Let’s say you’re reading a book and feel a bad headache coming on. What do you do—wait for it to blossom into a real doozy or go to the medicine cabinet and take a couple of Advil or Tylenol to steer the problem off its course? How about when you see the little squabble between your toddlers has escalated and your four year old is about to punch the living daylights out of her little brother. What do you do—watch with dread or deftly insert yourself to defuse the sibling bomb? No brainers, right? And there are many more examples where almost everyone would answer: “Duh!” Of course that’s what you do!

So here’s my question: given the incredible human ability to extrapolate from the present into a likely future scenario, why are so many of us so willfully deaf and blind to lurking problems in our businesses and our personal relationships? And what can we do to take off the blinders and earplugs that do nothing to protect us from looming disasters, so that we are awake and present to the reality of what is occurring and capable of deftly navigating to meaningful solutions? Take Lucy, a woman I had the chance to work with after her world had blown up in her face. At 35, Lucy supervised several branches for a large retail company. She was efficient, capable, aggressive, and whatever is the opposite of ‘warm and fuzzy’--- well she was it. She solved problems but wasn’t too worried about who she trampled along the way. Over the 10 years she had worked her way up in this company, a number of complaints—both written and verbal -- had been lodged against Lucy claiming she was harsh and that her management style tore people down instead of building them up, that she was out for herself and that she failed to develop and promote her teams’ talent. You’d think both Lucy and her managers would have taken action on these complaints, but both sides let sleeping dogs lie. Lucy didn’t really see her style as a problem since the branches she oversaw were profitable: she rationalized that the complaints were poison pens from jealous colleagues and subordinates. Her own supervisors too were inclined to turn a deaf ear since Lucy’s areas required very little oversight on their part and her consistently profitable quarters looked good on their bottom line. She did her job and if some folks were a bit prickly, well so be it. But sleeping dogs don’t sleep forever. One day Lucy blew her stack at a meeting, shredding one of her direct reports publicly and almost reducing him to tears. During that meeting something profound changed in the hearts and minds of her staff. Lucy, so unconscious of the impact of her words and actions, had gone one step too far and lost control of her team. As a group her entire staff banded together and went to senior management where they made it clear that until Lucy was transferred or fired they did not intend to show up for work. The upshot? When the executive team finally really listened to the range of complaints against Lucy instead of brushing off the comments like so many pesky flies, they saw no alternative but to let her go. The situation had gone beyond the point of no return. So Lucy lost her job and the company lost a gifted employee who, though rough around the edges, might have blossomed under good mentorship and clear expectations regarding her leadership and communication skills. We’ve all seen situations that have gone from bad to worse, where the intervention of a key player could have made all the difference. It happens at work—not only interpersonally as in Lucy’s story -- but also when impossible deadlines are set, when insufficient resources are allocated to a task, when a project has been green-lighted and starts to veer badly off course but no one has the courage to say so, and in countless other ways as well. The ‘see no evil hear no evil’ mindset invades our personal relationships too. How often do we prefer to think everything is just fine when somewhere in our core we know that something is really not fine at all. How often are we hurt or disappointed by a friend or lover and lack the courage to look them in the eye and tell them? ‘It’s easier just to let it go’ we say to ourselves. The consequence of letting sleeping dogs lie in our personal relationships are pretty easy to spot: At a certain point we hit the breaking point: we’ve had enough and because the situation has dragged on far too long, our emotions are dialed up high. We yell, fight and cry. We say things we can’t take back and which we would never had said months before when the first inklings of a tension surfaced -- if only we’d broached the topic then. Friendships and relationships fail or are forever altered. But so many professional and personal disasters can be headed off early and safely with two simple qualities: wakefulness and courage. So, this month why not take a few minutes to scan your life for glowing embers. A glowing ember needs immediate attention or you risk fire at a later date. If you’re not sure about a certain situation, why not assume you’ve got a glowing ember and summon the courage to step in, explore what’s going on and address the problem directly and consistently until you are comfortable that all parties concerns have been addressed. A glowing ember doused is harmless. An unattended ember can spark, and the fire it may create can ravage your business or devastate your life. So in the words of the world’s most famous cartoon bear: “Remember, only you can prevent….”