Toots from 2025-05-19#
Which statement holds more explanatory power as a cause for your last incident: (1) a team member…#
Which statement holds more explanatory power as a cause for your last incident: (1) a team member failed to sing the classic Men Without Hats song “Safety Dance” before committing their change; (2) a team member failed to follow documented code review practices?
Mastodon Source 🐘#
Neither statement has any explanatory power, as they are both explanations based on activities that did not occur (assuming your team isn’t exclusively composed of new wave and synth-pop fans). Things that did not occur cannot affect things that did occur.
Root cause analysis presumes a linear, causal chain of events can exhaustively explain an outcome. This is already a questionable lens to bring to complex system failures. When that line of inquiry further attributes undesirable outcomes to the absence of behavior, it eliminates the opportunity for learning and creates conditions where blaming an actor seems inevitable. If only actor A had done B, some horrible thing wouldn’t have happened!
Mastodon Source 🐘#
This paper on Causal Reasoning (https://www.energysafetycanada.com/EnergySafetyCanada/media/ESC/Programs/Causal-Reasoning-White-Paper.pdf) is an alternative, constructive perspective that considers the context for individual choices. It provides a set of guidelines to help counteract two prevalent post-incident investigation cognitive biases: negative reasoning bias and hindsight bias.
“Counterfactuals are things that did not occur, such as “workers not following procedures” or “workers not stopping work”. The reasoning orientation used to identify counterfactuals can be referred to as negative reasoning. The challenge with this reasoning bias is that it creates an illusion of cause without being causal.”
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“What does it mean to get things done in large companies? Most importantly, it means finishing …#
“What does it mean to get things done in large companies? Most importantly, it means finishing things. How can you finish things in a world where you can keep improving systems indefinitely? It means getting them to a point where the decision-makers at the company are happy.”
https://www.seangoedecke.com/getting-things-done/
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“What worked for us eventually was to remove our specialist hats and be generalists: Front-end…#
“What worked for us eventually was to remove our specialist hats and be generalists:
Front-end, back-end, QA, DevOps, etc. are all different concerns for the same outcome and impact.”
https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/when-a-team-is-too-big
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“However, there is a language you could master that teaches many of the same lessons, appears f…#
“However, there is a language you could master that teaches many of the same lessons, appears far more forgiving in terms of syntax, and has immediate broader appeal.
The language you can learn is your own.”
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/please-learn-to-write/