I sympathise with this, and a lot of teams do operate that way, but I fundamentally disagree with it.
Part of the reason Amazon's CoE-driven engineer culture had such operation excellence is that the responsibility was driven the whole way up the management chain. If your manager didn't dig down to the root cause of a sev2, the director was damn well going to, and if the director didn't, Andy Jassy was going to call them on it.
That sounds like a lot of busy work, and a bunch of it undoubtedly is, but the flip side of it is that the actual root causes were addressed, and if the root cause needed serious cross-functional resources to address, the escalation would get you what you needed. Need approval to bounce 3 months of work off your roadmap to address? You have a VP on the line to make that call. Need a couple of other teams to fix their shit? Here's a principal engineer who outranks their directors to drive the work. And so on...
> Then I realised that "I don't want the details" wasn't being dismissive. The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying "I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next".
Something about this feels wrong:
- If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
- If you don't trust them completely, how can you know if "what happens next" is appropriate without knowing the details?
Isn't this just reinforcing the idea that leadership doesn't need to have their feet on the ground?
The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.
> If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
> The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.
These two statements are at odds. You first assuming that lack of trust would be the only reason he needs to know what happens next, then go on to outline another reason he and the larger organization would both benefit from knowing more.
It's not just about trust. It's about knowing what your team is up to so you can provide them the resources necessary while also working to remove any obstacles in their way so they can get shit done. That's what good management does, it's just rare to see in low-trust organizations that treat everyone like a cog to be micromanaged because no one trusts anyone to get shit done of their own accord for whatever reason.
> These two statements are at odds. You first assuming that lack of trust would be the only reason he needs to know what happens next, then go on to outline another reason he and the larger organization would both benefit from knowing more.
But doesn't that same logic apply to whether they need to know the details?
> It's about knowing what your team is up to so you can provide them the resources necessary while also working to remove any obstacles in their way so they can get shit done.
That makes sense - I don't know if that's what the blog post was implying though. Ironically, this blog post could probably benefit from a few more details about what the meeting was supposed to achieve :)
A lot of times, people just need a gentle nudge, or an official blessing from an authority figure, to go ahead and make the change that is necessary. You can tell people to manage up, to fully own their work and their process, etc. But a lot of humans don’t want to step on others’ toes or be perceived as acting out of line. A worker on the assembly line might know the best way to make the line run more smoothly but it’s easy to think that’s “not my job” or “above my pay grade”. Sometimes all that’s needed is to tell them, “Yeah, go ahead and do it.”
Getting that to happen more automatically is one way out of this situation, but that tends to cause problems of its own, with blurry lines of responsibility and authority. So it works best with relatively flat organization structures, which aren’t used much in large organizations.
> But a lot of humans don’t want to step on others’ toes or be perceived as acting out of line.
It's conditioning. In all organizations above a certain size (> 100 people), stepping out of line receives an official reprimand. Someone always complains. Receive enough reprimands and the person is terminated. People learn to stay in line because they've been punished whenever they step out of it.
Unless the organization really truly rewards that behavior. Which is rare.
The senior-most people (VPs, founders) often say they want it. But it’s the middle managers who will stab you in the front in revenge, while staring you in the eye. And if the VP doesn’t step in, they are endorsing the outcome.
The best leaders know what they need to pay attention to. You cannot know everything. You can know any one thing (or perhaps several), but there are more things to know than you will have time to learn in your lifetime. The question is what is important for you to know, and what you leave to somebody else.
You will have to trust someone will figure out the details and come up with a reasonable solution. Sometimes you need to know that solution, sometimes in detail, sometimes just enough to know that they solved it. Sometimes you are the person who needs to figure out the details and make the solution. Knowing which you are is important.
In a large enough organization it is simply impossible for executives to be on the ground floor with everyone else. And not only is it impossible, it is essentially a waste of their time. They could maybe be maximally involved in only a few projects at a time.
I think its entirely contextual as to what the size of the org is and the scope of the projects. At a startup an "executive" or VP would legitimately be able to be working side by side with everyone else, or hearing about the ground level operations, but just by nature of the role being SVP I imagine this is a large enough company that this is no longer the case. At a certain point that becomes somebody else's job that is much closer to the team at hand.
The role entirely morphs and their job becomes to enable teams, get blockers out of the way, fast track or assist things like permissions/processes, shoot down ideas that legitimately don't add business value or are not worth wasting existing engineering effort on.
And I imagine in this scenario the point wasn't for the executive to literally hear what happens next, it was to ensure the proper steps are being taken and make sure "somebody" is handling the what happens next part of things, and so they can report up through the chain or delegate tasks for exactly that "what happens next" task.
> In a large enough organization it is simply impossible for executives to be on the ground floor with everyone else. And not only is it impossible, it is essentially a waste of their time. They could maybe be maximally involved in only a few projects at a time.
This is a very strong argument that no organization should be allowed to get that big.
I get the sentiment, but this is the reason we have airplanes, MRI machines, and computers that fit in our pockets. Advanced technology simply isn't possible in an economy of only ~100 person organizations. And I say this as someone with a deep sense of unease with modernity and all of the diseases of civilization. We somehow have managed to create systems that support literally billions of humans and allow many of them to have a quality of life undreamed of even a few hundred years ago. I dislike big orgs as much as they next guy but we need to understand why they exist if we want to criticize and reform them.
Big organizations don't enable greater technological progress, which is why companies do 98% of their innovation before they get huge, and get bad at innovating once they are.
Big organizations enable scaling and associated economies of scale, so it's possible for Apple to sell millions of iPhones cheaper than if they were a smaller company. I don't think that tradeoff is worth it for any individual consumer (pay a little less to be much more abused by the company), and I don't think it's worth it for society.
Most of the big corporations in America aren't providing things as useful as MRI machines, they're providing net negative garbage like social media and advertising. Big corporations like United Healthcare Group are inflating the cost of medical care rather than providing economies of scale and reduced cost for their clients.
The US desperately needs to bring back antitrust and start breaking these massive companies into much smaller pieces.
I don't read the article this way. It's pretty sane for an exec to draw a line where the team's autonomy meets leadership's responsibility for structure and incentives around which said team needs to organize.
"You did the right things and met the goals we set, but we hit a problem and we all agree it shouldn't happen again. Let's talk about what needs to change to address this."
You can trust someone to know the details and reasons for why something happened, and still want to provide the specific direction of "what are you doing to make sure it doesn't happen again". The organizational default is often to explain a fault (or worse, focus on blame) without specifically working to find a process improvement to prevent it from happening again.
Plan is the key here. In reality the SVP is hoping that they can make the decision to go with your solution.
Q: What are you going to do about missing this bug?
A1: "I'm going emphasize "BE" in Hamlets' "to BE or not to BE". - You should be fired for this, but that is not the planned decision.
A2: "I'm going to spend $$$$ on some tool". - This tool might solve the problem, but the budget doesn't allow for it and you should know that: I'm forced to make the decision to override you but I didn't plan on making that decision.
A3: "I'm going to [summarize something reasonable]" - good, you are doing what I expected.
Note that A3 doesn't have to work, it just has to be reasonable. If it works great, if not I will ask again next time and I expect you have different answer. Not working at all better be rare though since each not working loses confidence, but fortunately this is rare. However often working is sometimes all you can get (the next bug might be unrelated - no single answer could solve both). The idea is we repeat this for each bug until the rate of missed bugs is acceptably low.
“Trust” is usually bounded. I trust my elementary aged son to get dressed for school without supervision. That doesn’t mean I trust him to start a campfire without supervision. A chef might trust that their new employee is a hard worker and well intentioned. That doesn’t mean they also trust them to create and serve original dishes.
Here you are recasting “I trust that, despite the bad outcome, everyone’s actions here were reasonable” as “I trust that you are going to solve this fully without my guidance”. The fact that the word “trust” appears in both of these statements does not make them equivalent. Trusting that people are capable and well intentioned does not mean trusting that they will accomplish the same thing without you.
> - If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
You might need to know timescales so that you can inform upwards/outwards/other. You might need to make sure other resources that might be necessary are available. The planned "what next" and the proposed timescales might have impacts elsewhere that they haven't realised (and maybe even until now had no reason to be aware of). If they tell you the what next and there are no such complications, then they can carry on, otherwise there might need to be some changes to the plan or changes to other plans to allow time/resources to be available for this plan or just to stop potential near future conflicts.
> The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.
If I have a handle on things from bottom-up to top-down, I don't need them to rehash weed-level technical and specific details. I need them to tell me what we're going to change, and it needs to be a BIG systemic change, not minutiae, which is where many engineers thrive.
