Identify Your Failure Mode
Every behavioral pattern includes a habitual failure mode
Every rank in the SSH has a characteristic way it tends to fail. It is a predictable, almost gravitational pull toward the specific ditch that your particular behavioral pattern has dug for you over the course of a lifetime. Understanding your probable failure mode is at least as important as understanding your strengths, because your strengths will mostly take care of themselves. Your failure mode is the one that sneaks up on you while you’re congratulating yourself on how well everything is going.
The Alpha’s failure mode is intellectual laziness. He has Bravos to execute, Deltas to implement, and Gammas to research, so the temptation to stop thinking and simply command is constant and insidious. Instinct without information eventually leads to catastrophe, but the Alpha whose instincts have been right six times in a row has already stopped listening to the briefing by the seventh. His secondary failure mode is casual dishonesty—managing morale is a legitimate function, but “it’s going to be okay” becomes habitual, and once it does, it bleeds from crisis management into accountability avoidance.
The Bravo’s failure mode is the descent into pedantry, pettiness and cruelty. The enforcer role gives him legitimate authority over other men, and the line between enforcing standards and enjoying the enforcement is one that every Bravo walks daily. His other trap is the succession problem: when the Alpha leaves, the Bravo is often not only tempted, but asked to fill the new void. But attempting to succeed as a situational alpha with a Bravo’s toolkit is like trying to compose a symphony with a metronome. He’s a different instrument, and pretending otherwise is how functional organizations become dysfunctional ones.
The Delta’s failure mode is coasting. He achieves a degree of competence, earns a measure of respect, gets the job and the wife and the routine, and then stops. He doesn’t do this intentionally or dramatically. He just stops putting in the effort that led to his success and starts running on momentum while trying to enjoy it. The Delta who is coasting looks, from the outside, almost exactly like the Delta who is still trying. He shows up. He does the minimum. He maintains. But he has quietly abandoned any aspiration to become more than what he already is, and the eventual consequences of that abandonment tends to erode his marriage, his career, and his self-respect over the course of decades. His secondary failure mode is Delta narcissism, the self-centric perspective of the specialist who mistakes his specialty for the whole world, who looks at his piece of the puzzle and assumes his piece is the whole picture.
