most places I worked had folks who cared and wanted to improve things

Where are these places? It feels like they are hard to come by, and their hiring requirements can be highly competitive

Organizations don’t choose whether or not to ask questions. People do. The behavior of an organization is the sum of the actions of the people in it. If you are a member of an organization, and you ask ‘how do we prevent this from happening again?’ Guess what? The organization just learned how to ask that question.

Now it just needs to learn how to answer it, and act on the answer.. but step one seems solvable.

If the person who is charged with resolving the issue is capable, there's no point in a senior manager knowing the details outside of professional curiosity.

Yes, if a director and SVP are discussing the technical details of an incident, I would be concerned -- they should be concerned with putting the right people and processes in place to make those decisions.

When "Something had gone wrong that shouldn't have" bubbles up that far, you have an organizational issue, not a technical issue.

Of course, details might point upwards - plausible deniability could get damaged.

The quote box at the start of the article is the essence of it, the rest is AI-speak dressing it up.

TLDR:

Some outage causes a meeting with an SVP. SVP preempts the discussion with the following:

“I know that if we get into the details, the reasons will be perfectly reasonable. You'll explain what happened, I'll understand why everyone made the decisions they made, and I'll empathise with you.

Then it'll happen again.

So I don't want the details. I want to know what we're changing.”

Leadership still holds engineers accountable. And for that, they need to know the plan. Leaders are also held accountable, so again, they need to know the plan.

To me trust means youre willing to treat people like a black box. If the detail about the outputs is another i/o or something about an output that would appear on a spec sheet, it should be included.

Inner details shouldn't matter. Thats what makes a good summary

The details are sometimes important and sometimes irrelevant. If you insist on skipping them all the time, you will often be right, but when the day comes that you are wrong, your unwillingness to listen to the details will be the reason the problem can't get fixed.

Of course it's possible that this story is just told badly and the SVP already knew the technical details, in which case the blog post is a bit misleading.

I don't think it's necessarily misleading; it's just reminding folks that senior leaders have a different perspective than those below them and tailoring your message to the audience is important.

In this case of this, it was a reminder that while it's easy to believe the SVP is being dismissive, that's not the case at all. Instead, they want systems-oriented decisioning, not detail-oriented.

If anything, this was the SVP helping to grow the leaders under him by forcing them to think at the levels required to interact w/the rest of the organization.

How can you know if their "big change" is appropriate and good without knowing the details of the problem the change is addressing?

I'm a Senior Director leading three teams of engineering and science resources. I hired smart and capable people. Why should I, as a SrD be a technical bottleneck?

How can one know if the engineers' proposed "BIG systemic change" is appropriate and complete, without knowing the details of the problem it is addressing?

That’s the trust thing. Maybe the SVP trusts the people in his organization are capable of making the appropriate change without his supervision and what he’s doing is coaching them on how to do an incident postmortem properly.

Of course as you called out, the SVP might already have all the necessary details to do more than that. But simply pushing people in the right direction is a big piece of leadership’s job, at least when they have people they trust.

I have a healthy distrust of modern business structures, and an awareness of humans being humans.

I don't read the article this way. It's pretty sane for an exec to draw a line where the team's autonomy meets leadership's responsibility for structure and incentives around which said team needs to organize.

"You did the right things and met the goals we set, but we hit a problem and we all agree it shouldn't happen again. Let's talk about what needs to change to address this."

What I got from parent comment, and I agree, is:

If I trust you know what happened, and trust you to know what to do so it doesn’t happen again, why do I need to know? And how will I know (and endorse) your decision if I don’t know what happened?

It seems weird.

Also, not every IC or EM has the same skills and experience. There may be certain categories of work that you can be 100% hands-off and trust them to just do it, and others where you really need to understand bottom-up. Part of being an eng leader is to know when to insert yourself and when to "trust the process".

The SVP doesn't need to make any decisions here. Part of leadership is giving your team the space and time to make the decisions themselves.

Plan is the key here. In reality the SVP is hoping that they can make the decision to go with your solution.

Q: What are you going to do about missing this bug?

A1: "I'm going emphasize "BE" in Hamlets' "to BE or not to BE". - You should be fired for this, but that is not the planned decision.

