What makes public posts about incidents different from analysis write-ups

Posted Posted in ACL Posts

We have written before that documents written about an incident can take many forms and structures, depending on the author(s), purpose, and target audience. The goal of this post is to describe what makes public-facing articles that companies publish about incidents different from internal write-ups representing an effective incident analysis, and a rationale for why […]

Understanding Incidents: Three Analytical Traps

Posted Posted in ACL Posts

Dr. Johan Bergström, who leads the MSc program in Human Factors and Systems Safety at Lund University (I am an alumnus) has a short ~7 minute video discussing three common analytical traps that incident analysts and accident investigators can get caught in. They are: 1. Counterfactual reasoning 2. Normative language 3. Mechanistic reasoning Have you seen any […]

Jeli.io: Supporting Grounded Incident Analysis

Posted Posted in ACL Posts

I am an angel investor in Jeli.io, and could not be more excited for the product to come out of “stealth” mode, for many reasons! At its core, Jeli is built around the easy collection and annotation of this data, helping analysts make connections between chat transcripts, interviews, prior related incidents, and a whole host of […]

Troubled Times: Episode 3

Posted Posted in ACL Posts, Troubled Times

Demonstrating adaptability and the need for sustained adaptability Projections made in previous TT episode The projections made in Episode 2 are largely confirmed by experience during the summer. Private communications with individuals on these topics reveal substantial levels of stress and stress-related disturbances, notably sleep cycle disturbances, vivid dreaming, varying degrees of anhedonia, strained personal […]

Presentation: “Findings From The Field”

Posted Posted in ACL Posts

A few weeks ago I gave a talk at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London (which was virtual). The description of the talk: In the past two years, we have had the opportunity to observe and explore the real nitty-gritty of how organizations handle, perceive, value, and treat the incidents that they experience. While the size, […]

How Learning is Different Than Fixing

Posted Posted in ACL Posts

I was honored to present a talk at the AllTheTalks conference a few weeks back. tl;dr: slides are here, video and transcript is below The topic was incident analysis (big surprise there!) and the notion of learning and fixing, and how these activities are related but not the same. A key idea here is that rather than focusing on simply focusing on […]

Troubled Times, Episode 2

Posted Posted in ACL Posts, Troubled Times

Operators and Organizations Coping with Prolonged and Stressful Emergencies We’ve made some observations over the past month about how tech organizations are adjusting their practices as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s still too early to synthesize these observations into what we might call “patterns” but some of them do appear to be taking […]