September 29, 2021 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Incident Review
September 29, 2021 at 9:30 am
"...That's much better than blaming one person, giving the job to another human, who might easily make the same mistake."
Quite. Apart from the fact that there's nothing like blaming someone to make everyone take notice, and decide to sweep their mistakes under the carpet, when they happen to them. This is likely to make everything orders of magnitude worse.
September 29, 2021 at 10:49 am
I can remember building a logging solution and getting the response "this is a blame system with proof".
Also can remember someone trying t0 identify an anonymous employee survey respondent who accused the organisation of having a blame culture.
What I and my senior colleagues do is own up to our mistakes. When people look to you as a leader you have to demonstrate the behaviours you'd like to see in the people coming up the ranks. Sometimes this can be uncomfortable and in some cases this can involve having difficult conversations with your seniors and protecting your team.
For the most part I've seen a welcome change over my career where people are more tolerant of those mistakes that are only avoidable in hindsight.
September 29, 2021 at 12:25 pm
Love this article, Steve. There's a lot here I can learn from. I've not been in many incident reviews (I like that term) or what I've heard referred to as a "postmortem". My loss. In fact, its been so long since I've been in one I cannot remember how it went. Thank you for the link. I will read it thoughtfully to remember what was said and hopefully use it in the future.
Rod
September 29, 2021 at 1:50 pm
... This is likely to make everything orders of magnitude worse.
I agree. This is what happens at a lot of places I've worked. Someone gets blamed, occasionally terminated, and things get worse. And management continues to operate like this was a success.
September 29, 2021 at 3:25 pm
I've worked for companies that like to have public executions of those that have made mistakes (I exaggerate, but only slightly) and then announce to the world that all is good, when nothing has actually been learned - other than don't admit to a mistake.
The company I work for now actually does have a no-blame culture and it is one of the reasons I've rejected several offers of higher-paid employment. If you work for a company that does learn from these lessons, then you too have the opportunity to learn - as do others. The atmosphere is better, and people help each other. People trust each other's abilities, but nobody is scared to admit that they don't know or understand something. And as my company has announced the staff can work from home permanently any and all discussions, assistance and requests for help are via Teams, to be seen by all.
I've abandoned several live implementations because I haven't been happy about something, safe in the knowledge that my judgement is trusted and there is no comeback from yet another delay. An atmosphere of fear that the blame culture creates makes for more risks and less analysis.
October 1, 2021 at 3:05 pm
May be a slight case of apples and oranges, but this post made me think of this Simon Sinek video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTMiILxqBSc
Trying to figure out the world of SQL as marketing consultant for SQL Solutions Group https://sqlsolutionsgroup.com/
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