A2: "I'm going to spend $$$$ on some tool". - This tool might solve the problem, but the budget doesn't allow for it and you should know that: I'm forced to make the decision to override you but I didn't plan on making that decision.

A3: "I'm going to [summarize something reasonable]" - good, you are doing what I expected.

Note that A3 doesn't have to work, it just has to be reasonable. If it works great, if not I will ask again next time and I expect you have different answer. Not working at all better be rare though since each not working loses confidence, but fortunately this is rare. However often working is sometimes all you can get (the next bug might be unrelated - no single answer could solve both). The idea is we repeat this for each bug until the rate of missed bugs is acceptably low.

The meeting was about the SVP teaching the team that incidents happen, what's important is to prevent the same issue from occuring again.

The fact the author had never been in a call with the SVP implies incidents that happened before were explained in details, without much process change.

These two statements are at odds. You first assuming that lack of trust would be the only reason he needs to know what happens next, then go on to outline another reason he and the larger organization would both benefit from knowing more.

But doesn't that same logic apply to whether they need to know the details?

Big organizations don't enable greater technological progress, which is why companies do 98% of their innovation before they get huge, and get bad at innovating once they are.

Big organizations enable scaling and associated economies of scale, so it's possible for Apple to sell millions of iPhones cheaper than if they were a smaller company. I don't think that tradeoff is worth it for any individual consumer (pay a little less to be much more abused by the company), and I don't think it's worth it for society.

Most of the big corporations in America aren't providing things as useful as MRI machines, they're providing net negative garbage like social media and advertising. Big corporations like United Healthcare Group are inflating the cost of medical care rather than providing economies of scale and reduced cost for their clients.

The US desperately needs to bring back antitrust and start breaking these massive companies into much smaller pieces.

There may be something common across many of the ground floor parts, such that even just knowing what's going on in a fraction of them, they are much further in their vibe-calibration of what ground floor is like than if they know zero.

They trust your ability to do a root cause analysis. They don’t trust that you feel empowered to do anything about it, so they are verifying that you actually do.

“Trust” is usually bounded. I trust my elementary aged son to get dressed for school without supervision. That doesn’t mean I trust him to start a campfire without supervision. A chef might trust that their new employee is a hard worker and well intentioned. That doesn’t mean they also trust them to create and serve original dishes.

Here you are recasting “I trust that, despite the bad outcome, everyone’s actions here were reasonable” as “I trust that you are going to solve this fully without my guidance”. The fact that the word “trust” appears in both of these statements does not make them equivalent. Trusting that people are capable and well intentioned does not mean trusting that they will accomplish the same thing without you.

Yup, several things are wrong with it even though it may be a good idea as a good shortcut on the part of the SVP

But it should be used and phrased better.

Used better:trust and only sometimes ask for the detials, like cutting the just-shuffled deck in a card game, sometimes the player to the dealer's right will just tap the deck instead of cutting it, in effect saying "I trust that shuffle". Sometimes, certainly enough to both keep the SVP well-grounded in the details, and to keep the team knowing the SVP is both watching and cares about the details, the SVP MUST ask for the details. Trust and verify.

In terms of phrasing, "I don't want the details" is all about the SVP sending the message s/he doesn't want to be bothered. The phrasing should be: "I trust you on the details on this one; let's go straight to what do we do to manage the next one of these?".

Notice leading with "I trust you on this", not "don't waste my time".

If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.

I work in a competent team and leadership is required.

Unless the organization really truly rewards that behavior. Which is rare.

The senior-most people (VPs, founders) often say they want it. But it’s the middle managers who will stab you in the front in revenge, while staring you in the eye. And if the VP doesn’t step in, they are endorsing the outcome.

Can't do that w/o talking about the cost of what you're going to do, and you can't do that w/o talking about the impact of the incident.

So you can elide some details when you talk to leadership, investors, and regulators, but you can't elide everything.

The best leaders know what they need to pay attention to. You cannot know everything. You can know any one thing (or perhaps several), but there are more things to know than you will have time to learn in your lifetime. The question is what is important for you to know, and what you leave to somebody else.

