as a Microsoft 365 estate grows in complexity and regulatory exposure? A substantially larger fire. A more urgent one. Governance was not, at that point, the conversation the market was readily having. Provisioning was easier to sell. The founders had named the smoke because it was what buyers would currently respond to. They had not yet made the case for the fire underneath it.

This is the lens problem from the investor side. They were looking through the lens of what the market was buying at the time. I was looking through the lens of what the market was about to feel acutely. Both are defensible positions. One of them is closer to the real fire.

The same dynamic operates in boardrooms. A chief executive (‘CEO’) who opens a quarterly review with a clear account of what is actually changing in the competitive environment, what customers are worrying about now that they were not worrying about six months ago, earns the room before saying a word about the plan. The equivalent CEO who opens with operational metrics and strategic initiatives has given the board an extinguisher before establishing whether everyone in the room is looking at the same fire. The board evaluates the extinguisher. Nobody checks the diagnosis.

Investors who see a large number of pitches quickly develop pattern recognition for extinguishers. What they cannot easily dismiss is a founder who has genuinely investigated a fire at depth and can describe it in the language of the people living with it. The question serious investors ask of any pitch is specifically the fire question: why is this problem acute now, and not five years ago? A founder who cannot answer that is selling an extinguisher in search of a fire.

The Question Underneath the Question

The hardest version of Ogilvy’s principle is not about how to open a pitch. It is about whether you actually know which fire you are fighting.

Most leaders can describe their problem fluently. It is in the strategy documents, the investor materials, and the board papers. The more specific question is: when did you last go and confirm that the fire is still there, still burning, still burning in the same place? And are you describing it in the language of the person who has it, or in your own?

Two questions. Neither requires a long answer. Together, they will tell you quickly whether someone knows their fire. First: can you describe the problem in the language of the person who has it, not your language but theirs? Second: what would your best customer actually lose if this did not exist? Not what they would gain. What they would lose. Loss is the closer measure of fire. If you can answer both of those in under thirty seconds, without jargon, in language the person with the problem would immediately recognise as their own, you almost certainly know what fire you are fighting.

If you cannot, or if the answers come out smooth and rehearsed rather than felt, that uncertainty is probably worth sitting with before building anything else.

I have watched the fire-identification failure play out at every scale. The pattern is consistent: the extinguisher was built first, and the fire was assumed. In the cases that worked, the fire matched the assumption, or the founder was close enough to adjust before the mismatch became irreversible. In the cases that did not, the post-mortem blamed the market, the timing, the technology. It almost never examines the diagnosis.

If you have seen a different sequence work, I would like to know what the mechanism was. That would be a more interesting story than most of the ones that get told about why things failed.