---
title: "Signs you might be in survival mode"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/signs-you-might-be-in-survival-mode.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/signs-you-might-be-in-survival-mode.html"
published: "2014-03-27T07:37:29.863000+00:00"
updated: "2014-05-22T21:12:54.667000+00:00"
tags: ["First Steps during chaos"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "A list of early warning signs that a software team is in survival mode, such as constant urgency, missing context, no time to reduce risk and long stress."
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Signs you might be in survival mode

We had an interesting discussion [in class](http://osherove.com/trainingoptions) on how one can detect you might be in survival mode. Here are some possible early warning signs:

1. There is a perception or feeling of continuous urgency
2. There is lack of context (why are we doing this? where are we heading? When is this expected? what are the expectations?)
3. 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.
4. There is no time to reduce risk (technical debt, bus factors etc)
5. The team is unable to deliver
6. There is only time to take shortcuts
7. A long period of stress
8. Being non productive for a long period of time

## Read next

- [Definition: Survival Mode](https://www.5whys.com/articles/definition-survival-mode.html): A short definition of survival mode, the spiral of fighting fires with no time to learn, and how removing over commitments helps break it.
- [Elastic Leadership in Devops Survival Mode](https://www.5whys.com/articles/elastic-leadership-in-devops-survival-mode.html): A look at a DevOps Guys post in which command and control ended production fires and freed time to learn, read as Elastic Leadership in survival mode.
- [12 Behavior Anti Patterns You Will Face As a Software Team Leader](https://www.5whys.com/articles/12-behavior-anti-patterns-you-will-face-as-a-software-team-l.html): Twelve team member behavior anti-patterns and three outside disruptions a software team leader faces in survival mode, with how to respond to each one.

## Topic

- [Survival Mode](https://www.5whys.com/topics/survival-mode)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/