You will have to trust someone will figure out the details and come up with a reasonable solution. Sometimes you need to know that solution, sometimes in detail, sometimes just enough to know that they solved it. Sometimes you are the person who needs to figure out the details and make the solution. Knowing which you are is important.

It gives LinkedIn post vibes

That's all context management to all the way up

I would agree with you, this just sets up a scenario where the SVP positions themselves as a leader, without having to understand something technical, and without making the decisions on how to change things. It isnt about trust, it is about performing accountability so the SVP can say they did their job.

I think the author of the article is going out of their way to be charitable to the SVP for no reason. That meeting was a reassertion of power, not a wise move made by a sage.

One reason is prioritization. It’s enough to know what the effects of the failure were, the likely cost of what needs to change, and what areas and processes the changes will affect, to decide if and when this should happen.

Leadership still needs to understand these aspects on a conceptual, topical, and cost level to decide on the resource allocation (including time and schedule). They don’t need to understand the technical details, unless they are a technical leader with higher relevant technical competence than their reports.

- If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.

You might need to know timescales so that you can inform upwards/outwards/other. You might need to make sure other resources that might be necessary are available. The planned "what next" and the proposed timescales might have impacts elsewhere that they haven't realised (and maybe even until now had no reason to be aware of). If they tell you the what next and there are no such complications, then they can carry on, otherwise there might need to be some changes to the plan or changes to other plans to allow time/resources to be available for this plan or just to stop potential near future conflicts.

Trust, but verify. And perhaps even assist.

Haha ouch.

It's crazy how far i had to scroll to find someone saying exactly what i was thinking - how come AI sloppy writing like this is showing up on Hn front page?

You can expect what you inspect - Peter Drucker

Action items need an a forcing feature (like an SLO) to insure they are picked up. And someone needs to follow up when the item isn't handled timely. It should show up in team performance metrics and guide changes to processes to insure they get done.

I agree. Finding the time to update docs, processes and code based on a post-mortem is, from my experience, the hardest part. Critical, but difficult.

Actionable items go onto the backlog. The backlog grows from the top.

As a stopgap, a manual pre-flight check is added. The number of manual pre-flight checks becomes a ridiculous overhead but it gives a clear person to blame when something goes wrong.

Presumably the SVP joined the meeting because the incident was significant. The team can present the options but the executive may need to make a judgement call, and he can't do that responsibly if he turns his brain off. For instance, what if it happened due to understaffing or things falling between the cracks among teams, possibly indicating inadequate org design? Such things are the responsibility of management.

Why are these SVPs even needed anymore? They seem to do nothing of value.

If you ask them, of course they will make up a bs story with their fake answer. The fact is that they fail the ablation test.

My father who was also involved in IT tells a similar story where the executive cut him off and said "I asked you for the baby, not the labor pains."

How about explain the problem and solution in 3 to 5 levels of details in a top-down hierarchical manner sort of like a decision tree. Let people decide how far they want to drill down.

We call this incident postmortem, part of a company process. After serious problems and firefighting, when the patches and hacks and people working 24 hour and it admins wake on a Sunday morning to do work, we sit down and try to figure out how this will _never_ happen again.

Learned this doing incident reviews. If the exec asks for details it usually means they don't believe you yet, so "skip to what changes" is actually the good outcome.

I suspect the author still misunderstands the SVP. If I were the SVP of engineering saying this to someone, especially someone who is in a non-core engineering role like product, I probably recognize that they have a tendency to verbally spew and I want them to focus on the risk mitigation and response plan. I’ve already talked to my engineering leader because they informed me immediately, and I’ve already read the incident details.

But also the post reads like it comes from an inexperienced/immature service org, so maybe they’re just sorting their operational response process out.

Love this idea; won't go over well at all with the other accountants I work with. MY CFO doesn't like graphs because they "hide too many details' and insists on everything presented to her being in a table. MY VP pulls out a calculator and re-does the math on tables in decks by hand to help him 'understand'.

A lot of leaders like to hide in the details because the bigger picture is a harder problem.

If you don’t know what happened how would you be able to tell if the changes are addressing the problem? If you don’t care about the problem being addressed why jump in a call in the first place?

