The lifeboat exercise comes from a psychology discussion examining morality under pressure. Consider this - "You suddenly find yourself in a lifeboat with 15 people. However, it can only support 9. If you were in command, who would you choose to survive?" The traditional exercise continues on to give a profile of the 15 people, and you have to determine who survives. This discussion, however, leverages that concept toward business survival and focusing on what your minimum viable team is and how this can bleed over into your personal life.
Small startups go through some well-known growth stages. At each stage, the founders have some tough decisions to make, but those usually boil down to a choice between getting much bigger and risking everything or downsizing and sacrificing people, projects and dreams. Even the largest, most successful businesses need to consider the concept of waste and bloat. I have seen a company with nine CTOs and they indeed had to go through the process of who to keep and who to reassign.
If you manage a team, imagine the CEO coming to you one day in confidence saying that there was a critical need to downsize to keep the doors open. You may have 10 or 15 direct reports or more, but in order to keep the company afloat, you need to reduce your team to 5. Who do you retain? Who needs to be let go? Who stays on your team and who is valuable but should be reassigned to a different group? These are tough decisions that no one ever wants to make, but sometimes it happens. The idea of doing the exercise on a routine basis is to avoid having to make that decision under pressure. You can tailor that to your own reality so if you have 5 direct reports, maybe you need to reduce that to 3.
While on the surface that seems like a simple numbers game, the mental process can be gut-wrenching. If you have fantastically creative and highly motivated people, then losing any one of them could have a critical impact, and that is where it gets really hard. It forces you to think of the greater good, not only individual contribution, and it forces you to look inward. You have to at some point consider that YOU may be one of the people left behind. Do you sacrifice yourself for the good of the organisation? Would you?
Luckily for me, I have not ever had to follow through on that mental exercise, and I think that is actually a result of doing it in the first place. When offered the opportunity to expand and hire, I've been able to do a mental check on the results of my last lifeboat exercise and determine that our team could cover temporary workload increases or learn more without expanding unnecessarily. This has helped to remove the spectre of having to reduce staff in leaner times and the whole team prospers. I believe when an entire company operates this way, a smaller dedicated team can do amazing things because you are always assessing value and avoiding bloat.
This whole concept can be translated to other things as well. I consider the same process when developing software. Can I build a functional deployment with 3 features instead of 5? Do all the extraneous frills actually add any value, or can you deliver a smaller, but better product?
You can do the same in your personal life too. Ask yourself if you really need all the "things" in your world or if you could live without. Ask yourself "If you needed to leave your home tomorrow and you could only take with you what you could put in the back of a pick-up truck, what would those things be?" Clothes, pictures, furniture, heirlooms and keepsakes? What is critical, and what is just taking up space in your house?
Running through this mental exercise monthly can save the stress of having to make critical decisions under pressure and helps me streamline my life and my work. Hopefully sharing this will help you too.
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