Notes on dynamics of dysfunctional teams

Important stat: 34% of people are feeling regular stress or anxiety at work. Likely many of them are thinking of leaving the organisation they’re currently working in.

Dysfunctional team: a “ticket factory,” timeline:

  • golden era - the team is relatively predictable, the developers are reasonably content, because they get to deliver a greenfield project without much complication - the team delivers value, and delivers it well, but doesn’t know what it is that they’re working towards
  • white lies - deadlines start to be matched exactly (a potential sign of Parkinson’s law), there are // TODO comments that will never be resolved, conflicts resulting from misunderstanding of priorities, arguments in code review, insincere approvals (“I know this is bad, but we have to wrap this up, and we’ll fix it someday.”)
  • zombie team - missing deadlines become standard, SLA breaches become commonplace, team members look for excuses, simple things are no longer simple, no one knows why

Causes of dysfunciton:

  • fear - “we don’t want to be fired”
  • comfort - “there’s nothing we can do”
  • unclear priorities - “we did it because the business pressed us to”

Healing:

  • awareness - “we just can’t persuade the business to do things our way” - what have you done to make the business want to talk to you?
  • argumentation types:
    • “we just want to do it” - technical or personal arguments that are not impacting the business (“we want to use a new framework/library for R&D”), they might work in some circumstances, for example if the business is particularly considerate of the team’s morale
    • benefit language - what benefits can the business obtain due to improving conditions; problematic because (from experience) the business tends to weigh guaranteed costs than potential benefits
    • risk language - improve conditions or else; loss of financial liquidity, reputational damage, product failure (e.g. due to external constraints such as accessibility regulation)
  • becoming a team of craftsmen
    • the team can justify obstacles in business terms
    • they understand the business context - “why we do what we do”
    • they see the reason behind their actions
    • the technical debt has an owner and a deadline

(h/t CodeStoryBro @ Boiling Frogs 2026)