Agreed, I came looking for a post like this.

I can't be the only person who thought this is a highly intelligent person being inadvertently gaslit by the SVP into thinking the exec is right to be dismissive with "I don't want the details" because introspection is common in intelligent people.

Had someone said that to me I'd have walked away after saying "fine I'll sort it'.

This illustrates that "trust" to do the job, and since they didn't want the details of the problem, they therefore don't need the specific solution description. This kind of response is also the same level of respect, it's either seen as trust in ability, or just downright disdain with plausible deniability for being rude.

...I'll empathise with you. Then it'll happen again.

I'm not so sure this means "I trust you."

This is a really really smart SVP. The answer to “how do we prevent this in the future” is to identify decisions that reduce that problem from happening again. This doesn’t have to be perfect. You can say “we are going to do X next time” and also say “but we don’t know how far X will work”. When the failure happens again, you can retire process X and move on to Y. The aim is to make a series of decisions that eventually get to the heart of the issue.

Everything else is a conversation that takes up space on a post-mortem or runbook.

An SVP of engineering should care about the details, this is the essence of leadership. When you don’t care about the details you are just a manager and worthless i.e. you should be replaced with a leader.

It's rarely a single cause, there's no root, it's a forest.

It's usually a combination of things that are not quite right, specially in mature orgs where all the simple fixes have already been applied.

It's semantic, if you do RCA right you don't stop at a single cause, but that's what usually ends up happening.

I think that's a problem domain in itself. Identify when failures that occur even when skilled people doing their jobs properly, adjust the environment so that they no longer happen.

It is understandably a completely different task compared to what those skilled people are specialised to do. You probably need a dedicated role to do it.

Perhaps you could call them a manager. Their job is to see the multiple parts of the system. They should ask for the Details of what happened so they can determine why the problem occurred.

Consider one of the problems listed in the article

"The alert fired, but the on-call engineer had already dealt with twenty low-value alerts that evening".

The engineer can say they were busy, they didn't see the alert, that they are swamped with things they think are low-value. Someone else can say the alert fired. Each person involved may have their own perspective, with different ideas as to what the problem actually is.

It's easy when you see problem described in terms of what the solution is. Someone needs to figure that out, to do that they need the details.

This is similar to the approach in healthcare, at least my experience in pharmacy.

When an error occurs we find the root cause but in 99% of cases a change to the environment/process is required to avoid it in the future.

Humans are all imperfect, their competence will change hour to hour let alone day to day. But you can control a system and put checks in place (admittedly a human can still do the process wrong, but then you need to think how the process can be clearer).

No-blame culture is very effective at providing an open environment to share mistakes, learn, but most importantly avoid reoccurance.

Interesting. At our org we always do both. Root cause, what are we changing. I assumed that was standard practice.

If you just explain what happened and why, that's fine but...how are you going to make sure it doesn't happen again?

The problem I found more vexing as a manager was: how can you prevent this KIND of problem from occurring?

I'd have someone on my team make a technical error and xyz wouldn't work. Wed talk thru it, and they wouldn't make that exact mistake again. But there's literally 10k things that can go wrong in our system, so then a related mistake would happen later.

What they needed was improved pattern recognition vs if this / then that which comes from post mortems.

At first I thought "I don't want the details" sounded dismissive.

Well that is because it was delivered by someone who was actually being dismissive!

If they want to know what "we are changing" but don't want to know any detail as to why, even presented at an appropriate level, they are very likely looking for you to take all the risk of the decision and they are dismissing your need to have the necessary informed consent for it to become the we.

Now, if you're presenting that information at a level of detail that is truly irrelevant or deep, that is your problem to fix.

But otherwise be very wary of this pattern of communication where "we" might mean "you". Anyone with any sense of risk management should know not to do this.

If you have not seen it, watch Margin Call. When you get to the boardroom scene [0] you'll see this play out, but you will also see the (pretty rapacious, direct) boss understand properly that the information he is getting from a low ranking employee is nevertheless his problem to understand, even if only at a 10,000 feet level.

Beyond the drama of the way the scene ends, it's actually a very good model of how that interaction should play out for everyone — making it clear that everyone in the room shares in the "we" of it, including the decisionmaker.