If execs demand a big change every time something goes wrong, they will demoralize everyone working for them, and probably waste a lot of money.
Most of the time, operational failures are either the result of a new feature being sent off without enough testing, or a dozen small failures lining up to remove resilience. Big changes without well-thought out plans primarily serve to stoke executive egos.
> If I have a handle on things from bottom-up to top-down, I don't need them to rehash weed-level technical and specific details.
I should have been clearer.
When I said that good leaders pay attention to things from the bottom-up, that doesn't mean they always know everything needed for any discussion. It just means they are able and keen to understand the low-level details when they matter, because they routinely look at such details in the projects that they're involved in.
Of course it's possible that this story is just told badly and the SVP already knew the technical details, in which case the blog post is a bit misleading.
> I need them to tell me what we're going to change, and it needs to be a BIG systemic change, not minutiae, which is where many engineers thrive.
How can one know if the engineers' proposed "BIG systemic change" is appropriate and complete, without knowing the details of the problem it is addressing?
> Of course it's possible that this story is just told badly and the SVP already knew the technical details, in which case the blog post is a bit misleading.
I don't think it's necessarily misleading; it's just reminding folks that senior leaders have a different perspective than those below them and tailoring your message to the audience is important.
In this case of this, it was a reminder that while it's easy to believe the SVP is being dismissive, that's not the case at all. Instead, they want systems-oriented decisioning, not detail-oriented.
If anything, this was the SVP helping to grow the leaders under him by forcing them to think at the levels required to interact w/the rest of the organization.
> How can you know if their "big change" is appropriate and good without knowing the details of the problem the change is addressing?
I'm a Senior Director leading three teams of engineering and science resources. I hired smart and capable people. Why should I, as a SrD be a technical bottleneck?
> How can one know if the engineers' proposed "BIG systemic change" is appropriate and complete, without knowing the details of the problem it is addressing?
That’s the trust thing. Maybe the SVP trusts the people in his organization are capable of making the appropriate change without his supervision and what he’s doing is coaching them on how to do an incident postmortem properly.
Of course as you called out, the SVP might already have all the necessary details to do more than that. But simply pushing people in the right direction is a big piece of leadership’s job, at least when they have people they trust.
If I trust you know what happened, and trust you to know what to do so it doesn’t happen again, why do I need to know? And how will I know (and endorse) your decision if I don’t know what happened?
One reason is prioritization. It’s enough to know what the effects of the failure were, the likely cost of what needs to change, and what areas and processes the changes will affect, to decide if and when this should happen.
Leadership still needs to understand these aspects on a conceptual, topical, and cost level to decide on the resource allocation (including time and schedule). They don’t need to understand the technical details, unless they are a technical leader with higher relevant technical competence than their reports.
I would agree with you, this just sets up a scenario where the SVP positions themselves as a leader, without having to understand something technical, and without making the decisions on how to change things. It isnt about trust, it is about performing accountability so the SVP can say they did their job.
I think the author of the article is going out of their way to be charitable to the SVP for no reason. That meeting was a reassertion of power, not a wise move made by a sage.
They trust your ability to do a root cause analysis. They don’t trust that you feel empowered to do anything about it, so they are verifying that you actually do.
Not wanting to know the details is a red flag. Sometimes the process of expressing the details can reveal things that were unknown by one or both parties, leading to improved processes. The only acceptable exception would be "Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."
To me trust means youre willing to treat people like a black box. If the detail about the outputs is another i/o or something about an output that would appear on a spec sheet, it should be included.
Inner details shouldn't matter. Thats what makes a good summary
Also, not every IC or EM has the same skills and experience. There may be certain categories of work that you can be 100% hands-off and trust them to just do it, and others where you really need to understand bottom-up. Part of being an eng leader is to know when to insert yourself and when to "trust the process".
Leadership still holds engineers accountable. And for that, they need to know the plan. Leaders are also held accountable, so again, they need to know the plan.
> If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
I work in a competent team and leadership is required.
Yup, several things are wrong with it even though it may be a good idea as a good shortcut on the part of the SVP
But it should be used and phrased better.
Used better:trust and only sometimes ask for the detials, like cutting the just-shuffled deck in a card game, sometimes the player to the dealer's right will just tap the deck instead of cutting it, in effect saying "I trust that shuffle". Sometimes, certainly enough to both keep the SVP well-grounded in the details, and to keep the team knowing the SVP is both watching and cares about the details, the SVP MUST ask for the details. Trust and verify.
In terms of phrasing, "I don't want the details" is all about the SVP sending the message s/he doesn't want to be bothered. The phrasing should be: "I trust you on the details on this one; let's go straight to what do we do to manage the next one of these?".
Notice leading with "I trust you on this", not "don't waste my time".
I'm here for the sentiment expressed by the SVP in this article: "I already believe we reached this point through rational choices. Let's talk about how to change the system so it doesn't happen again."
I do think his choice of words was a bit suboptimal. But, it got the point across.
Talking about changing the system "so it doesn't happen again" can only lead to more "rational choices". This is a thinly veiled tantrum spoken in a calm voice.
If you want to reduce incidents, you need to lean into the problems instead of dismissing them or delegating even more all over again. Doubling down on trying to keep your hands clean is shit leadership.
The basis of this blog post is delusional. The language from the SVP is the desire to fast-forward past the thought process that comes with listening to "the story". This could only lead to more problems. They're basically admitting they weren't going to listen in the first place. "The story" doesn't always lead to blame game, and sometimes the changes needed are the context in which rational and trustworthy people are working in. That is not a change to the system, but to the organization.
I think there's something valuable in your take. The idea that technical failures and process failures are parallel tracks is not new.
Certainly not the kind of thing where an exec needs to pull out the "I don't want problems, I want solutions" card to illuminate that they are only valuable to the process domain resolution, not the technical one.
The accommodating reader can read that interaction as entirely because of mismatched insight into the issue. I'm willing to budge that maybe too much time in the agile dens does really does necessitate the conversational roundabouts. It's taught people to taboo process they don't see the immediate need for.
The incentive is not causing an even bigger mess and keeping their role. Contrary to popular belief, executives really are held accountable for outcomes.
It's a question of how much failure is visible and whether anyone else cares, including themselves. If they were only ever motivated by money, they might already have enough since so long ago that now they really only care about harsher legal action that money can't fix. Getting fired isn't a motivator anymore. That's a bad fit for any organization. Someone else is also dropping the ball there.
There's still some problem with that approach. OK, I will tell what I'm going change to prevent recurrence of the issue. How does that makes sense to the audience? Unless they just want hear that "some" change will be there and don't care about how that change would make any sense.
It boils down to what exactly is the ownership or accountability of your SVP around the issue. Why are they even bothered to ensure that there will be some change? If they are responsible for ensuring that the issue doesn't happen again, then they do need to say "I want the details".
I think there is a subtle additional level of trust that the author didn't call out. As the author noted, the SVP trusted that everyone involved in the issue responded rationally and professionally. But they left out the part where the SVP also trusted that the author and their engineering counterpart had already analyzed what happened and how.
The SVP doesn't have time to dig into the "who did what and when" timeline of a problem. They do need to communicate that they're willing to invest resources in preventing recurrence. Was the team burned out by noisy alarms? Then the SVP needs to hear "We're spending time improving automation to reduce alarms, and tuning remaining alarms to make them less noisy. This will take engineering time away from feature work." Or maybe the system had a single point of failure that broke, and the SVP needs to hear "We're redoing X to eliminate a single point of failure, but it will increase our infrastructure budget by $Y".
The SVP is inviting a higher level discussion around what resources need to be consumed in order to be sure this doesn't happen again. And they're opening the door to defending that use of resources.
What you describe is exactly what a 'leader' is supposed to 'see'. When to know when details are needed, and when to trust their delegate. The trust is also balanced: if what you say does not align with what the leader is 'seeing', then trust falls apart.
Everyone has some measure of the 'big picture' and the person at top is supposed to see the biggest, final picture. Where everyone and their processes fit, within the big picture. Delegation could be perfectly aligned (and trust would be easy) if not for quality:
Quality determines how well the relationship works between leader and delegate.
The amount of quality is determined by the amount of need, and urgency available. The relationship (and communication) evolves over time as quality is determined by leaders.
Regardless, there's always going to be difficulty because there's never an ideal system where quality is perfectly measured. That's why communication with people, as people, is also very important. When we perceive disrespect: communication shuts down. Humility must be respected.
