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Something that appealed to me during my years at Bridgewater is the willingness to attribute failure to individuals without making those individuals suffer. In

Something that appealed to me during my years at Bridgewater is the willingness to attribute failure to individuals without making those individuals suffer. In "blameless" there's no personalities mentioned at all but in reality personality and individuals matter. EG if we had an outage because I put code into production w/o review, yes it's a systemic failure but it's also something about me, something about my manager, etc. By talking about those things as well, you make it easier for both the system and the individuals to evolve.

16bytes 3y ago
The issue with attributing failure, no matter how little suffering there is, is that it provides a huge incentive to not self report and/or downplay incidents. Unless you are acting with malice, your actions are a product of the system and procedures in place. Those should be the focus of improvement, not individuals. E.g. preventing prod pushes that contain unreviewed code. Of course we need to talk about individuals, but that's performance management and not incident management.
filleduchaos 3y ago
It's interesting how people carry their preconceived notions into articles like this, especially when those articles are about entirely different industries and/or contexts than they're used to. For example, reading any NTSB report would make it quite clear that the actions of specific individuals - from pilots to controllers to maintenance techs and more - are very much mentioned and dissected under the "blameless" style of investigation that international aviation adheres to. But people already have their own ideas of what "blameless" means that inevitably colours their reading - in some cases, colours it so strongly that not even the evidence of success is enough to budge the conclusion that there must be something wrong with the way "blameless" culture is implemented.

16bytes 3y ago

The issue with attributing failure, no matter how little suffering there is, is that it provides a huge incentive to not self report and/or downplay incidents. Unless you are acting with malice, your actions are a product of the system and procedures in place. Those should be the focus of improvement, not individuals. E.g. preventing prod pushes that contain unreviewed code. Of course we need to talk about individuals, but that's performance management and not incident management.

filleduchaos 3y ago

It's interesting how people carry their preconceived notions into articles like this, especially when those articles are about entirely different industries and/or contexts than they're used to. For example, reading any NTSB report would make it quite clear that the actions of specific individuals - from pilots to controllers to maintenance techs and more - are very much mentioned and dissected under the "blameless" style of investigation that international aviation adheres to. But people already have their own ideas of what "blameless" means that inevitably colours their reading - in some cases, colours it so strongly that not even the evidence of success is enough to budge the conclusion that there must be something wrong with the way "blameless" culture is implemented.