I have been in rooms where it played out at least something like that, where the boss wants to make an attempt to share the burden of the detail, and I've been able to leave them feeling somewhat supported, or at least without feeling like I was being shafted.

And I've been in rooms with people who don't want to know the details but just want to know what "we" are going to fix — those guys have never been as good to work for. If they say "we" but leave you with the impression they may mean "you", it's bad.

[0] said scene, but really, really, watch the film if you never have:

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechma...

If I'm to explain what needs to change, that will by definition address processes or lack thereof that led to the problem, no? Which is then explaining what happened and why in an indirect manner, so many of the proposed changes may not make sense without more context.

If I recall correctly, in The Pragmatic Engineer, this was described simply as "provide options, not excuses" and is a critical way of building credibility.

I think the problem is when the execs aren’t looking at change-for-the-better. Instead they’re looking to appoint blame. Moving to a position of assumed competency in your staff and taking the perspective of how-to-improve-next-time is a real step forward in maturity. My guess is it’s rare and blame is easier: most management doesn’t reach this level, instead it’s immature.

What they didn't want was for empathy to become the mechanism by which the organisation absolved itself of having to change.

That line is absolute gold

The incentive is not causing an even bigger mess and keeping their role. Contrary to popular belief, executives really are held accountable for outcomes.

It's a question of how much failure is visible and whether anyone else cares, including themselves. If they were only ever motivated by money, they might already have enough since so long ago that now they really only care about harsher legal action that money can't fix. Getting fired isn't a motivator anymore. That's a bad fit for any organization. Someone else is also dropping the ball there.

Right, maybe saying "tantrum" was suboptimal.

I think there's something valuable in your take. The idea that technical failures and process failures are parallel tracks is not new.

Certainly not the kind of thing where an exec needs to pull out the "I don't want problems, I want solutions" card to illuminate that they are only valuable to the process domain resolution, not the technical one.

The accommodating reader can read that interaction as entirely because of mismatched insight into the issue. I'm willing to budge that maybe too much time in the agile dens does really does necessitate the conversational roundabouts. It's taught people to taboo process they don't see the immediate need for.

I do think his choice of words was a bit suboptimal. But, it got the point across.

As I've gotten older, I've grown to appreciate people who are willing to be a little rude in order to avoid wasting people's time or giving them false impressions.

For example, when recruiters reach out to me on LinkedIn now, I almost always say something like "I don't want to waste your time or mine: what is the salary range?" It might be considered a bit "rude" to immediately jump to money, but I figure that that's less rude than wasting 30-90 minutes of time for a job that I have no chance of accepting.

I also try and be a little upfront if I don't like food someone has prepared. I try not to be too much of a dick, but if someone prepared something that I don't like and they ask my opinion, I will say that I wasn't a huge fan. Again, maybe a bit rude, but I also don't want to mislead people.

It kind of goes against my gut; I, like most people, don't really want to make people feel bad and I certainly am not immune to people-pleasing, but I've tried to fight that for the greater cause of being more-honest and upfront with how I speak.

Is this Five Whys from First Principles?

What you describe is exactly what a 'leader' is supposed to 'see'. When to know when details are needed, and when to trust their delegate. The trust is also balanced: if what you say does not align with what the leader is 'seeing', then trust falls apart.

Everyone has some measure of the 'big picture' and the person at top is supposed to see the biggest, final picture. Where everyone and their processes fit, within the big picture. Delegation could be perfectly aligned (and trust would be easy) if not for quality:

Quality determines how well the relationship works between leader and delegate.

The amount of quality is determined by the amount of need, and urgency available. The relationship (and communication) evolves over time as quality is determined by leaders.

Regardless, there's always going to be difficulty because there's never an ideal system where quality is perfectly measured. That's why communication with people, as people, is also very important. When we perceive disrespect: communication shuts down. Humility must be respected.

If you can't communicate, there's definitely no measure of quality available for the relationship between leader and delegate. If communication is there (and communication should be measured as transmission of real information), then trust is more easily measured.

Once you know how much you trust something, then you know how much detail you need when you 'need to get something done'. Because you know the big picture, and where this thing you need fits. And how well it works.

