You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on leadership, startups, identity, politics, and how to make high stakes decisions that are intentional and in-line with your values.
🌪️ A Black Cloud
I was driving to Target on Wednesday afternoon when I noticed a massive black cloud in the sky about a mile away. I texted my husband a photo: what the...? He texted back a link to the Boyle Heights warehouse fire.
That was a week ago. We're about 5 miles from the fire, but we've had our air purifier running every day since, woke up Saturday to the thick smell of toxic burning in the air, and ended up driving to my parents' house to escape it.
A 500,000-square-foot warehouse has been burning in one of the biggest cities in the world for at least a week...but it's primarily affecting a working-class neighborhood, so, what's the rush in putting it out, right?
This isn't a disaster, it's a decision.
🔥 Why You Should Care
This fire because it is one of the most visible recent examples of what I think about constantly in my work: what happens when the people making decisions are completely insulated from the consequences of those decisions.
The tension between who chooses vs. who absorbs the cost is a leadership failure. And it shows up in everywhere: in public spaces, at home, and in corporate decisions.
🏭 This Isn't a One-Off
Apparently, the fire in Boyle Heights broke out while contractors were testing a rooftop solar array on a cold storage facility holding 85 million pounds of frozen food. Within 24 hours of the fire starting, the city issued shelter-in-place orders instead of evacuation orders. Residents were told to stay put, even as air quality readings in Boyle Heights hit "Very Unhealthy."
Unfortunately, the Boyle Heights fire is not an isolated incident; it is the latest in a pattern that has been playing out across Southern California for months.
- In May 2026, a chemical tank at a GKN Aerospace facility in Garden Grove began overheating and leaking toxic vapors with a threat to explode, causing 50,000 people to be placed under evacuation orders.
Each of these incidents had its own proximate cause: a faulty valve, a rooftop solar test, a sprinkler system that failed. But proximate causes are not root causes; root causes live further up the chain, in the decisions that created the conditions for failure in the first place.
This is what an organizational failure looks like from the outside: not one bad decision, but a series of smaller ones about budgets, zoning, and whose neighborhood absorbs industrial risk, that compound until something catches fire and the gap becomes impossible to ignore.
Mayor Bass called it "interesting" that these incidents keep happening in the same kinds of communities. Interesting is...an interesting choice of words 😡
These fires didn't just happen in disproportionately working-class and POC neighborhoods; they happen there because of hundreds of organizational decisions about zoning, permitting, investment, and oversight that made these communities the places where industrial risk gets concentrated and absorbed.
💼 The Normalization Of Deviance
There's a concept in organizational theory called The Normalization of Deviance by sociologist Diane Vaughan who studied the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster where 7 people died. NASA engineers had flagged dangerous structural failures on multiple flights before the explosion. Each time nothing catastrophic happened despite the warnings, the risk became a little more acceptable, a little more normalized.
Until: the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after NASA's 25th launch and seven people died.
What makes Vaughan's finding so....dare I say, interesting...wasn't that NASA was full of reckless people who wanted people to die; it was that the organization had built systems where warning signs could be absorbed, rationalized, and filed away until the risk no longer felt like risk at all.
Sound familiar? A sprinkler system and hydrants without water pressure in Tracy. A city that had to fly in water cannons from Texas to fight the Boyle Heights fire. A facility expansion permitted in Garden Grove two days before a chemical tank failed.
These are not one-time oversights...they are what the normalization of deviance looks like at scale by our leaders. I keep asking myself how many more of these it takes before we start demanding answers about who decided these communities were the right place to absorb this kind of risk.
🌫️ What You Can Actually Do
Most of you reading this aren't signing industrial permits, but most of us are operating inside organizations where the same dynamic plays out at a smaller scale every day.
➡️ The budget that gets cut while the workload stays the same.
➡️ The concern raised in a meeting that never makes it into the action items.
➡️ The department that absorbs the cost of decisions made in a boardroom they'll never enter.
The question for those of us coming up in leadership within organizations that have real power is whether we are the kind of leader who stays close enough to the consequences of our decisions to actually feel them.
Or, whether we are, slowly and without meaning to, normalizing something we'll only recognize as a failure once it's already on fire.
🥨 Snacks
🌫️ Air Quality: If you're in LA, check conditions before heading outside at AirNow. Boyle Heights and surrounding areas are still seeing elevated readings.
🎤 Speaker Reel: I finally put together a speaker reel. Here's what it feels like to work with me.
💡 Worth Thinking About: Are you planning to avoid failure, or planning for success? They're not the same thing.
💸 Values Check: A Muslim creator turned down a Heineken sponsorship and explained exactly why. In a world where "just this once" is always the ask, this one stuck with me.
See you in next week's mess,
Arshiya