If you can't communicate, there's definitely no measure of quality available for the relationship between leader and delegate. If communication is there (and communication should be measured as transmission of real information), then trust is more easily measured.
Once you know how much you trust something, then you know how much detail you need when you 'need to get something done'. Because you know the big picture, and where this thing you need fits. And how well it works.
OP is already at the director level. The further you go up the management chain, the less people are involved in process or technical decision making -- they are primarily concerned with organizational decision making. It sounds like the issue was something that was fully within the management scope of lower levels of management here:
> Something had gone wrong that shouldn't have.
The SVP is trying to determine what change in management is taking place, not what technical change is taking place.
There are a set of principles at play: used by leaders and engineers, when trying to 'do work'.
When you need to get something done, unless you can build the entire thing, you have to trust someone to help you. There's very few people who choose to live a life where they are 100% self-sufficient, living-off-the-land.
Leaders have to trust people, engineers have to trust components.
> To drive change in your organization, don't ask "why did this happen?".
> Instead, ask:
> What are we changing so that the same class of failure is less likely next time?
Why are these framed as being almost mutually exclusive? I don't get it. "How/why did this happen?" informs how you answer "What are we changing?" Even the following section, "Reasonable people", functions in this way with a "Why did this happen?" followed by "What are we changing?".
Just feels like this article has some internal conflict with itself in order to achieve a "don't do that, do this" type of style.
I don't get it neither. It's important for context to document "why something happened" alongside action items to prevent it from happening again. This is part of history that will be extremely valuable as company knowledge on why processes exists in the first place.
Otherwise, what will be the discussion when it's time to question it later?
One thing that's often left out that tends to grind organizations to a halt is that continuous improvement processes tend to be additive.
You always add rules, and alerts, and so on. You need to revisit existing processes to and see what can be removed or replaced.
My other nit with these is a term that's abused a lot "Root Cause", most complex issues have many contributing factors, not a single root cause, and if you force the teams to find one, they will.
I dislike RCA (Root Cause Analysis) it puts you in the wrong mindset, CFA would be better (Contributing Factor Analysis).
"Okay, everyone is overworked, and we need you to hire more people for this team. We have too much tech debt, and we can't predict which bit of it will explode next week. The change needs to start with the attitudes of our executive leadership."
I suspect the author still misunderstands the SVP. If I were the SVP of engineering saying this to someone, especially someone who is in a non-core engineering role like product, I probably recognize that they have a tendency to verbally spew and I want them to focus on the risk mitigation and response plan. I’ve already talked to my engineering leader because they informed me immediately, and I’ve already read the incident details.
But also the post reads like it comes from an inexperienced/immature service org, so maybe they’re just sorting their operational response process out.
"Okay, then I'm going to rewomble the dinglehop, which should un-galvatrate the percapitator." Why is the SVP in the meeting at all? If they don't want the details, they can't contribute to the change, or even evaluate whether the change makes sense at all. The SVP could be completely removed from this situation and the outcome would be exactly the same. Which shouldn't be surprising, since that's almost always true of all executives anywhere.
> Everyone nods their head, says "that makes sense", and we all move on with our day.
Why? Why do you need to be intimidated into actually making effective change? Why is everyone walking around with their hands tied, unable or afraid to enact change? Probably because of the terrible leadership at this company.
>> "We missed it because Alice was on holiday and Bob thought the Widgets team owned it".
> Okay. How do we make ownership unambiguous when someone is unavailable?
You cannot take this step without details. That Bob-Alice story is the details. You do actually need to know that story before you can take the step of knowing that "unambiguous ownership" would be a worthwhile change to make. What exactly is this SVP doing again?
This entire post could be summarized as "executives are useless" and "do the 5-whys", both of which everyone already knows.
Lots of folks are commenting on the internal dynamics, but the other part that didn't resonate with me was actually the what happens next part. This may be an overreaction on my part, stemming from watching lots of engineers suggest expensive solutions to relatively minor issues. And it's a mistake I've made myself before as well, I started in telecom with very strict standards for availability, so it's hard to beat out of me the desire to look through the most minor alarm for a potential problem brewing or get to a root cause of the most minor incidents.
And maybe this is just a part that the article dodges, but for something described as non-catastrophic, I would suggest that there shouldn't be a presumption of changes. In my view there should be an assessment of the risk of re-occurrence, and if it was a near miss, what is the risk had it not been a near miss. And then even should changes be part of the outcomes, how expensive are those to implement compared to whatever the issue was, and if they're too expensive compared to the risk, don't put resources into it.
“If your corrective action depends on people remembering a conversation from six months ago, you don't have a corrective action. You have organizational folklore.”
I think i’m going to call our ticket support system “folklore” from now on. It sure is used that way.
I've never seen an incident report or postmortem that didn't include action items to cover the core issue noted in this writing: "can we / how do we prevent this failure mode from recurring?"
I'm not saying these moments of discovery / epiphany aren't valuable, they are and this retelling is enjoyably written.
I am saying that action items borne of incidents should be de rigueur.
Some of the best life advice I learned during conscription as a squad leader: do not explain if an explanation is not asked for. If you (or, importantly, your subordinates!) mess something up and are confronted by a superior, the only correct reply is "Yes sir I screwed up sir I’m sorry sir it won’t happen again".
That could make sense in the military. It could make sense for an offshore IT org whose role is to provide warm-bodied yes-men, or similar situations. But it’s catastrophic for a creative organization that’s actually doing anything other than CRUD apps or something equally mechanical, because it means management can’t possibly understand the systems that the company’s income depends on, which means they can’t possibly manage effectively.
It’s still up to them to ask. And if they never ask, I doubt it would help at all trying to explain anyway – they’d just zone out – and might be a good idea to look for a new job.
In any case, the actually important question "How to make this not happen again?" would presumably include the relevant parts of what "this" is as well. But in a more actionable frame.
Action items need an a forcing feature (like an SLO) to insure they are picked up. And someone needs to follow up when the item isn't handled timely. It should show up in team performance metrics and guide changes to processes to insure they get done.
The important part is the action items are assigned an owner and executed.
I’ve done plenty of postmortems and many meetings where we go through the motions but “leadership” does not assign and address follow-ups. Most organizations pay lip service to reliability.
Actionable items go onto the backlog. The backlog grows from the top.
As a stopgap, a manual pre-flight check is added. The number of manual pre-flight checks becomes a ridiculous overhead but it gives a clear person to blame when something goes wrong.
I think the problem is when the execs aren’t looking at change-for-the-better. Instead they’re looking to appoint blame. Moving to a position of assumed competency in your staff and taking the perspective of how-to-improve-next-time is a real step forward in maturity. My guess is it’s rare and blame is easier: most management doesn’t reach this level, instead it’s immature.
I think that's a problem domain in itself. Identify when failures that occur even when skilled people doing their jobs properly, adjust the environment so that they no longer happen.
It is understandably a completely different task compared to what those skilled people are specialised to do. You probably need a dedicated role to do it.
Perhaps you could call them a manager. Their job is to see the multiple parts of the system. They should ask for the Details of what happened so they can determine why the problem occurred.
Consider one of the problems listed in the article
>"The alert fired, but the on-call engineer had already dealt with twenty low-value alerts that evening".
The engineer can say they were busy, they didn't see the alert, that they are swamped with things they think are low-value. Someone else can say the alert fired. Each person involved may have their own perspective, with different ideas as to what the problem actually is.
It's easy when you see problem described in terms of what the solution is. Someone needs to figure that out, to do that they need the details.
There's a reason 5 Why's Analysis is a thing. If you just say "here's a bunch of stuff we're changing," but you haven't said enough about the root cause, then no one will understand whether we're doing enough (or too much; or the wrong things). I like the framing of being empathetic - everyone is smart, doing the best they can with their knowledge and experience at the time - but sometimes we didn't do all the right things, and getting feedback from more senior engineers helps drive that improvement.
> There's a reason 5 Why's Analysis is a thing. If you just say "here's a bunch of stuff we're changing," but you haven't said enough about the root cause, then no one will understand whether we're doing enough (or too much; or the wrong things).
No, that's not the point at all.
Root cause analysis and context and tradeoff analysis and plans are still critical requirements.
But not everyone needs to do root cause analysis and evaluate tradeoffs and review plans. Some stakeholders don't need any of that. They pay you to care, so that they don't need to.
What these stakeholders care about is whether you can fix things, how are you planning on how to fix things, how many resources you need to allocate to fix things, and when are things fixed.
Different audiences require different messages because they have different concerns and responsibilities.
