Keep calm and use the runbook

Allocate resources to it.

See: https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/04/04/things-i-learned-managin...

In the onboarding welcome call, one of the first things that I share is that if the new team member notices an issue in any of the documentation, they should either correct it, or at least raise a flag. You need to build the culture from the very start.

Runbooks, checklists, playbooks, SOPs (standard operating procedures), broadly fall into two categories:

- those that always need to be followed

- those that provide helpful and welcome direction on how to do an unknown or rarely occurring task

It needs to be clear which is which.

An example of one that always needs to be followed is the deployment process. It changes from time to time. The person running it may perfectly remember all the steps from the last time it was run. But this time, a new step may have been added. Reading and following it step by step is critical.

How to keep these up to date? When things break, do a retrospective. Often, the action item required to prevent an issue will require you to update the runbook.

For the runbooks that are "nice to have", you should hear about problems from the people that run them. I regularly hear that such-and-such instructions no longer work, or such-and-such step needs to be changed. People tend to appreciate these types of instructions more as they can see how they make their lives easier. Because of that, they tend to take care of them more.

It's kind of crazy that we live in a world where questions like this are even a thing.

> how do you foster a culture in which everyone keeps it up to date

You hire the people who will do the stuff you need them to do, and you don't hire the people who won't.

Given all the well-known strife over hiring games that are the source of constant complaints, you'd think that meant that most orgs' resident personnel experts would be at a place where they already at least have the basics covered—ensuring that employees will be able to manage to do the stuff that they're supposed to do after being hired. And yet here we are.

How much market inefficiency and dysfunction in the industry would disappear if people abandoned any illusions about the efficacy of riddles to attempt to measure aptitude (usually by approaching it sideways), and just focused on these two things instead: "We are a company that does X. We need to hire someone to take care of Y. Part of that involves doing Z. Can you do Z (or figure out how)? Will you do Z?"

IMHO:

- Process: follow it in order when you want result X, all steps need to be completed, each time every time. Routine stuff.

- Runbook: follow it in order when X happens, some steps may not apply depending on the situation or you may need to adapt. Non-routine stuff.