What Service Disruptions Reveal: Negotiation Style and the Anatomy of Team Response
Why the same incident looks like failure, resilience, and a systems problem all at once.
Thirty years ago, without warning, I developed a serious fear of flying. I was a periodic traveler, so the anxiety was both unexpected and disruptive. After a couple of years of managing it poorly, while still a graduate student, I decided to face it directly. I started flying lessons. It was remarkably affordable, less than three thousand dollars for a private pilot’s license at the time, paid out at fifty-seven dollars a lesson.
Flight instructors use a phrase that has stayed with me: either “you fly the plane” or “the plane flies you.” Experienced pilots develop an instinct, built from hours in the cockpit, that picks up on subtle shifts in wind and aircraft behavior before those shifts become problems. New pilots spend their time reacting. Each correction comes a beat too late and becomes an overcorrection, which creates a new problem, which requires another correction. Only experience teaches you which kind of pilot you are.
The same dynamic holds for CIOs and their senior leadership teams. Unless a team is continuously doing the quiet, disciplined work of anticipating and preventing problems, disruptions will come. As someone who is naturally assertive, my instinct is to lean hard on prevention, to keep teams focused, to treat every near-miss as a signal that something needs addressing. That instinct is not wrong. But flying this plane well is not a solo act; it is a team effort requiring the best of three distinct styles.
In today’s Dispatch, I want to revisit the negotiation styles discussed in earlier commentary and look at them through the lens of IT service disruptions. The three styles: Assertives, Accommodators, and Analysts, read these IT service disruptions quite differently. Each sees something real. Each misses something their counterparts will catch. It is their collective effort at scrutinizing the smallest details together that puts the team in genuine control of the plane they are flying.
The big picture
Major service disruptions are not just operational events. They are interpretive ones. When something breaks, whether by human error or machine failure, the disruption does more than reveal a gap in process or infrastructure. It surfaces the assumptions each team member carries about what strong team performance actually looks like.
Most post-incident reviews proceed as if everyone in the room read the same event. In practice, they did not. The same incident that registers as a performance failure to one person looks like a demonstration of team resilience to another, and a predictable consequence of a system carrying too much load to a third. These interpretations are not random. They are structural. They follow directly from the negotiation styles explored and discussed previously: the Assertive, the Accommodator, and the Analyst.
Understanding why this happens, and what it costs when overlooked, is the central challenge of building teams that improve steadily over time rather than cycling between disruption and recovery. Mutual self-awareness is key to strong teams.
The Assertive’s Read: Weight as Prevention
For the Assertive, a major service disruption is evidence of drift. Standards have slipped. Somewhere attention was lost, a detail fell through, and both the leadership and the organization paid for it. Their instinct is to bring weight to the moment: name what happened, assign responsibility, and make clear that tolerating service disruptions is not acceptable. They believe, not without reason, that a team that never feels the full weight of disruptions will stop working hard to prevent them.
The Assertive is not wrong. Teams do drift in the absence of accountability. The problem is the conflation of two distinct questions. Did the team respond well? And did the team prevent this? For the Assertive, a strong recovery does not redeem a failure to prevent the major disruption in the first place. That distinction is important, but applied without calibration, it produces a team culture that equates every disruption with poor performance rather than using the incident as a diagnostic.
The structural risk of too much Assertive energy is a tension-filled room. Accommodators, who thrive on relational trust and shared recognition, disengage or fade into the background when the environment feels punitive. Analysts, who need psychological safety to raise structural concerns without being accused of deflection, go quiet. The very voices that could improve the system long-term are driven out by the short-term pressure to raise the bar. An all-Assertive culture can hold standards, but it can put too much weight on those best situated to address underlying issues.
The Accommodator’s Read: Response as Sufficient Evidence
The Accommodator measures the performance of the team much differently. They do not evaluate the incident at the moment of major disruption alone; they evaluate it across the full arc. Detection, communication, coordination, recovery. A team that held together under pressure, communicated well, and resolved the issue with collective effort has demonstrated something real and tangible. That is not nothing. Operational resilience is built over time through exactly these moments.