Does a project manager need to know the failure rate of a DSL connection of a customer that reported an outage? You might, but does the project manager need to?
An SVP of engineering should care about the details, this is the essence of leadership. When you don’t care about the details you are just a manager and worthless i.e. you should be replaced with a leader.
This reads like a LinkedIn post. I know kagi translate[1] supports "LinkedIn" language - could someone with an account there copy that article and translate from "LinkedIn" to "English"? I wonder if we'd uncover some simpler meaning this way.
Edit: I was wrong. It still reads like LinkedIn to me but “translating” doesn’t help. Thanks in any case.
Yes, if a director and SVP are discussing the technical details of an incident, I would be concerned -- they should be concerned with putting the right people and processes in place to make those decisions.
When "Something had gone wrong that shouldn't have" bubbles up that far, you have an organizational issue, not a technical issue.
If the person who is charged with resolving the issue is capable, there's no point in a senior manager knowing the details outside of professional curiosity.
>If your corrective action depends on people remembering a conversation from six months ago, you don't have a corrective action. You have organizational folklore.
Interesting. At our org we always do both. Root cause, what are we changing. I assumed that was standard practice.
If you just explain what happened and why, that's fine but...how are you going to make sure it doesn't happen again?
The problem I found more vexing as a manager was: how can you prevent this KIND of problem from occurring?
I'd have someone on my team make a technical error and xyz wouldn't work. Wed talk thru it, and they wouldn't make that exact mistake again. But there's literally 10k things that can go wrong in our system, so then a related mistake would happen later.
What they needed was improved pattern recognition vs if this / then that which comes from post mortems.
Organizations don’t choose whether or not to ask questions. People do. The behavior of an organization is the sum of the actions of the people in it. If you are a member of an organization, and you ask ‘how do we prevent this from happening again?’ Guess what? The organization just learned how to ask that question.
Now it just needs to learn how to answer it, and act on the answer.. but step one seems solvable.
This is similar to the approach in healthcare, at least my experience in pharmacy.
When an error occurs we find the root cause but in 99% of cases a change to the environment/process is required to avoid it in the future.
Humans are all imperfect, their competence will change hour to hour let alone day to day. But you can control a system and put checks in place (admittedly a human can still do the process wrong, but then you need to think how the process can be clearer).
No-blame culture is very effective at providing an open environment to share mistakes, learn, but most importantly avoid reoccurance.
This is a really really smart SVP. The answer to “how do we prevent this in the future” is to identify decisions that reduce that problem from happening again. This doesn’t have to be perfect. You can say “we are going to do X next time” and also say “but we don’t know how far X will work”. When the failure happens again, you can retire process X and move on to Y. The aim is to make a series of decisions that eventually get to the heart of the issue.
Everything else is a conversation that takes up space on a post-mortem or runbook.
Love this idea; won't go over well at all with the other accountants I work with. MY CFO doesn't like graphs because they "hide too many details' and insists on everything presented to her being in a table. MY VP pulls out a calculator and re-does the math on tables in decks by hand to help him 'understand'.
A lot of leaders like to hide in the details because the bigger picture is a harder problem.
We call this incident postmortem, part of a company process. After serious problems and firefighting, when the patches and hacks and people working 24 hour and it admins wake on a Sunday morning to do work, we sit down and try to figure out how this will _never_ happen again.
Idiotic article. Nobody collects "why"s so they can not change anything. Not changing anything is never the failure mode. The failure mode is changing the wrong thing. If you are a leader, and something egregious goes wrong, it is your job to ensure that your people don't just put some bandaid fix on it that will keep causing issues indefinitely. Understanding the complete "why" is a precondition for that. Not bothering to hear a complete explanation because you trust your people to do the right thing is fine, but then why were you on that call in the first place? Let them do their job.
How about explain the problem and solution in 3 to 5 levels of details in a top-down hierarchical manner sort of like a decision tree. Let people decide how far they want to drill down.
If I recall correctly, in The Pragmatic Engineer, this was described simply as "provide options, not excuses" and is a critical way of building credibility.
If you don’t know what happened how would you be able to tell if the changes are addressing the problem? If you don’t care about the problem being addressed why jump in a call in the first place?
We write up timelines. We reconstruct decisions. We explain dependencies. At the end of it, we hand over a document that contains the specific combination of events that led to the incident. Everyone nods their head, says "that makes sense", and we all move on with our day.
...huh? I've been in corporate America for 19 years now and I've never once had this happen. I've never seen anyone just look for the cause and not ask what can be done to prevent it in the future. Everyone KNOWS that question is coming next.
Learned this doing incident reviews. If the exec asks for details it usually means they don't believe you yet, so "skip to what changes" is actually the good outcome.
I thought keeping details away from c-suit regardless of how technical these people are was the standard thing to do. Your job is to make these guys work the minimum. We fucked up, we fixed it and it won’t happen again. They don’t need to know anything else. You could upload the forensics report to a share drive and make the link available if they want to see it, but most times they won’t bother.
How you can have an informed conversation about change without hearing the problem out?
If you trust someone that much, why are you even in the loop? Why are you badgering them at all? This is just bad management pretending to offer underlings autonomy. As soon as it fails, everyone loses their job.
> At first I thought "I don't want the details" sounded dismissive.
Well that is because it was delivered by someone who was actually being dismissive!
If they want to know what "we are changing" but don't want to know any detail as to why, even presented at an appropriate level, they are very likely looking for you to take all the risk of the decision and they are dismissing your need to have the necessary informed consent for it to become the we.
Now, if you're presenting that information at a level of detail that is truly irrelevant or deep, that is your problem to fix.
But otherwise be very wary of this pattern of communication where "we" might mean "you". Anyone with any sense of risk management should know not to do this.
If you have not seen it, watch Margin Call. When you get to the boardroom scene [0] you'll see this play out, but you will also see the (pretty rapacious, direct) boss understand properly that the information he is getting from a low ranking employee is nevertheless his problem to understand, even if only at a 10,000 feet level.
Beyond the drama of the way the scene ends, it's actually a very good model of how that interaction should play out for everyone — making it clear that everyone in the room shares in the "we" of it, including the decisionmaker.
I have been in rooms where it played out at least something like that, where the boss wants to make an attempt to share the burden of the detail, and I've been able to leave them feeling somewhat supported, or at least without feeling like I was being shafted.
And I've been in rooms with people who don't want to know the details but just want to know what "we" are going to fix — those guys have never been as good to work for. If they say "we" but leave you with the impression they may mean "you", it's bad.
[0] said scene, but really, really, watch the film if you never have:
>> I know that if we get into the details, the reasons will be perfectly reasonable. You'll explain what happened, I'll understand why everyone made the decisions they made, and I'll empathise with you.
>> Then it'll happen again.
>> So I don't want the details. I want to know what we're changing.
Even if the manager's approach was correct, this is just a hurtful way to frame it to your team. It's great that the author could reverse-engineer what the manager was doing, but it shouldn't come to that.
Why couldn't the manager say something like:
> You are all great engineers, so I already know that everyone made the best decision available with the information they had at the time. What are we going to do differently moving forward?
I'm still not sure I agree with the strategy, because I don't see how you can understand what happens next without understanding what went wrong. But I can see how the framing might help steer the discussion.
SVP seems like such a useless appendage in the story.
He doesn’t want the details, he just wants someone else to tell him what they’re gonna do. But if he doesn’t know the details, he won’t understand if the plan will make things better or worse.
So… what exactly is this presumably valuable person there to do? Just to gage the confidence in the room? Presumably everyone was confident before the mistake happened.
What does this person who just wants a solution add? Why isn’t he fostering a discussion and adding his insight? Why is he in the room at all?
I can understand the inclination, but actually I /do/ want the details, because without the details I cannot consider and measure if the change proposed is a reasonable pathway to help manage the class of problem. Many times, people in organizations while well-meaning are siloed and focused specifically in their own niche and therefore will propose changes that cannot be coherent in any holistic manner across all the parts of the organization that would need to be affected by the change. That means you /do/ need to understand the details, and also have a big picture view.
The executive is there to help with the big picture, but you can't see the big picture if the canvas is blank.
If I'm to explain what needs to change, that will by definition address processes or lack thereof that led to the problem, no? Which is then explaining what happened and why in an indirect manner, so many of the proposed changes may not make sense without more context.
I would not have said that. I would have asked for the details and tried to find the gaps because, almost always, something could have been done. Then the question is how much risk reduction are you willing to pay for.
