Emergency Room or Wellness Visits?

Is your software development life-cycle an emergency room or a doctor's office?

Emergency rooms contain urgent requests and responses. ER patients don't have a choice because they've suffered trauma. However, others simply weren't proactive in their healthcare until a crisis occurred.

Doctor's offices service proactive patients coming for care before it reaches life or death. Their care is important, but it's unusual for the patient to die during the visit.

Software development teams can function as Emergency rooms. However, there are two conditions:
(1) The emergency is only for a short period of time and everyone shares visibility of the pathway out of the crisis.
(2) During the hiring process, Team Members are screened for the trait of enjoying / thriving with in a siege.

If you're not planning/needing to run an ER style software development shop, constant emergencies are the smell of mismanaged stakeholders or a failure to adequately anticipate/plan.

Someone once referred to a coworker as a firefighter. They worked great during a crisis. However, that meant a crisis was required for the person to be at their best. Teams led by firefighters (or ER doctors) experience fatigue and burnout from the daily life and death drama (and exaggerated/hyper-sensitive responses to failure). Most people will not maintain an edge of excellence in a string of never ending crisis.

What the solution?

Find calm leaders who insulate/protect their teams from external pressures that present every new project as a drop-everything emergency. Real life ER doctors deal with life and death, and they demonstrate the calm demeanor necessary to lead in a actual crisis. How much more much should we?