n o ren
Systems & Organizations

Stop Treating Teams Like Fire Drills

When a hospital’s ER team rehearses a code every shift, they still miss the patient whose vitals dip just after the drill ends.

2026-10-041 min read

Teams that run endless “practice runs” assume speed beats depth, but the habit actually erodes the very situational awareness it pretends to sharpen. In aviation, a fire drill is a low‑frequency, high‑consequence event; crews train for it once a month, then return to normal operations, preserving the rarity that makes the drill meaningful. When organizations transplant that cadence to daily product work, the drill becomes the norm and the rare, high‑impact signal disappears into background noise.

A mid‑size e‑commerce firm scheduled a sprint‑planning sprint every Monday, a two‑hour “alignment drill” that forced every function to surface blockers and re‑prioritize. By the third week, the meeting’s purpose was no longer to surface surprises but to fill a calendar slot, and the team stopped noticing a sudden spike in cart abandonment that appeared just after the meeting closed. The drill’s frequency dulled the alertness that a true anomaly would have triggered, and the revenue dip grew unchecked.

The fix is to treat “alignment drills” as true exceptions, not daily fixtures. Reserve a dedicated, unscheduled slot for when a genuine, out‑of‑ordinary signal surfaces, and let the ordinary rhythm run without forced interruption. This restores the contrast that makes the signal stand out, and teams learn to protect their attention for the moments that truly matter.

Key insights
Frequent “alignment drills” flatten the signal‑to‑noise ratio, making real alerts invisible.
Preserve a rare, unscheduled window for genuine anomalies to keep teams’ attention sharp.
Why it matters

Ignoring the rarity of true alerts lets small problems snowball into crises before anyone notices.

Over‑scheduling coordination meetings creates a false sense of control, eroding trust in the process itself.

Use this tomorrow
1
Open the last three sprint retrospectives, locate any item labeled “unexpected,” and count how many were raised outside the regular alignment slot.
2
Schedule a single, 90‑minute “exception meeting” next week, announce that it will only be used for emergent issues, and note whether any new urgent items surface during it.
Go deeper

The practice stems from high‑reliability organizations that deliberately limit safety drills to preserve their salience, a principle first codified in nuclear submarine crews. By keeping drills scarce, operators maintain a mental model that treats each drill as a warning, not a routine.

The approach can backfire if the exception window is never used; teams may begin to hoard issues, creating bottlenecks elsewhere. Balance is achieved by pairing the rare slot with a clear escalation path that encourages timely flagging without overloading the meeting.