Presumably the SVP joined the meeting because the incident was significant. The team can present the options but the executive may need to make a judgement call, and he can't do that responsibly if he turns his brain off. For instance, what if it happened due to understaffing or things falling between the cracks among teams, possibly indicating inadequate org design? Such things are the responsibility of management.
I'm giving you the details because I'm going to give you options for solutions and I need priority information about those solutions, and you need to be informed about the trade-offs and costs of each option because you have better knowledge of our overarching objectives than I do.
If our overarching objectives don't impact our on-the-ground decisions, what are you even for?
The quote box at the start of the article is the essence of it, the rest is AI-speak dressing it up.
TLDR:
Some outage causes a meeting with an SVP. SVP preempts the discussion with the following:
“I know that if we get into the details, the reasons will be perfectly reasonable. You'll explain what happened, I'll understand why everyone made the decisions they made, and I'll empathise with you.
Then it'll happen again.
So I don't want the details. I want to know what we're changing.”
I sympathise with this, and a lot of teams do operate that way, but I fundamentally disagree with it.
Part of the reason Amazon's CoE-driven engineer culture had such operation excellence is that the responsibility was driven the whole way up the management chain. If your manager didn't dig down to the root cause of a sev2, the director was damn well going to, and if the director didn't, Andy Jassy was going to call them on it.
That sounds like a lot of busy work, and a bunch of it undoubtedly is, but the flip side of it is that the actual root causes were addressed, and if the root cause needed serious cross-functional resources to address, the escalation would get you what you needed. Need approval to bounce 3 months of work off your roadmap to address? You have a VP on the line to make that call. Need a couple of other teams to fix their shit? Here's a principal engineer who outranks their directors to drive the work. And so on...
> Then I realised that "I don't want the details" wasn't being dismissive. The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying "I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next".
Something about this feels wrong:
- If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
- If you don't trust them completely, how can you know if "what happens next" is appropriate without knowing the details?
Isn't this just reinforcing the idea that leadership doesn't need to have their feet on the ground?
The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.
You answered your own question.
> If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
> The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.
These two statements are at odds. You first assuming that lack of trust would be the only reason he needs to know what happens next, then go on to outline another reason he and the larger organization would both benefit from knowing more.
It's not just about trust. It's about knowing what your team is up to so you can provide them the resources necessary while also working to remove any obstacles in their way so they can get shit done. That's what good management does, it's just rare to see in low-trust organizations that treat everyone like a cog to be micromanaged because no one trusts anyone to get shit done of their own accord for whatever reason.
> These two statements are at odds. You first assuming that lack of trust would be the only reason he needs to know what happens next, then go on to outline another reason he and the larger organization would both benefit from knowing more.
But doesn't that same logic apply to whether they need to know the details?
> It's about knowing what your team is up to so you can provide them the resources necessary while also working to remove any obstacles in their way so they can get shit done.
That makes sense - I don't know if that's what the blog post was implying though. Ironically, this blog post could probably benefit from a few more details about what the meeting was supposed to achieve :)
A lot of times, people just need a gentle nudge, or an official blessing from an authority figure, to go ahead and make the change that is necessary. You can tell people to manage up, to fully own their work and their process, etc. But a lot of humans don’t want to step on others’ toes or be perceived as acting out of line. A worker on the assembly line might know the best way to make the line run more smoothly but it’s easy to think that’s “not my job” or “above my pay grade”. Sometimes all that’s needed is to tell them, “Yeah, go ahead and do it.”
Getting that to happen more automatically is one way out of this situation, but that tends to cause problems of its own, with blurry lines of responsibility and authority. So it works best with relatively flat organization structures, which aren’t used much in large organizations.
> But a lot of humans don’t want to step on others’ toes or be perceived as acting out of line.
It's conditioning. In all organizations above a certain size (> 100 people), stepping out of line receives an official reprimand. Someone always complains. Receive enough reprimands and the person is terminated. People learn to stay in line because they've been punished whenever they step out of it.
Unless the organization really truly rewards that behavior. Which is rare.
The senior-most people (VPs, founders) often say they want it. But it’s the middle managers who will stab you in the front in revenge, while staring you in the eye. And if the VP doesn’t step in, they are endorsing the outcome.
The best leaders know what they need to pay attention to. You cannot know everything. You can know any one thing (or perhaps several), but there are more things to know than you will have time to learn in your lifetime. The question is what is important for you to know, and what you leave to somebody else.
You will have to trust someone will figure out the details and come up with a reasonable solution. Sometimes you need to know that solution, sometimes in detail, sometimes just enough to know that they solved it. Sometimes you are the person who needs to figure out the details and make the solution. Knowing which you are is important.
In a large enough organization it is simply impossible for executives to be on the ground floor with everyone else. And not only is it impossible, it is essentially a waste of their time. They could maybe be maximally involved in only a few projects at a time.
I think its entirely contextual as to what the size of the org is and the scope of the projects. At a startup an "executive" or VP would legitimately be able to be working side by side with everyone else, or hearing about the ground level operations, but just by nature of the role being SVP I imagine this is a large enough company that this is no longer the case. At a certain point that becomes somebody else's job that is much closer to the team at hand.
The role entirely morphs and their job becomes to enable teams, get blockers out of the way, fast track or assist things like permissions/processes, shoot down ideas that legitimately don't add business value or are not worth wasting existing engineering effort on.
And I imagine in this scenario the point wasn't for the executive to literally hear what happens next, it was to ensure the proper steps are being taken and make sure "somebody" is handling the what happens next part of things, and so they can report up through the chain or delegate tasks for exactly that "what happens next" task.
> In a large enough organization it is simply impossible for executives to be on the ground floor with everyone else. And not only is it impossible, it is essentially a waste of their time. They could maybe be maximally involved in only a few projects at a time.
This is a very strong argument that no organization should be allowed to get that big.
I get the sentiment, but this is the reason we have airplanes, MRI machines, and computers that fit in our pockets. Advanced technology simply isn't possible in an economy of only ~100 person organizations. And I say this as someone with a deep sense of unease with modernity and all of the diseases of civilization. We somehow have managed to create systems that support literally billions of humans and allow many of them to have a quality of life undreamed of even a few hundred years ago. I dislike big orgs as much as they next guy but we need to understand why they exist if we want to criticize and reform them.
Big organizations don't enable greater technological progress, which is why companies do 98% of their innovation before they get huge, and get bad at innovating once they are.
Big organizations enable scaling and associated economies of scale, so it's possible for Apple to sell millions of iPhones cheaper than if they were a smaller company. I don't think that tradeoff is worth it for any individual consumer (pay a little less to be much more abused by the company), and I don't think it's worth it for society.
Most of the big corporations in America aren't providing things as useful as MRI machines, they're providing net negative garbage like social media and advertising. Big corporations like United Healthcare Group are inflating the cost of medical care rather than providing economies of scale and reduced cost for their clients.
The US desperately needs to bring back antitrust and start breaking these massive companies into much smaller pieces.
I don't read the article this way. It's pretty sane for an exec to draw a line where the team's autonomy meets leadership's responsibility for structure and incentives around which said team needs to organize.
"You did the right things and met the goals we set, but we hit a problem and we all agree it shouldn't happen again. Let's talk about what needs to change to address this."
You can trust someone to know the details and reasons for why something happened, and still want to provide the specific direction of "what are you doing to make sure it doesn't happen again". The organizational default is often to explain a fault (or worse, focus on blame) without specifically working to find a process improvement to prevent it from happening again.
Except if you don’t know the details, how will you be able to make an informed decision on what happens next?
- We’ll just fire joe - Ok cool
I agree with the parent comment. You need SOME level of detail, otherwise your decision might as well be a guess.
The SVP doesn’t plan on making any decisions here.
Plan is the key here. In reality the SVP is hoping that they can make the decision to go with your solution.
Q: What are you going to do about missing this bug?
A1: "I'm going emphasize "BE" in Hamlets' "to BE or not to BE". - You should be fired for this, but that is not the planned decision.
A2: "I'm going to spend $$$$ on some tool". - This tool might solve the problem, but the budget doesn't allow for it and you should know that: I'm forced to make the decision to override you but I didn't plan on making that decision.
A3: "I'm going to [summarize something reasonable]" - good, you are doing what I expected.
Note that A3 doesn't have to work, it just has to be reasonable. If it works great, if not I will ask again next time and I expect you have different answer. Not working at all better be rare though since each not working loses confidence, but fortunately this is rare. However often working is sometimes all you can get (the next bug might be unrelated - no single answer could solve both). The idea is we repeat this for each bug until the rate of missed bugs is acceptably low.
