Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
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Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
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Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
#2I love blameless postmortems. And, it isn't really whether the team or the team lead decides to do a blameless postmortem. It's whether the company values looking at things this way. And, those values change over time, and shift when the times are good or bad (financially).
I would really love to read about a blameless postmortem that happened in a dying company where everyone was backstabbing each other. Now, that would be a good story!
In fairness, this story does convey that. The "second story" part is great.
I do wish there was a little more about how management came around to seeing it, how they rectified bonuses and pay and PIPs. There is an untold journey here.
Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
#3I love blameless postmortems. And, it isn't really whether the team or the team lead decides to do a blameless postmortem. It's whether the company values looking at things this way. And, those values change over time, and shift when the times are good or bad (financially). I would really love to read about a blameless postmortem that happened in a dying company where everyone was backstabbing each other. Now, that w…
> I would really love to read about a blameless postmortem that happened in a dying company where everyone was backstabbing each other. Now, that would be a good story!
It doesn't have to be a dying company. Many companies that try to transition from startup -> small company -> medium company -> megacorp tend to run into periods of change and insanity in every one of those transitions. I suspect its one of the reasons why most companies die out at some point: the failure to focus on product and focusing instead on politics. Teams turtle down, avoid responsibility (i.e. blame) at every opportunity, the product turns to shit as nobody wants to move a muscle in case anything breaks.
Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
#4Only tangentially related but I have to get it out of my system anyway:
I watched the latest season of the F1 documentary on Netflix, and what stood out beyond anything else to me was that every team pitted their own drivers against each other, had a "you win or you lose" mentality, screamed at people for messing up, and so on.
All teams except one. One team iterated how they "win as a team and make mistakes as a team", mistakes are an opportunity to learn, and so on. One team showed pretty clearly how they had a good culture surrounding failures.
I'm not at all surprised that this one team is the team that has consistently won the last 6 years in a row.
Why aren't more teams copying this? Why is this one team not more secretive about their recipe to success?
Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
#5I love blameless postmortems. And, it isn't really whether the team or the team lead decides to do a blameless postmortem. It's whether the company values looking at things this way. And, those values change over time, and shift when the times are good or bad (financially). I would really love to read about a blameless postmortem that happened in a dying company where everyone was backstabbing each other. Now, that w…
I have been recommended the book "Turning the Ship Around" for an account of how to grow a new good culture in a decisively bad one. It's probably not an exact recipe for being able to hold blameless postmortems, but I suspect it could contain some valuable information.
If anyone knows how well it applies to this situation, please do tell me!
Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
#6Only tangentially related but I have to get it out of my system anyway: I watched the latest season of the F1 documentary on Netflix, and what stood out beyond anything else to me was that every team pitted their own drivers against each other, had a "you win or you lose" mentality, screamed at people for messing up, and so on. All teams except one. One team iterated how they "win as a team and make mistakes as a tea…
Both strategies are known to work - Carrot and Stick. Why?
Because the psychological Traits and Needs of all humans are not the same.
Most people who build teams have a sense of their own Needs and Traits and pick strategies/team members that align/compensate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Invent...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
There is a distribution of Traits/Needs that you need to be aware of within any population, group, team etc.
If you are not aware of those variations and randomly create groups and try to impose strategy, what works and fails will always remain mysterious.
Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
#7I love blameless postmortems. And, it isn't really whether the team or the team lead decides to do a blameless postmortem. It's whether the company values looking at things this way. And, those values change over time, and shift when the times are good or bad (financially). I would really love to read about a blameless postmortem that happened in a dying company where everyone was backstabbing each other. Now, that w…
I have been recommended the book "Turning the Ship Around" for an account of how to grow a new good culture in a decisively bad one. It's probably not an exact recipe for being able to hold blameless postmortems, but I suspect it could contain some valuable information. If anyone knows how well it applies to this situation, please do tell me!
TBH I’m not sure of its relevance to postmortems specifically but I’d highly recommend the book. Turn the Ship Around, Marquet. Great audiobook too.
Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
#8Only tangentially related but I have to get it out of my system anyway: I watched the latest season of the F1 documentary on Netflix, and what stood out beyond anything else to me was that every team pitted their own drivers against each other, had a "you win or you lose" mentality, screamed at people for messing up, and so on. All teams except one. One team iterated how they "win as a team and make mistakes as a tea…
As the other reply kind of hints at, it's a lot easier to do this if you have the absolutely dominant driver on your team. If I was the technical director and we were losing, I'd certainly be like "Lewis, pal, we lose as a team, right?"
And then Lewis would be gone and we would just be losers.
Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
#9Only tangentially related but I have to get it out of my system anyway: I watched the latest season of the F1 documentary on Netflix, and what stood out beyond anything else to me was that every team pitted their own drivers against each other, had a "you win or you lose" mentality, screamed at people for messing up, and so on. All teams except one. One team iterated how they "win as a team and make mistakes as a tea…
Toyota did the same thkng with NUMMI.
More than 4 decades later, none of the other manufacturers come close to Toyota still. Why?
Because the change is one in how you understand the world. This is really hard to do, particularly as an organisation. It needs to reinvent yourself from scratch. It means killing your org to live again.
The org will fight it. People that were favored will lose power and standing. They will fight it. Things will get worse before getting better. They will fight it. It will need different way to count success. That will be used against it. It will need new way to trust. They will say it is laxist.
Said otherwise: the current structure work good enough. There is not enough reward and competitive pressure to make the huge opportunity cost of change an accepted strategy.
You can apply that model of change infinitely. Ask yourself why we have not seen huge swath of the web move into Elixir as an example.
Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)
#10I love blameless postmortems. And, it isn't really whether the team or the team lead decides to do a blameless postmortem. It's whether the company values looking at things this way. And, those values change over time, and shift when the times are good or bad (financially). I would really love to read about a blameless postmortem that happened in a dying company where everyone was backstabbing each other. Now, that w…
So this came from management. It is John Allspaw that pushed for them, at the time VP of Eng iirc.
For how to do it... there is a community at https://www.learningfromincidents.io/ trying to help.
The consensus so far is to test waters and do some "in parallel", if necessary rogue-ish. The output is so superior in term of learning that you may then use this result as a trojan horse.
You need to carry your water.