Chapter 4. Dealing with survival mode

Survival mode (I sometimes also call it the survival phase), where I think most teams are located these days, is what I define as “not having enough time to learn.”

Are you in survival mode?

If your team is constantly chasing its own tail and putting out fires, instead of having time to sit down and experiment, learn new things, and apply them in a manner that makes them stick, then you don’t have enough time to learn.

Can you send your team to a unit-testing course for a few days? Maybe. But when they come back, how much extra time do you provide for your team to apply what they’ve learned at a slower pace of development (also known as deliberate practice)? Twenty percent more? Not nearly enough. As I’ll discuss in this chapter, 20% won’t begin to address the need. In fact, 200% to 300% more time is the minimum you should allow.

By not creating this extra slack time, you put your team back into survival mode. They will spiral back into old habits because of the constraints put on them.

The survival comfort zone

Getting out of survival mode

Making slack time—required actions

Why slack?

Command-and-control leadership

During transformation you’ll likely need to...

What if your team is large?

What if you’re part of a “wide team”—a team that’s distributed?

Next up

Summary