The SVP doesn't need to make any decisions here. Part of leadership is giving your team the space and time to make the decisions themselves.
“Trust” is usually bounded. I trust my elementary aged son to get dressed for school without supervision. That doesn’t mean I trust him to start a campfire without supervision. A chef might trust that their new employee is a hard worker and well intentioned. That doesn’t mean they also trust them to create and serve original dishes.
Here you are recasting “I trust that, despite the bad outcome, everyone’s actions here were reasonable” as “I trust that you are going to solve this fully without my guidance”. The fact that the word “trust” appears in both of these statements does not make them equivalent. Trusting that people are capable and well intentioned does not mean trusting that they will accomplish the same thing without you.
> - If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
You might need to know timescales so that you can inform upwards/outwards/other. You might need to make sure other resources that might be necessary are available. The planned "what next" and the proposed timescales might have impacts elsewhere that they haven't realised (and maybe even until now had no reason to be aware of). If they tell you the what next and there are no such complications, then they can carry on, otherwise there might need to be some changes to the plan or changes to other plans to allow time/resources to be available for this plan or just to stop potential near future conflicts.
Trust, but verify. And perhaps even assist.
> The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.
If I have a handle on things from bottom-up to top-down, I don't need them to rehash weed-level technical and specific details. I need them to tell me what we're going to change, and it needs to be a BIG systemic change, not minutiae, which is where many engineers thrive.
If execs demand a big change every time something goes wrong, they will demoralize everyone working for them, and probably waste a lot of money.
Most of the time, operational failures are either the result of a new feature being sent off without enough testing, or a dozen small failures lining up to remove resilience. Big changes without well-thought out plans primarily serve to stoke executive egos.
I think you have a distrust of your leaders and are taking this from a very different place the author of the article was.
I have a healthy distrust of modern business structures, and an awareness of humans being humans.
> If I have a handle on things from bottom-up to top-down, I don't need them to rehash weed-level technical and specific details.
I should have been clearer.
When I said that good leaders pay attention to things from the bottom-up, that doesn't mean they always know everything needed for any discussion. It just means they are able and keen to understand the low-level details when they matter, because they routinely look at such details in the projects that they're involved in.
Of course it's possible that this story is just told badly and the SVP already knew the technical details, in which case the blog post is a bit misleading.
> I need them to tell me what we're going to change, and it needs to be a BIG systemic change, not minutiae, which is where many engineers thrive.
How can one know if the engineers' proposed "BIG systemic change" is appropriate and complete, without knowing the details of the problem it is addressing?
> Of course it's possible that this story is just told badly and the SVP already knew the technical details, in which case the blog post is a bit misleading.
I don't think it's necessarily misleading; it's just reminding folks that senior leaders have a different perspective than those below them and tailoring your message to the audience is important.
In this case of this, it was a reminder that while it's easy to believe the SVP is being dismissive, that's not the case at all. Instead, they want systems-oriented decisioning, not detail-oriented.
If anything, this was the SVP helping to grow the leaders under him by forcing them to think at the levels required to interact w/the rest of the organization.
> How can you know if their "big change" is appropriate and good without knowing the details of the problem the change is addressing?
I'm a Senior Director leading three teams of engineering and science resources. I hired smart and capable people. Why should I, as a SrD be a technical bottleneck?
> How can one know if the engineers' proposed "BIG systemic change" is appropriate and complete, without knowing the details of the problem it is addressing?
That’s the trust thing. Maybe the SVP trusts the people in his organization are capable of making the appropriate change without his supervision and what he’s doing is coaching them on how to do an incident postmortem properly.
Of course as you called out, the SVP might already have all the necessary details to do more than that. But simply pushing people in the right direction is a big piece of leadership’s job, at least when they have people they trust.
He wants to direct/align on strategy, not tactics. I'd say that's a good division of responsibility so I'm not sure I see your objection.
What I got from parent comment, and I agree, is:
If I trust you know what happened, and trust you to know what to do so it doesn’t happen again, why do I need to know? And how will I know (and endorse) your decision if I don’t know what happened?
It seems weird.
One reason is prioritization. It’s enough to know what the effects of the failure were, the likely cost of what needs to change, and what areas and processes the changes will affect, to decide if and when this should happen.
Leadership still needs to understand these aspects on a conceptual, topical, and cost level to decide on the resource allocation (including time and schedule). They don’t need to understand the technical details, unless they are a technical leader with higher relevant technical competence than their reports.
I would agree with you, this just sets up a scenario where the SVP positions themselves as a leader, without having to understand something technical, and without making the decisions on how to change things. It isnt about trust, it is about performing accountability so the SVP can say they did their job.
I think the author of the article is going out of their way to be charitable to the SVP for no reason. That meeting was a reassertion of power, not a wise move made by a sage.
They trust your ability to do a root cause analysis. They don’t trust that you feel empowered to do anything about it, so they are verifying that you actually do.
Not wanting to know the details is a red flag. Sometimes the process of expressing the details can reveal things that were unknown by one or both parties, leading to improved processes. The only acceptable exception would be "Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."
To me trust means youre willing to treat people like a black box. If the detail about the outputs is another i/o or something about an output that would appear on a spec sheet, it should be included.
Inner details shouldn't matter. Thats what makes a good summary
Also, not every IC or EM has the same skills and experience. There may be certain categories of work that you can be 100% hands-off and trust them to just do it, and others where you really need to understand bottom-up. Part of being an eng leader is to know when to insert yourself and when to "trust the process".
That's all context management to all the way up
Leadership still holds engineers accountable. And for that, they need to know the plan. Leaders are also held accountable, so again, they need to know the plan.
It gives LinkedIn post vibes
The SVP has to explain what they’re doing to prevent reoccurance again to investors, customers, ceo who don’t care about the widget on x k8s
> If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
I work in a competent team and leadership is required.
Yup, several things are wrong with it even though it may be a good idea as a good shortcut on the part of the SVP
But it should be used and phrased better.
Used better:trust and only sometimes ask for the detials, like cutting the just-shuffled deck in a card game, sometimes the player to the dealer's right will just tap the deck instead of cutting it, in effect saying "I trust that shuffle". Sometimes, certainly enough to both keep the SVP well-grounded in the details, and to keep the team knowing the SVP is both watching and cares about the details, the SVP MUST ask for the details. Trust and verify.
In terms of phrasing, "I don't want the details" is all about the SVP sending the message s/he doesn't want to be bothered. The phrasing should be: "I trust you on the details on this one; let's go straight to what do we do to manage the next one of these?".
Notice leading with "I trust you on this", not "don't waste my time".
I'm here for the sentiment expressed by the SVP in this article: "I already believe we reached this point through rational choices. Let's talk about how to change the system so it doesn't happen again."
I do think his choice of words was a bit suboptimal. But, it got the point across.
Talking about changing the system "so it doesn't happen again" can only lead to more "rational choices". This is a thinly veiled tantrum spoken in a calm voice.
If you want to reduce incidents, you need to lean into the problems instead of dismissing them or delegating even more all over again. Doubling down on trying to keep your hands clean is shit leadership.
The basis of this blog post is delusional. The language from the SVP is the desire to fast-forward past the thought process that comes with listening to "the story". This could only lead to more problems. They're basically admitting they weren't going to listen in the first place. "The story" doesn't always lead to blame game, and sometimes the changes needed are the context in which rational and trustworthy people are working in. That is not a change to the system, but to the organization.
I don't think the two of us read the same post.
You're inferring a lot of emotion into this writing that I simply did not read.
Right, maybe saying "tantrum" was suboptimal.
I think there's something valuable in your take. The idea that technical failures and process failures are parallel tracks is not new.
Certainly not the kind of thing where an exec needs to pull out the "I don't want problems, I want solutions" card to illuminate that they are only valuable to the process domain resolution, not the technical one.
The accommodating reader can read that interaction as entirely because of mismatched insight into the issue. I'm willing to budge that maybe too much time in the agile dens does really does necessitate the conversational roundabouts. It's taught people to taboo process they don't see the immediate need for.
How do you say that so they actually change?
They also have rational choice to not have to get their hands dirty. What incentive is there?
The incentive is not causing an even bigger mess and keeping their role. Contrary to popular belief, executives really are held accountable for outcomes.
It's a question of how much failure is visible and whether anyone else cares, including themselves. If they were only ever motivated by money, they might already have enough since so long ago that now they really only care about harsher legal action that money can't fix. Getting fired isn't a motivator anymore. That's a bad fit for any organization. Someone else is also dropping the ball there.