There are a set of principles at play: used by leaders and engineers, when trying to 'do work'.

When you need to get something done, unless you can build the entire thing, you have to trust someone to help you. There's very few people who choose to live a life where they are 100% self-sufficient, living-off-the-land.

Leaders have to trust people, engineers have to trust components.

I think there is a subtle additional level of trust that the author didn't call out. As the author noted, the SVP trusted that everyone involved in the issue responded rationally and professionally. But they left out the part where the SVP also trusted that the author and their engineering counterpart had already analyzed what happened and how.

The SVP doesn't have time to dig into the "who did what and when" timeline of a problem. They do need to communicate that they're willing to invest resources in preventing recurrence. Was the team burned out by noisy alarms? Then the SVP needs to hear "We're spending time improving automation to reduce alarms, and tuning remaining alarms to make them less noisy. This will take engineering time away from feature work." Or maybe the system had a single point of failure that broke, and the SVP needs to hear "We're redoing X to eliminate a single point of failure, but it will increase our infrastructure budget by $Y".

The SVP is inviting a higher level discussion around what resources need to be consumed in order to be sure this doesn't happen again. And they're opening the door to defending that use of resources.

I don't get it neither. It's important for context to document "why something happened" alongside action items to prevent it from happening again. This is part of history that will be extremely valuable as company knowledge on why processes exists in the first place.

Otherwise, what will be the discussion when it's time to question it later?

This should not be exclusive.

Because answering the “why” feels like you’ve achieved something. You all blame Gary, pat yourselves on the back and then go home satisfied.

It’s like when cloudflare does a blog post saying they were out for three days and it was because they let someone slopcode the DNS. How has that achieved anything? It will go down again the following week. The customers want to know how you will prevent it happening again, they don’t really care how entertaining your blog is.

How can you talk about what you'll do w/o talking about cost, cost of opportunity, impact of motivating incidents, etc.??

Maybe if the changes you're doing are small and cheap, sure. But if they are invasive and costly...

I can understand the inclination, but actually I /do/ want the details, because without the details I cannot consider and measure if the change proposed is a reasonable pathway to help manage the class of problem. Many times, people in organizations while well-meaning are siloed and focused specifically in their own niche and therefore will propose changes that cannot be coherent in any holistic manner across all the parts of the organization that would need to be affected by the change. That means you /do/ need to understand the details, and also have a big picture view.

The executive is there to help with the big picture, but you can't see the big picture if the canvas is blank.

My version of this is: "This is the kind of mistake that we get to make once. How do we prevent it from happening again."

I usually do want the details, but I also want to communicate my expectations up top and unambiguously.

SVP seems like such a useless appendage in the story.

He doesn’t want the details, he just wants someone else to tell him what they’re gonna do. But if he doesn’t know the details, he won’t understand if the plan will make things better or worse.

So… what exactly is this presumably valuable person there to do? Just to gage the confidence in the room? Presumably everyone was confident before the mistake happened.

What does this person who just wants a solution add? Why isn’t he fostering a discussion and adding his insight? Why is he in the room at all?

[The Manager] continued:

> I know that if we get into the details, the reasons will be perfectly reasonable. You'll explain what happened, I'll understand why everyone made the decisions they made, and I'll empathise with you.

> Then it'll happen again.

> So I don't want the details. I want to know what we're changing.

Even if the manager's approach was correct, this is just a hurtful way to frame it to your team. It's great that the author could reverse-engineer what the manager was doing, but it shouldn't come to that.

Why couldn't the manager say something like:

You are all great engineers, so I already know that everyone made the best decision available with the information they had at the time. What are we going to do differently moving forward?

I'm still not sure I agree with the strategy, because I don't see how you can understand what happens next without understanding what went wrong. But I can see how the framing might help steer the discussion.

I'm giving you the details because I'm going to give you options for solutions and I need priority information about those solutions, and you need to be informed about the trade-offs and costs of each option because you have better knowledge of our overarching objectives than I do.

If our overarching objectives don't impact our on-the-ground decisions, what are you even for?

