TBM 407: The Three Juggling Acts (Strategic, Lazy, and Survival)
Here’s a simple model I’ve been using lately to discuss strategy and focus.
It imagines three juggling acts.
Strategic juggling
Lazy juggling
Survival juggling
Strategic juggling is all about intentionally preserving optionality. You are choosing to keep options alive, and fully understand the tradeoffs and the costs. Periodically, the team prunes and rebalances. You’re operating like an explorer mapping several routes before choosing one, or a farmer planting several crops to hedge against uncertain weather.
Lazy juggling boils down to lack of prioritization discipline. Work is driven by novelty, anxiety, shiny objects, and convenience. No care given to network effects and compounding. Busy across many things, but none of it connects. While you might hope something will “stick”, there’s no mechanism to measure/prove that. You’re like a dog chasing every squirrel, channel surfing without ever watching a show, or a workshop filled with half-started projects.
Survival juggling is non-negotiable juggling. You are overloaded by reality, and there’s no quick fix (other than peanut butter spreading). Tradeoffs are forced, not chosen. Neglecting any ball has immediate consequences. Survival judgement is, as the name implies, about survival. You’re not diversifying with intent, or out of laziness. You’ve got your back against the wall—a triage doctor in an overcrowded ER, bailing water from a leaking boats with multiple holes, or a firefighter containing multiple active blazes.
Slipping…
Strategic juggling can easily slip into lazy juggling if your mechanisms for pruning, prioritization, and learning break down. You keep your options alive indefinitely because nothing forces decisions. Instead of forced periodic rebalancing you find yourself in perpetual “wait and see.” Strategic juggling thrives on information and signals. The big risk is that you start spending all of your energy on maintaining parallel bets, and forget to learn. Worse still, the team burns out, nothing gets a “fighting chance”, people forget the Why, and the team gets addicted to novelty.
Lazy juggling can slip into survival juggling if the accumulated drift, half-finished work, and ignored commitments finally come due all at once. Time to pay up! Optional becomes non-negotiable. Deadlines converge. The team can’t unravel dependencies. Dropping any ball has real consequences, because too many balls were allowed into the air without a plan. The team is no longer chasing shiny objects for stimulation or avoidance; it is scrambling to prevent failure, reputational damage, or collapse. Energy shifts from exploration to triage. Work is dictated by urgency. You are busy because you have no safe alternative.
Survival juggling is very hard to extract yourself from. It is like trying to get back in shape when 18hrs of your day are already locked up in day-to-day responsibilities. What tends to happen is that things finally implode, everything goes to ***t, and new management/leadership tries to pick up the pieces (or existing leadership finds people to scapegoat). It takes intense focus and discipline to bend the curve, and try to fix the train while it is barreling down the tracks in all of its survival-juggling glory. It involves painful tradeoffs, saying no to things that still feel important, stabilizing the most fragile elements first, and accepting short-term discomfort to avoid catastrophic failure later.
People Love Strategic Juggling, But…
Of course, on paper, everyone wants strategic juggling. The “why not both”and “don’t limit our options” leader loves strategic juggling. It is very easy to rationalize whatever you’re doing as strategic juggling, even when all the signals point to lazy or survival juggling. But realistically, sometimes it is very hard to tell. The border between strategic and lazy is sometimes very subjective. In my career there have been many moments where I couldn’t really tell if the team was in strategic juggling mode, or lazy/survival juggling mode, because it all hinged on an assumption being true or false.
In one company I worked with, leadership launched several major bets at once to hedge against an uncertain future. On paper it looked like disciplined optionality. In practice, every team felt stretched, the core product started slipping, and none of the new initiatives generated decisive traction. Some leaders argued this was simply the cost of playing a long game under uncertainty. Others believed we were avoiding hard choices and starving each effort of the focus required to succeed.
The entire diagnosis hinged on a single unknowable assumption: that one of these bets would eventually break out if we just held on long enough. Until reality forced a decision, it was impossible to say whether we were managing a portfolio of options or slowly drifting into survival mode.
Yes, in theory our job was to discern the early signals, pay attention to the inputs, and run disciplined learning loops. In practice, everyone was too tired from the juggling to do anything beyond keeping the balls in the air.
But How About Focus?
“But why not focus?! Why juggle at all?” the savvy reader might ask.
I’ll leave you with a thought. You can have strategic focus, lazy focus, and survival focus just the same!
Strategic focus. Deliberate concentration on the highest-leverage path, chosen with eyes open to what you are not doing, with clear criteria for when to pivot if reality changes.
Lazy focus. Narrow attention driven by convenience, habit, or avoidance; you’re “focused” mainly because you never step back to ask whether this is still the right thing to focus on.
Survival focus. Forced concentration on the most immediate fire, where focus is not a choice but a necessity, and anything outside the blast radius is ignored because there is no capacity left.
Which gives us a nice 2x3:
In fact, you could imagine us perpetually swimming between these:
Virtuous Loop
Explore (Strategic Juggling) →
Learn (Strategic Juggling) →
Choose (Strategic Focus) →
Compound (Strategic Focus) →
Re-explore (Strategic Juggling)
Vicious Loop
Drift (Lazy Juggling) →
Scatter (Lazy Juggling) →
Overload (Survival Juggling) →
Crisis (Survival Focus) →
Triage (Survival Focus) →
Drift (Lazy Juggling)
Good → Bad Crossover (Loss of Agency)
Complacency (Strategic Focus) →
Stop pruning (Strategic Juggling) →
Drift (Lazy Juggling) →
Consequences converge (Survival Juggling) →
Crisis dominates (Survival Focus)
Bad → Good Crossover (Recovery to Agency)
Stabilize (Survival Focus) →
Create breathing room (Survival Juggling) →
Intentional reset (Strategic Juggling) →
Choose a winnable path (Strategic Focus) →
Rebuild momentum (Strategic Focus)
Five Questions
Some questions to ponder:
Where are you actually operating right now, and what evidence would convince you that you’re wrong?
Which balls are you keeping in the air out of true optionality, and which ones are there because you’re afraid to drop them?
If you were forced to eliminate half of what you’re juggling tomorrow, what would you keep? And what does that reveal about your real priorities?
What would it take to create enough breathing room to move one step toward strategic modes, even temporarily?
Are you choosing your constraints, or are your constraints choosing for you?
Related:
Great language for how most teams actually operate.
your image is exactly what I hate about ai slop. your composition is a mess with very little negative space to help isolate the ideas in each of the jugglers, it’s confusing to look at once, if I try to understand it it makes it worse and less complete with things that doen’t make snese as the objects, I’d rather you draw a simple stick figure drawing than include ai slop that keeps on the vector for entropy.