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Fallible Humans: Dealing With Failure In The Absence Of Scapegoats

Fallible Humans: Dealing With Failure In The Absence Of Scapegoats

Functional siloing - "dev", "ops", etc. - make it easier to pass the buck and blame others when things go wrong. In an environment where dev, ops, and other business functions co-operate and work together, it's not so easy to fall back on traditional scapegoats. DevOps approaches encourage us to move away from the harmful (and counterproductive) apportioning of blame for failure, but it takes effort and commitment from all involved.

I'll discuss the philosophy and motivations of "blamelessness", along with ways to understand the vital role humans play in making complex socio-technical systems safe, even when things go awry, along with advice on how to promote and foster a blameless culture in your workplace, and techniques for analyzing and learning from failures without resorting to finger-pointing and scapegoating.

This talk was originally given at DevOps Days Minneapolis on 18 July, 2014: http://devopsdays.org/events/2014-minneapolis/

A transcript is available at http://ind.ec/fallible

Ian Malpass

July 18, 2014
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  1. "Jerusalem Ugglan 1". Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

    - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jerusalem_Ugglan_1.jpg
  2. With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and

    care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. ! Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight Of The Idols
  3. A person who has been punished is not thereby simply

    less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment. ! B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity
  4. Get the feature out on time Don’t have any bugs

    Don’t use too many resources
  5. Practice makes perfect as close to perfect as we can

    hope for in a complex system based on reasonable expectations
  6. Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity ! Clay

    Shirky, Wikis, Grafitti, and Process