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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)

#21

Post by williamdclt »

JackMcMack wrote: post #14
di4na wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wil…

It means killing your org to live again. This resonates with me. I've experienced a few "agile transformations". They almost never stuck. The thing that mostly worked was creating teams with a majority of experienced agile devs, people willing to self improve and execute. And when the job is over, it all starts falling apart. Some team members might be believers now, they become disillusioned and leave. Some might ha…

I saw an interesting talk by Alistair Cockburn (one of the Agile Manifesto guys), where he said he never once saw a succesful "agile transformation". Just too much resistance to change to have any chance to succeed.

What did succeed, is to create what he called a "new building", meaning a new subcompany (sometimes literally in a new building) with a different (agile) culture, and only letting in people that are interested in making it work. Slowly let the old company die, the new one grow. It takes years and years.

Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)

#22

Post by wlesieutre »

kqr wrote: post #4

Only 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…

> I'm not at all surprised that this one team is the team that has consistently won the last 6 years in a row.

They also have a budget of close to $500 million, which can't hurt. Ferrari and Red Bull are the only teams that come close to that.

Fourth largest budget is Renault at almost $200 million less.

We'll see if they continue to stack up with the $175 million budget cap that's coming in 2021.

Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)

#23

Post by aahortwwy »

kqr wrote: post #4

Only 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…

> Why is this one team not more secretive about their recipe to success?

It's not a secret. Many other organizations (not in F1, by your description) operate this way. It's well understood, but...

> Why aren't more teams copying this?

... everyone on the team needs to buy in to this approach. One selfish team member can slowly ruin the whole thing.

The uncomfortable reality of these cultures is that when someone in the culture is not truly committed, or is putting their self-interest ahead of the team, they need to be removed. A lot of leaders are not strong enough to recognize that and take action.

Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)

#24

Post by diegoperini »

notyourday wrote: post #20

Blameless postmortems should come with the equal pay ( as in equal dollar amount, equal value of equity, and equal value of other perks) for everyone in the tech organization. If it does not, then it is a propaganda tool embraced by people who extract more value from the people below them.

I don't understand the argument. (I didn't vote on your comment)

Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)

#25

Post by skrebbel »

wlesieutre wrote: post #22
kqr wrote: post #4

Only 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…

> I'm not at all surprised that this one team is the team that has consistently won the last 6 years in a row. They also have a budget of close to $500 million, which can't hurt. Ferrari and Red Bull are the only teams that come close to that. Fourth largest budget is Renault at almost $200 million less. We'll see if they continue to stack up with the $175 million budget cap that's coming in 2021.

For non-F1-followers like me: I spent 5 minutes on Wikipedia so you don't have to, and "they" is Mercedes, who re-entered Formula 1 in 2010 after a 55 year hiatus, and won every year since 2014. Pretty spectacular!

Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)

#26

Post by draw_down »

aahortwwy wrote: post #23
kqr wrote: post #4

Only 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…

> Why is this one team not more secretive about their recipe to success? It's not a secret. Many other organizations (not in F1, by your description) operate this way. It's well understood, but... > Why aren't more teams copying this? ... everyone on the team needs to buy in to this approach. One selfish team member can slowly ruin the whole thing. The uncomfortable reality of these cultures is that when someone in t…

Stuff like this makes me wonder. How strong was the culture really, if it didn’t know how to handle having one errant member among its ranks? That is going to happen eventually, on a long enough timeline.

Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)

#27

Post by bob33212 »

aahortwwy wrote: post #23
kqr wrote: post #4

Only 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…

> Why is this one team not more secretive about their recipe to success? It's not a secret. Many other organizations (not in F1, by your description) operate this way. It's well understood, but... > Why aren't more teams copying this? ... everyone on the team needs to buy in to this approach. One selfish team member can slowly ruin the whole thing. The uncomfortable reality of these cultures is that when someone in t…

It is similar to why organizations don't hire 10x engineers only. It is difficult, a lot of work and hiring just one bad manager could cause the 10x engineers to leave or become unproductive. It is far easier to treat engineers like cogs and hire people that check the right boxes and throw them into a standard scrum process.

Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)

#28

Post by codesections »

> We must strive to understand that accidents don’t happen because people gamble and lose.

The problem is that some accidents do happen because people gamble and lose – or rather, because people cut corners is ways that probably won't matter but sometimes really, really do.

The best approach needs to balance both causes of error. I agree that most organizations tend to err too far in the "blame someone" direction – but that doesn't mean that it's impossible to err by going too far in the other direction.

Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)

#29

Post by leggomylibro »

I once worked somewhere that did blameless technical postmortems very well. Whenever something broke, we kept asking questions until we had uncovered what went wrong, and we constantly reminded each other that our failings were in the process, not the people.

It worked great, and we ended up with much more robust systems than most other places I'd worked.

Sadly, they didn't apply the same ideals to social faux pas. We had an older gentleman working for us who, on hearing a younger member of the team propose an idea, said: "okay, I'll play the straight man: why won't this cause [...]"

In the poor guy's generation, "straight man" was a stand-up comedy term for the person who acts deadpan and surprised while their partner makes with the comedy. But after explaining his actions and the expectations/assumptions behind them, he was reprimanded, ostracized in the office, and left before long.

Even though I liked working on the technical systems at that job, I felt isolated and uncomfortable speaking with my peers after that. I've never been good with people, and what if I made a mistake?

That sort of terror is what non-technical folks feel when you ask them to start taking on new responsibilities, and it's why these blameless systems are so important.

Re: Blameless post-mortems and a just culture (2012)

#30

Post by di4na »

JackMcMack wrote: post #14
di4na wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wil…

It means killing your org to live again. This resonates with me. I've experienced a few "agile transformations". They almost never stuck. The thing that mostly worked was creating teams with a majority of experienced agile devs, people willing to self improve and execute. And when the job is over, it all starts falling apart. Some team members might be believers now, they become disillusioned and leave. Some might ha…

Regarding Nummi: the same workers work, but it was obvious and well known from the beginning that it was a different way to do things. It was not a change from the previous one. It was a different organisation altogether
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