We had an interesting discussion in class on how one can detect you might be in survival mode. Here are some possible early warning signs:
- There is a perception or feeling of continuous urgency
- There is lack of context (why are we doing this? where are we heading? When is this expected? what are the expectations?)
- The team is forced into a state where they are always reacting to changes (key word here is forced because a self organizing team can choose to simply react with changes such as during a continuous delivery flow). Not being able to choose whether to plan some things out.
- There is no time to reduce risk (technical debt, bus factors etc)
- The team is unable to deliver
- There is only time to take shortcuts
- A long period of stress
- Being non productive for a long period of time