Tending the Fire

Last month I watched my friend Rich build a campfire in the rain for nearly an hour. No fire starter. Soaking wet wood. And me, trying to help, making it worse.

He looked at me and said, “You’re smothering it. Give it room.”

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Because months earlier, I’d built something at my firm that I didn’t fully understand yet. Rich and his wet wood showed me why it worked.

A few months ago, we redesigned our monthly firmwide meeting. Not a radical overhaul. Just a shift in what we put first. We stopped leading with numbers and started leading with people.

We called it the Monthly Campfire. And we built it around three questions.

The Spark: What lit something up in you this month? We go around the room, or Zoom, and everyone shares one moment, big or small, that excited them. A win. A challenge they pushed through. A realization. Someone’s kid took their first steps. Someone finally reached a milestone they’d been chasing for two years. It names what’s alive in the room before we ever get to the numbers. And it invites vulnerability without oversharing.

The Firewood: What’s fueling your fire, or dimming it? Everyone shares what’s driving them or dragging on them. In my experience, most people go straight to the wet wood. The things holding them back. The bottlenecks, the struggles, the things they’re maybe a little embarrassed to still be dealing with. And that’s exactly where the meeting earns its keep. Because when someone shares their wet wood, other people jump in. Not to fix it. To say: I’ve been there. Here’s what helped. Or: I’m in the same spot. Let’s figure it out together. Then we do the data. The KPIs, the targets, the actual numbers from the month. We don’t skip it. We just don’t lead with it.

The Ember: What are you carrying into the next 30 days? We close by going back around: What’s the insight or intention you’re leaving with? What ember are you taking with you? It turns the meeting from a status update into something people actually carry with them. Some people on Zoom even use a campfire background for this part. Which sounds small, but it does something. It makes the metaphor real. It reminds everyone that we’re gathering around something, not just sitting through something.

We’ve been running this meeting for several months now. And something has quietly shifted inside our firm. People show up differently. They share more honestly. They carry each other more.

I thought I understood why it worked. Then I sat around an actual campfire.

Northern Texas. A Wet Pit. No Fire Starter. Rich grew up in Texas. He knows how to build a fire. So naturally, I jumped in to help. He stopped me almost immediately.

“You’re smothering it. Give it room.”

So I sat back. And for nearly an hour, I watched him work. Slowly. Patiently. Methodically. And the fire eventually caught. Because I got out of his way.

I’ve thought about that moment more than I expected to.

My instinct was to help. To contribute. To be useful. But I was adding too much too fast, and I was making it harder, not easier. Sometimes a leader doesn’t have to have all the answers. They don’t have to be the one who makes it happen. They just have to find the people who know how to do the job and trust them to do it.

I’ve had to learn that more than once. I’m still learning it.

At one point, Rich pointed to a log near the bottom of the pile. Steam was rising from it; not smoke, but vapor. The wood was wet from the inside, and it was quietly undermining everything around it. He moved it out. Not with frustration. Just with clarity.

I’ve seen that in teams. A person who isn’t a bad person, they’re just not able or willing to change right now, and their energy is affecting everything around them. Sometimes it’s not even a person. It’s a process. A system. A way of doing things that made sense once and simply doesn’t anymore. And the longer you build the fire around the wet wood, the harder everything becomes.

This is also something we watch for in our Campfire meetings too. If someone shares the same wet wood month after month, that’s a signal. Not to judge. To go deeper. To ask what’s actually happening and why it keeps showing up. Most of the time something remarkable happens: collaboration. Solutions emerge that no one could have found alone. But sometimes the wood just needs to come out.

Late in the evening, the embers had spread out across the pit. Rich gathered them. Pushed them into a single pile, close together, then set fresh wood on top.

“They catch faster when they’re together,” he said.

I sat with that for a long time. We all carry individual embers out of a meeting. Our own insights, our own intentions, our own small shifts. But when we bring those embers together, when we learn out loud in front of each other, the fire is much stronger than any one of us could build alone.

I came back from that cabin with more than I expected. Not a new framework. A deeper understanding of why the one we’d already built actually works.

Fire is fragile and resilient at the same time. It needs room to breathe. It gets smothered by too much too fast. It gets undermined by what we refuse to remove. And it burns brightest when we stop spreading out and draw close to each other.

I keep coming back to this idea that the leader’s job isn’t to have the answers. It’s to tend the fire. To create space for people’s stories, their sparks, and their meaning to matter. And then to get out of the way long enough for the fire to catch.

So we pause to tend to the fire. Together. Every month. Because when the fire goes out, disconnection creeps in quietly. And you don’t always notice until the room is already cold.

What ember are you carrying into the next 30 days? Hit reply and tell me. I’d love to know what’s staying with you.