Your svp is a bad manager

It’s still up to them to ask. If they want to know the whole causal chain from distal to proximal, so be it. And if they never ask, I doubt it would help at all trying to explain anyway – they’d just zone out – and might be a good idea to start looking for a new job.

In any case, the actually important question "How to make sure this won’t happen again?" would presumably include the relevant parts of what "this" is as well. But in a more actionable frame.

This reads like a LinkedIn post. I know kagi translate[1] supports "LinkedIn" language - could someone with an account there copy that article and translate from "LinkedIn" to "English"? I wonder if we'd uncover some simpler meaning this way.

Edit: I was wrong. It still reads like LinkedIn to me but “translating” doesn’t help. Thanks in any case.

[1]: https://translate.kagi.com/

We write up timelines. We reconstruct decisions. We explain dependencies. At the end of it, we hand over a document that contains the specific combination of events that led to the incident. Everyone nods their head, says "that makes sense", and we all move on with our day.

...huh? I've been in corporate America for 19 years now and I've never once had this happen. I've never seen anyone just look for the cause and not ask what can be done to prevent it in the future. Everyone KNOWS that question is coming next.

Idiotic article. Nobody collects "why"s so they can not change anything. Not changing anything is never the failure mode. The failure mode is changing the wrong thing. If you are a leader, and something egregious goes wrong, it is your job to ensure that your people don't just put some bandaid fix on it that will keep causing issues indefinitely. Understanding the complete "why" is a precondition for that. Not bothering to hear a complete explanation because you trust your people to do the right thing is fine, but then why were you on that call in the first place? Let them do their job.

This is just a LinkedIn post.

"We are under-qualified"

What answer is wanted here?

"We will be more proactive and agile, and volunteer to work during the entire weekend to keep our customers happy, sir!"

"Good, good, but don't bother me with the details."

How you can have an informed conversation about change without hearing the problem out?

If you trust someone that much, why are you even in the loop? Why are you badgering them at all? This is just bad management pretending to offer underlings autonomy. As soon as it fails, everyone loses their job.

SVP sounds like a dingle to me. Author is justifying it with some magical thinking, "Oh he's not being rude, he's being smart"

The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying "I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next".

Apropos, I was once told a Japanese saying: "Fix the problem, not the blame."

I must have repeated this charming story a dozen times before realizing it makes no sense in Japanese -- it relies entirely on English idioms.

"Okay, then I'm going to rewomble the dinglehop, which should un-galvatrate the percapitator." Why is the SVP in the meeting at all? If they don't want the details, they can't contribute to the change, or even evaluate whether the change makes sense at all. The SVP could be completely removed from this situation and the outcome would be exactly the same. Which shouldn't be surprising, since that's almost always true of all executives anywhere.

Everyone nods their head, says "that makes sense", and we all move on with our day.

Why? Why do you need to be intimidated into actually making effective change? Why is everyone walking around with their hands tied, unable or afraid to enact change? Probably because of the terrible leadership at this company.

> "We missed it because Alice was on holiday and Bob thought the Widgets team owned it".

Okay. How do we make ownership unambiguous when someone is unavailable?

You cannot take this step without details. That Bob-Alice story is the details. You do actually need to know that story before you can take the step of knowing that "unambiguous ownership" would be a worthwhile change to make. What exactly is this SVP doing again?

This entire post could be summarized as "executives are useless" and "do the 5-whys", both of which everyone already knows.

No. They should always get the full details.

Neurotypical executive toxic attitudes should be shamed.

Making informed decisions based on assumptions or guesses is always going to result in terrible outcomes.

If your corrective action depends on people remembering a conversation from six months ago, you don't have a corrective action. You have organizational folklore.

I appreciate this.

Exactly. The point of the article is that the boss just needs to know that you have a real plan, not 3 Hopes in a trench coat.

I thought keeping details away from c-suit regardless of how technical these people are was the standard thing to do. Your job is to make these guys work the minimum. We fucked up, we fixed it and it won’t happen again. They don’t need to know anything else. You could upload the forensics report to a share drive and make the link available if they want to see it, but most times they won’t bother.

The SVP needs something to report back to his manager and that’s it.