There's still some problem with that approach. OK, I will tell what I'm going change to prevent recurrence of the issue. How does that makes sense to the audience? Unless they just want hear that "some" change will be there and don't care about how that change would make any sense.
It boils down to what exactly is the ownership or accountability of your SVP around the issue. Why are they even bothered to ensure that there will be some change? If they are responsible for ensuring that the issue doesn't happen again, then they do need to say "I want the details".
I think there is a subtle additional level of trust that the author didn't call out. As the author noted, the SVP trusted that everyone involved in the issue responded rationally and professionally. But they left out the part where the SVP also trusted that the author and their engineering counterpart had already analyzed what happened and how.
The SVP doesn't have time to dig into the "who did what and when" timeline of a problem. They do need to communicate that they're willing to invest resources in preventing recurrence. Was the team burned out by noisy alarms? Then the SVP needs to hear "We're spending time improving automation to reduce alarms, and tuning remaining alarms to make them less noisy. This will take engineering time away from feature work." Or maybe the system had a single point of failure that broke, and the SVP needs to hear "We're redoing X to eliminate a single point of failure, but it will increase our infrastructure budget by $Y".
The SVP is inviting a higher level discussion around what resources need to be consumed in order to be sure this doesn't happen again. And they're opening the door to defending that use of resources.
What you describe is exactly what a 'leader' is supposed to 'see'. When to know when details are needed, and when to trust their delegate. The trust is also balanced: if what you say does not align with what the leader is 'seeing', then trust falls apart.
Everyone has some measure of the 'big picture' and the person at top is supposed to see the biggest, final picture. Where everyone and their processes fit, within the big picture. Delegation could be perfectly aligned (and trust would be easy) if not for quality:
Quality determines how well the relationship works between leader and delegate.
The amount of quality is determined by the amount of need, and urgency available. The relationship (and communication) evolves over time as quality is determined by leaders.
Regardless, there's always going to be difficulty because there's never an ideal system where quality is perfectly measured. That's why communication with people, as people, is also very important. When we perceive disrespect: communication shuts down. Humility must be respected.
If you can't communicate, there's definitely no measure of quality available for the relationship between leader and delegate. If communication is there (and communication should be measured as transmission of real information), then trust is more easily measured.
Once you know how much you trust something, then you know how much detail you need when you 'need to get something done'. Because you know the big picture, and where this thing you need fits. And how well it works.
OP is already at the director level. The further you go up the management chain, the less people are involved in process or technical decision making -- they are primarily concerned with organizational decision making. It sounds like the issue was something that was fully within the management scope of lower levels of management here:
> Something had gone wrong that shouldn't have.
The SVP is trying to determine what change in management is taking place, not what technical change is taking place.
There are a set of principles at play: used by leaders and engineers, when trying to 'do work'.
When you need to get something done, unless you can build the entire thing, you have to trust someone to help you. There's very few people who choose to live a life where they are 100% self-sufficient, living-off-the-land.
Leaders have to trust people, engineers have to trust components.
> To drive change in your organization, don't ask "why did this happen?".
> Instead, ask:
> What are we changing so that the same class of failure is less likely next time?
Why are these framed as being almost mutually exclusive? I don't get it. "How/why did this happen?" informs how you answer "What are we changing?" Even the following section, "Reasonable people", functions in this way with a "Why did this happen?" followed by "What are we changing?".
Just feels like this article has some internal conflict with itself in order to achieve a "don't do that, do this" type of style.
I don't get it neither. It's important for context to document "why something happened" alongside action items to prevent it from happening again. This is part of history that will be extremely valuable as company knowledge on why processes exists in the first place.
Otherwise, what will be the discussion when it's time to question it later?
This should not be exclusive.
One thing that's often left out that tends to grind organizations to a halt is that continuous improvement processes tend to be additive.
You always add rules, and alerts, and so on. You need to revisit existing processes to and see what can be removed or replaced.
My other nit with these is a term that's abused a lot "Root Cause", most complex issues have many contributing factors, not a single root cause, and if you force the teams to find one, they will.
I dislike RCA (Root Cause Analysis) it puts you in the wrong mindset, CFA would be better (Contributing Factor Analysis).
Doesn’t eliminating RCA case by case also lead to fewer CFA thereby eliminating them as well?
It's rarely a single cause, there's no root, it's a forest.
It's usually a combination of things that are not quite right, specially in mature orgs where all the simple fixes have already been applied.
It's semantic, if you do RCA right you don't stop at a single cause, but that's what usually ends up happening.
"Okay, everyone is overworked, and we need you to hire more people for this team. We have too much tech debt, and we can't predict which bit of it will explode next week. The change needs to start with the attitudes of our executive leadership."
Oops, now I'm fired.
"We are under-qualified"
I suspect the author still misunderstands the SVP. If I were the SVP of engineering saying this to someone, especially someone who is in a non-core engineering role like product, I probably recognize that they have a tendency to verbally spew and I want them to focus on the risk mitigation and response plan. I’ve already talked to my engineering leader because they informed me immediately, and I’ve already read the incident details.
But also the post reads like it comes from an inexperienced/immature service org, so maybe they’re just sorting their operational response process out.
"Okay, then I'm going to rewomble the dinglehop, which should un-galvatrate the percapitator." Why is the SVP in the meeting at all? If they don't want the details, they can't contribute to the change, or even evaluate whether the change makes sense at all. The SVP could be completely removed from this situation and the outcome would be exactly the same. Which shouldn't be surprising, since that's almost always true of all executives anywhere.
> Everyone nods their head, says "that makes sense", and we all move on with our day.
Why? Why do you need to be intimidated into actually making effective change? Why is everyone walking around with their hands tied, unable or afraid to enact change? Probably because of the terrible leadership at this company.
>> "We missed it because Alice was on holiday and Bob thought the Widgets team owned it".
> Okay. How do we make ownership unambiguous when someone is unavailable?
You cannot take this step without details. That Bob-Alice story is the details. You do actually need to know that story before you can take the step of knowing that "unambiguous ownership" would be a worthwhile change to make. What exactly is this SVP doing again?
This entire post could be summarized as "executives are useless" and "do the 5-whys", both of which everyone already knows.
Lots of folks are commenting on the internal dynamics, but the other part that didn't resonate with me was actually the what happens next part. This may be an overreaction on my part, stemming from watching lots of engineers suggest expensive solutions to relatively minor issues. And it's a mistake I've made myself before as well, I started in telecom with very strict standards for availability, so it's hard to beat out of me the desire to look through the most minor alarm for a potential problem brewing or get to a root cause of the most minor incidents.
And maybe this is just a part that the article dodges, but for something described as non-catastrophic, I would suggest that there shouldn't be a presumption of changes. In my view there should be an assessment of the risk of re-occurrence, and if it was a near miss, what is the risk had it not been a near miss. And then even should changes be part of the outcomes, how expensive are those to implement compared to whatever the issue was, and if they're too expensive compared to the risk, don't put resources into it.
“If your corrective action depends on people remembering a conversation from six months ago, you don't have a corrective action. You have organizational folklore.”
I think i’m going to call our ticket support system “folklore” from now on. It sure is used that way.
I've never seen an incident report or postmortem that didn't include action items to cover the core issue noted in this writing: "can we / how do we prevent this failure mode from recurring?"
I'm not saying these moments of discovery / epiphany aren't valuable, they are and this retelling is enjoyably written.
I am saying that action items borne of incidents should be de rigueur.
Right, this is not even table stakes, it’s the whole point of a post-mortem.
When you have a bug in a program, you fix it. This is just a variation of that incredibly obvious “advice” applied at a slightly different level.
This article may be more appropriate for LinkedIn.
Give AI vibes, so agree.
Good article write-up, I didn't need to read more than one paragraph to get all the information from the whole page.
Haha ouch.
Some of the best life advice I learned during conscription as a squad leader: do not explain if an explanation is not asked for. If you (or, importantly, your subordinates!) mess something up and are confronted by a superior, the only correct reply is "Yes sir I screwed up sir I’m sorry sir it won’t happen again".
That could make sense in the military. It could make sense for an offshore IT org whose role is to provide warm-bodied yes-men, or similar situations. But it’s catastrophic for a creative organization that’s actually doing anything other than CRUD apps or something equally mechanical, because it means management can’t possibly understand the systems that the company’s income depends on, which means they can’t possibly manage effectively.
It’s still up to them to ask. And if they never ask, I doubt it would help at all trying to explain anyway – they’d just zone out – and might be a good idea to look for a new job.
In any case, the actually important question "How to make this not happen again?" would presumably include the relevant parts of what "this" is as well. But in a more actionable frame.