The Accommodator is also not wrong. Teams that carry weight and function under pressure have built a kind of institutional muscle. The risk is a different conflation: “Did we handle this well?” and “Is the IT service stable and healthy?” are separate questions. A team can respond superbly to a chronic condition while remaining entirely blind to the fact that a chronic condition is worsening. Over time, the Accommodator’s instinct to recognize and affirm can become a tolerance for drift, normalizing recurring incidents by reframing each one as evidence of team strength.
The structural risk of too much Accommodator influence is the gradual acceptance of a quiet, degrading baseline. Prevention is deprioritized. Root cause analysis feels unfair. The team gets very good at incident response and focuses less on incident prevention. What looks like a resilient team culture is sometimes a comfortable one.
The Analyst’s Read: Structure Produces Defects
The Analyst does not read a disruption as evidence of individual lapse or cultural softness. They read it as output. Given the volume of work in progress, the number of competing priorities, and the cognitive load on the people doing the work, a defect at this moment was a near certainty. The framework here is familiar to readers of prior commentary: high WIP correlates with high defect rates. Lower the load, reduce the errors. Set better priorities, say no more often, and the system produces better results.
The Analyst’s structural argument is well-grounded. The research on WIP and defect rates is consistent, and the dynamics of overloaded service queues are predictable. But the Analyst’s lens, applied too narrowly, mistakes the map for the territory. Not every defect is a WIP problem. Some disruptions trace to training gaps, design flaws, or errors or omissions in judgment. Structural explanations, however accurate, can become a way of avoiding the accountability questions the Assertive is right to raise.
The more serious risk is behavioral. Analysts shut down under sustained assertive pressure. When the post-incident debrief turns into an accountability session with a high emotional temperature, the Analyst withdraws. They stop offering structural critique precisely when it is most needed. A team that loses the Analyst’s voice at critical moments loses its most reliable corrective mechanism. The pressure cooker the Assertive builds is most damaging not because it generates weight on the team, but because it deters the people best equipped to apply structural fixes to the system.
Why Strong Teams Need All Three
The Assertive, Accommodator, and Analyst are not competing for the correct interpretation of what happened. They are each surfacing a distinct response mode that the others are structurally inclined to miss. A team without Assertive energy drifts. A team without Accommodator instinct buckles under stress. A team without Analyst discipline accumulates invisible structural risk until something breaks hard.
The ideal-type version of each style, pursued without the correction of the other two, produces a team that is recognizably broken. The pure Assertive culture stresses out its best people. The pure Accommodator culture gradually accepts chronic low-level underperformance as normal and expected. The pure Analyst culture retreats into analytical frameworks and goes quiet at the moment the room needs a clear voice.
Bob Iger’s phrase, “sweating the details together,” captures what the alternative looks like. Not one interpretive style imposed on the whole team, but shared scrutiny of the same details from different angles. Excellence in operations is not a single perspective held consistently. It is the accumulation of small corrections, made by people who see the same playing field differently and trust each other enough to say what they think.
The leader’s job is to hold those three perspectives in productive tension. In practice, that means managing the Assertive’s post-incident pressure so it does not silence the Analyst, creating space for the Accommodator’s recognition so it reads as earned rather than defensive, and treating structural critique as required input rather than a deflection from accountability. All feedback should always be welcome. None of these adjustments is easy in the moment of a response or debrief. All of them are necessary.
The final word
A disruption reveals more than what IT service broke. It reveals how the team understands the relationship between performance, pressure, and trust. The Assertive, the Accommodator, and the Analyst will never read that moment the same way. That is not a problem to resolve. It is the architecture of a team that gets better over time. Success is not a single moment of incident response and resolution. It is the accumulation of small details, scrutinized honestly by people who see the world a bit differently and trust each other enough to say the things that need to be said.