[en] It is now well known that many reactions giving measurable fusion cross-sections also show a fission of the compound system formed, similar to the low energy fission of the known fissioning nuclei. Recently, both the fusion excitation functions and the mass equilibration in the fragmentation of the composite system were measured for a large number of systems with 94<=Z<=110 by bombarding ²⁰⁸Pb on different targets of ²⁶Mg, ⁴⁸Ca, ⁵⁰Ti, ⁵²Cr, ⁵⁸Fe and ⁶⁴Ni. From a theoretical point of view, it is relevant to ask the question: how do the colliding nuclei fuse and then why does the compound system formed fission instead of going to the ground state to give a stable system. In this Letter, we attempt to show that the fusion of asymmetric colliding nuclei is due to the overcoming of the interaction barriers in adiabatic potentials and the fission of the compound system should perhaps occur as a sudden process, like the one in the spontaneous fission phenomenon. We have made our calculations for the compound systems with 102<=Z<=110 and for the asymmetric target-projectile combinations of the experiments of Ref. 1, using the fragmentation theory whose basis is the asymmetric two-centre shell model