War Room

Epictetus, a former slave turned Stoic philosopher, once called out some academics of his time, in Discourses 2.20, for arguing both sides of any issue with equal skill and force, purely to demonstrate that certain knowledge is impossible.

Epictetus mocks this as self-refuting and pointless:

“What a travesty! What are you doing? You prove yourself wrong on a daily basis and still you won’t give up these idle efforts. When you eat, where do you bring your hand, to your mouth, or to your eye? … You use [clear impressions and valid arguments] every day while denying that anything is clear or valid.”

I started with this because, if you read my recent post about fixing what hurts most first, you may assume what follows will contradict it and make it sound like I am arguing both sides. I do not think I am. I think there is a difference between optimization and recovery.

There is this well-known theoretical construct in economics called Homo Economicus. It basically posits that, given proper and complete information, a rational human will choose the option that optimizes outcomes. Yeah, right. Too bad reality does not agree, as behavioural economics has shown time and again. It may well be that tackling what hurts most first gives you the optimal outcome, but the human side may need something else first.

When a leader takes over a new team, things may be so out of control that just looking at the backlog, with dozens or hundreds of items, creates a mental block and real distress across the team. The psychological barrier is real, and the sense of learned helplessness can destroy motivation. In that state, the team may not even be able to think clearly enough to address the deepest problems first.

If you have worked in operations, you can probably relate to the feeling of relief when your ticket queue drops from hundreds to dozens. Just moving from 100 to 99 tickets gives the team a sense of progress and the confidence that we can actually do this. Building momentum matters. Not because morale is some magical substitute for strategy, but because people who feel completely buried often stop believing that progress is possible at all.

But how is that different from the usual firefighting? I would say the difference is that this has to be done deliberately and within a tight time box, with all hands on deck. No distractions, no meetings, no project work. And when necessary, pulling in people from other teams to help. A war room is expensive and disruptive, which is exactly why it should be rare and intentional.

Many years ago, I worked for a software company whose support backlog was growing uncontrollably. There were dozens of bugs and customer requests, far too many tickets the team did not know how to address right away, and many with known root causes that just needed someone to fix them. But with the daily influx of new calls, and with software engineers unavailable to debug issues, fix bugs, or even provide guidance on proper configuration, the support team was drowning.

We finally convinced leadership and coordinated a war room for an entire day to tackle the support queue. We literally used the kitchen space, if memory serves me right, to set up all the workstations, and we had people from three or four different departments huddled in there, swarming the issues. Professional services worked with support to fix configurations, developers debugged and hot-patched code, and operations deployed fixes on the spot.

What we accomplished that day gave the support team a cleaner queue and allowed the developers and operations teams to remove items from the backlog. Everybody took a breath of relief. We finally had enough breathing room to start addressing the problems that mattered most.

Now, I am not saying every overloaded team needs a war room. And I am definitely not saying this should become the normal mode of operation. If a team needs war rooms regularly, that is no longer a reset. That is a sign of deeper operational failure.

But if you ever find yourself in front of a team that is so far behind that even entertaining the idea of attacking systemic problems feels impossible, you may need one. Not as a strategy. Not as an operating model. As an emergency intervention.

That is the key distinction. A war room is not how you run a team. It is something you do when the team is so deep in the hole that they cannot think clearly anymore, let alone work systematically. In that state, the first priority is not optimization. It is restoring a basic sense of control, proving that progress is still possible, and creating enough breathing room for people to lift their eyes from the next incoming fire.

And once that happens, you cannot stay in war-room mode. That is when the real work begins. Then you go back to identifying the biggest sources of pain, the recurring patterns, the structural weaknesses, and the changes that will actually bend the curve over time. A war room is not a substitute for fixing staffing, process, ownership, architecture, or incentives. It is, sometimes, the only way to create enough space for those fixes to happen.

So no, I do not think this contradicts my earlier point. Sometimes you fix what hurts most first. And sometimes you clear just enough chaos to make that possible.