Comfort is killing your Engineering Team
The counterintuitive discovery that transformed my plateaued team into an innovation powerhouse
I walked into our engineering leadership meeting with disturbing data.
Despite having the most stable, cohesive engineering team in the company (zero attrition for 18 months, consistent delivery metrics, and historically low bug rates) our innovation metrics were at all-time low.
New feature delivery had slowed by 27%, and technical debt was accumulating fast.
What I discovered next shocked me: our team's remarkable stability was actually killing our growth.
Here's exactly what I cover in this article:
- The stability paradox
- The Cognitive Friction Framework
1. Implement Mandatory Perspective Rotation (MPR)
2. Deploy Strategic Constraint Injection (SCI)
3. Institute Methodical Assumption Breaking (MAB)
- The balanced disruption roadmap
- The unexpected outcomes
- Your action plan
- Final thoughts