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Leaders are really into playing pretend and it seems to just get worse the higher they are on the ladder. Like, literally, an effective way to sell to them is

Leaders are really into playing pretend and it seems to just get worse the higher they are on the ladder. Like, literally, an effective way to sell to them is to make them feel like they’re in a movie doing Super Important Things. LOL. Executive Disneyland.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
Much of a leader's job is to visibly perform leadership. It seems silly until the first time you need something big from a team whose managers do it poorly, and you realize that they're incapable of making commitments or setting priorities. The expectation that leaders will play pretend about a "war" and call everyone into a "war room" is just a part of what it means for an organization to commit that consistent high uptime is a top priority.
- fn-mote 2y ago
  > commit that consistent high uptime is a top priority I’m hoping you find SOME leaders who can find a more effective way to convey this priority! Theoretically in our “data driven” leadership you could think of some metrics that would demonstrate the war room is / is not really working. At least after the fact, to save you from the next one. Who feels like a powerful leader in those circumstances, though? On the other hand, it feels good to me to be able to tell people I’m not involved at that level of detail, and they should just talk to X on the team.
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    You can indeed think of such metrics. The most common one is average time to resolution (often abbreviated TTR or MTTR), and war rooms are common precisely because they produce massive benefits in this metric. I know of at least one organization that began outright mandating war rooms after running the numbers and discovering how many incidents would have benefitted from having one. If you can invent a strategy that produces even better MTTR than war rooms, I'm sure a lot of managers would love to hear it. I've never seen one and I'm skeptical whether it's possible.
    - JadeNB 2y ago
      > I know of at least one organization that began outright mandating war rooms after running the numbers and discovering how many incidents would have benefitted from having one. How can you run numbers to find out what would have happened?
      - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
        A large organization can usually identify groups of "similar enough" incidents to identify the correlation. (Can the numbers prove causation? Not to the standards of a scientific journal, but you can't exactly induce 100 incidents to do a controlled study.)

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

Much of a leader's job is to visibly perform leadership. It seems silly until the first time you need something big from a team whose managers do it poorly, and you realize that they're incapable of making commitments or setting priorities. The expectation that leaders will play pretend about a "war" and call everyone into a "war room" is just a part of what it means for an organization to commit that consistent high uptime is a top priority.

fn-mote 2y ago
> commit that consistent high uptime is a top priority I’m hoping you find SOME leaders who can find a more effective way to convey this priority! Theoretically in our “data driven” leadership you could think of some metrics that would demonstrate the war room is / is not really working. At least after the fact, to save you from the next one. Who feels like a powerful leader in those circumstances, though? On the other hand, it feels good to me to be able to tell people I’m not involved at that level of detail, and they should just talk to X on the team.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  You can indeed think of such metrics. The most common one is average time to resolution (often abbreviated TTR or MTTR), and war rooms are common precisely because they produce massive benefits in this metric. I know of at least one organization that began outright mandating war rooms after running the numbers and discovering how many incidents would have benefitted from having one. If you can invent a strategy that produces even better MTTR than war rooms, I'm sure a lot of managers would love to hear it. I've never seen one and I'm skeptical whether it's possible.
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    > I know of at least one organization that began outright mandating war rooms after running the numbers and discovering how many incidents would have benefitted from having one. How can you run numbers to find out what would have happened?
    - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      A large organization can usually identify groups of "similar enough" incidents to identify the correlation. (Can the numbers prove causation? Not to the standards of a scientific journal, but you can't exactly induce 100 incidents to do a controlled study.)