I have never seen anyone dead from crossing a deadline at work. In literal sense, deadlines are deadly; people die if they cross it yet we use it in our everyday work lives to indicate ETA. I see a persistent need for people to use war metaphors at work to install a sense of urgency. Some examples – Setting up a war room, which is nothing but a cosy meeting room where all stakeholders are present to take a quick decision. Info from the trenches, which is simply getting information from people doing the job. Fire our first salvo, which is releasing the MVP.

War is ugly, even when it has a winner many at times it is pyrrhic. I had interacted with people who had done duty in the military and refugees who have been displaced by war. One word to describe, it is – horrific.

• War kills and maims people. The worst part is that a good portion of people die or are maimed because of someone else’ decisions. Collateral damage is inevitable
• There are no rights/justice in a war zone, you get to lose everything and often get displaced if you survive
• Even basic needs are not available, starvation and diseases are common

Long term ill effects of using these metaphors at work is getting primed to respond only to threats and urgencies not anything else. Many of the workplace issues are because of poor ways of working than poor intent to work from the people.

How to go about work then?

My favourite answer is embrace XP, which treats work as work and people as people. XP helps complex and big goals achievable in simple sustainable and repeatable ways. I also show people the Cynefin framework. It clearly marks how decision making works into 5 different domains. Starts with Clear and progresses to complicated -> complex -> chaotic -> confusion. Below is the image from wikipedia for reference.

War belongs to the chaotic domain, the priority is damage control. Focus is on act and then respond based on what happens, where we learn how to limit our damage. Majority of the work on the other hand either belongs complex or complicated domain. Complex domain is used when building user experience, where we learn what user wants. Complicated domain is used when building automations, where we know what user wants.

By thinking in chaotic terms and using those metaphors we are forced to think of limiting damage not be productive, so ditch the war metaphors at work and start using the terms and metaphors appropriate for the problem domain we are in.