I learned this myself while yelling at AI.

i don't want to sound like a douchebag but isn't figuring out what went wrong and how to prevent next time kind of an obvious goal

Lots of folks are commenting on the internal dynamics, but the other part that didn't resonate with me was actually the what happens next part. This may be an overreaction on my part, stemming from watching lots of engineers suggest expensive solutions to relatively minor issues. And it's a mistake I've made myself before as well, I started in telecom with very strict standards for availability, so it's hard to beat out of me the desire to look through the most minor alarm for a potential problem brewing or get to a root cause of the most minor incidents.

And maybe this is just a part that the article dodges, but for something described as non-catastrophic, I would suggest that there shouldn't be a presumption of changes. In my view there should be an assessment of the risk of re-occurrence, and if it was a near miss, what is the risk had it not been a near miss. And then even should changes be part of the outcomes, how expensive are those to implement compared to whatever the issue was, and if they're too expensive compared to the risk, don't put resources into it.

“If your corrective action depends on people remembering a conversation from six months ago, you don't have a corrective action. You have organizational folklore.”

I think i’m going to call our ticket support system “folklore” from now on. It sure is used that way.

Right, this is not even table stakes, it’s the whole point of a post-mortem.

When you have a bug in a program, you fix it. This is just a variation of that incredibly obvious “advice” applied at a slightly different level.

I sympathise with this, and a lot of teams do operate that way, but I fundamentally disagree with it.

Part of the reason Amazon's CoE-driven engineer culture had such operation excellence is that the responsibility was driven the whole way up the management chain. If your manager didn't dig down to the root cause of a sev2, the director was damn well going to, and if the director didn't, Andy Jassy was going to call them on it.

That sounds like a lot of busy work, and a bunch of it undoubtedly is, but the flip side of it is that the actual root causes were addressed, and if the root cause needed serious cross-functional resources to address, the escalation would get you what you needed. Need approval to bounce 3 months of work off your roadmap to address? You have a VP on the line to make that call. Need a couple of other teams to fix their shit? Here's a principal engineer who outranks their directors to drive the work. And so on...

Bootlicking apologia for a bad boss.

The assumption that something always has to change is the culture that leads startups to knee jerk their way into miles of red tape and performative bureaucracy

Yes and no.

Solutions aren't always good solutions. We need to drill into the details, but not the problem's details. We need to look at the solution's details.

https://littlegreenviper.com/problems-and-solutions/

Best article I’ve read this month. The SVP expressed unqualified trust in the team. Asking the team for the next steps emphasizes this trust.

I get triggered from these Linkedin bs type of articles. In the real world time and money is limited and everything gets prioritized. I worked at corps were MOST of the incidents reoccurred cause fixes was never prioritized. Cheaper to have people on call than to fix stuff.

So in summary, instead of details propose how to change the system so that instead of hearing perfectly reasonable details about why the current system failed, go straight for changing the systems to prevent the chance of failure again.

I like this plan of action, it removes focus from what happened in the past to how can we prevent it from happening in the future.

The post-mortem process can cover all of these things:

  - what happened
  - impact
  - root causes
  - what will be changed (commitments)

You can't really talk about what to change w/o talking about root causes, and you can't talk about that without talking about what happened. You also can't consider the costs of commitments to be made w/o discussing actual and potential impact because resources are limited and the cost of opportunity is real.

It's fine for executives to get only a summary of impact + commitments. But the whole post-mortem process has to be followed, and some people have to be aware of all the details.

I think you did not read that part.

The SVP wasn't interested in understanding how the issue happened or who was involved. They didn't want to be convinced that everyone involved behaved reasonably. That's a baseline expectation.

Their question became:

“Given that reasonable people produced this outcome, what needs to change?”

Of course you have to know the problem, but he trust and excpect a sulution from them. So this does just work this way, if you can trust the people. If not, then the top person has to check the solution for himself.

I can't help but notice that a climate of fear around being deemed non-essential or otherwise getting on an authority figure's bad side tends to create significant mismatches in priorities and breakdowns of trust that could be upstream of significant organizational inefficiency in a variety of situations. Perhaps solutions to meta-problems of this nature might be high-leverage, as the thought leaders like to say