Every post-mortem I've done had:
1. timeline of events
2. impact
3. 5 whys — the details of how and why things happend
4. actionable items
I've never seen a post-mortem without actionable items.
Do the actionable items usually get implemented?
You can expect what you inspect - Peter Drucker
Action items need an a forcing feature (like an SLO) to insure they are picked up. And someone needs to follow up when the item isn't handled timely. It should show up in team performance metrics and guide changes to processes to insure they get done.
The important part is the action items are assigned an owner and executed.
I’ve done plenty of postmortems and many meetings where we go through the motions but “leadership” does not assign and address follow-ups. Most organizations pay lip service to reliability.
I agree. Finding the time to update docs, processes and code based on a post-mortem is, from my experience, the hardest part. Critical, but difficult.
Actionable items go onto the backlog. The backlog grows from the top.
As a stopgap, a manual pre-flight check is added. The number of manual pre-flight checks becomes a ridiculous overhead but it gives a clear person to blame when something goes wrong.
I think the problem is when the execs aren’t looking at change-for-the-better. Instead they’re looking to appoint blame. Moving to a position of assumed competency in your staff and taking the perspective of how-to-improve-next-time is a real step forward in maturity. My guess is it’s rare and blame is easier: most management doesn’t reach this level, instead it’s immature.
I think that's a problem domain in itself. Identify when failures that occur even when skilled people doing their jobs properly, adjust the environment so that they no longer happen.
It is understandably a completely different task compared to what those skilled people are specialised to do. You probably need a dedicated role to do it.
Perhaps you could call them a manager. Their job is to see the multiple parts of the system. They should ask for the Details of what happened so they can determine why the problem occurred.
Consider one of the problems listed in the article
>"The alert fired, but the on-call engineer had already dealt with twenty low-value alerts that evening".
The engineer can say they were busy, they didn't see the alert, that they are swamped with things they think are low-value. Someone else can say the alert fired. Each person involved may have their own perspective, with different ideas as to what the problem actually is.
It's easy when you see problem described in terms of what the solution is. Someone needs to figure that out, to do that they need the details.
There's a reason 5 Why's Analysis is a thing. If you just say "here's a bunch of stuff we're changing," but you haven't said enough about the root cause, then no one will understand whether we're doing enough (or too much; or the wrong things). I like the framing of being empathetic - everyone is smart, doing the best they can with their knowledge and experience at the time - but sometimes we didn't do all the right things, and getting feedback from more senior engineers helps drive that improvement.
> There's a reason 5 Why's Analysis is a thing. If you just say "here's a bunch of stuff we're changing," but you haven't said enough about the root cause, then no one will understand whether we're doing enough (or too much; or the wrong things).
No, that's not the point at all.
Root cause analysis and context and tradeoff analysis and plans are still critical requirements.
But not everyone needs to do root cause analysis and evaluate tradeoffs and review plans. Some stakeholders don't need any of that. They pay you to care, so that they don't need to.
What these stakeholders care about is whether you can fix things, how are you planning on how to fix things, how many resources you need to allocate to fix things, and when are things fixed.
Different audiences require different messages because they have different concerns and responsibilities.
Does a project manager need to know the failure rate of a DSL connection of a customer that reported an outage? You might, but does the project manager need to?
The executive did not display empathy.
People need to tell their stories. They need to be heard and have their work and its difficulty respected.
That's what went wrong. Everything else is an abuse victim rationalizing their abuse.
My version of this is: "This is the kind of mistake that we get to make once. How do we prevent it from happening again."
I usually do want the details, but I also want to communicate my expectations up top and unambiguously.
An SVP of engineering should care about the details, this is the essence of leadership. When you don’t care about the details you are just a manager and worthless i.e. you should be replaced with a leader.
SVP sounds like a dingle to me. Author is justifying it with some magical thinking, "Oh he's not being rude, he's being smart"
This reads like a LinkedIn post. I know kagi translate[1] supports "LinkedIn" language - could someone with an account there copy that article and translate from "LinkedIn" to "English"? I wonder if we'd uncover some simpler meaning this way.
Edit: I was wrong. It still reads like LinkedIn to me but “translating” doesn’t help. Thanks in any case.
[1]: https://translate.kagi.com/
A Senior Vice President of ENGINEERING doesn't want the technical details?
Yes, if a director and SVP are discussing the technical details of an incident, I would be concerned -- they should be concerned with putting the right people and processes in place to make those decisions.
When "Something had gone wrong that shouldn't have" bubbles up that far, you have an organizational issue, not a technical issue.
Of course, details might point upwards - plausible deniability could get damaged.
If the person who is charged with resolving the issue is capable, there's no point in a senior manager knowing the details outside of professional curiosity.
>If your corrective action depends on people remembering a conversation from six months ago, you don't have a corrective action. You have organizational folklore.
I appreciate this.
Interesting. At our org we always do both. Root cause, what are we changing. I assumed that was standard practice.
If you just explain what happened and why, that's fine but...how are you going to make sure it doesn't happen again?
The problem I found more vexing as a manager was: how can you prevent this KIND of problem from occurring?
I'd have someone on my team make a technical error and xyz wouldn't work. Wed talk thru it, and they wouldn't make that exact mistake again. But there's literally 10k things that can go wrong in our system, so then a related mistake would happen later.
What they needed was improved pattern recognition vs if this / then that which comes from post mortems.
What if you work at an organisation that doesn't ask "How do we prevent this from happening again?"
Organizations don’t choose whether or not to ask questions. People do. The behavior of an organization is the sum of the actions of the people in it. If you are a member of an organization, and you ask ‘how do we prevent this from happening again?’ Guess what? The organization just learned how to ask that question.
Now it just needs to learn how to answer it, and act on the answer.. but step one seems solvable.
That feels like a tough place to work. I would worry about burnout and churning employees if I didn't work at a place that tried to improve every day.
Maybe I'm a bit of a pollyana, but most places I worked had folks who cared and wanted to improve things.
>most places I worked had folks who cared and wanted to improve things
Where are these places? It feels like they are hard to come by, and their hiring requirements can be highly competitive
This is similar to the approach in healthcare, at least my experience in pharmacy.
When an error occurs we find the root cause but in 99% of cases a change to the environment/process is required to avoid it in the future.
Humans are all imperfect, their competence will change hour to hour let alone day to day. But you can control a system and put checks in place (admittedly a human can still do the process wrong, but then you need to think how the process can be clearer).
No-blame culture is very effective at providing an open environment to share mistakes, learn, but most importantly avoid reoccurance.
The SVP needs something to report back to his manager and that’s it.
> What they didn't want was for empathy to become the mechanism by which the organisation absolved itself of having to change.
That line is absolute gold
This is a really really smart SVP. The answer to “how do we prevent this in the future” is to identify decisions that reduce that problem from happening again. This doesn’t have to be perfect. You can say “we are going to do X next time” and also say “but we don’t know how far X will work”. When the failure happens again, you can retire process X and move on to Y. The aim is to make a series of decisions that eventually get to the heart of the issue.
Everything else is a conversation that takes up space on a post-mortem or runbook.
Love this idea; won't go over well at all with the other accountants I work with. MY CFO doesn't like graphs because they "hide too many details' and insists on everything presented to her being in a table. MY VP pulls out a calculator and re-does the math on tables in decks by hand to help him 'understand'.
A lot of leaders like to hide in the details because the bigger picture is a harder problem.
My father who was also involved in IT tells a similar story where the executive cut him off and said "I asked you for the baby, not the labor pains."
We call this incident postmortem, part of a company process. After serious problems and firefighting, when the patches and hacks and people working 24 hour and it admins wake on a Sunday morning to do work, we sit down and try to figure out how this will _never_ happen again.
Idiotic article. Nobody collects "why"s so they can not change anything. Not changing anything is never the failure mode. The failure mode is changing the wrong thing. If you are a leader, and something egregious goes wrong, it is your job to ensure that your people don't just put some bandaid fix on it that will keep causing issues indefinitely. Understanding the complete "why" is a precondition for that. Not bothering to hear a complete explanation because you trust your people to do the right thing is fine, but then why were you on that call in the first place? Let them do their job.
Thats funny. When I try to only give the conclusion, I'm often asked for the details.
How about explain the problem and solution in 3 to 5 levels of details in a top-down hierarchical manner sort of like a decision tree. Let people decide how far they want to drill down.
If I recall correctly, in The Pragmatic Engineer, this was described simply as "provide options, not excuses" and is a critical way of building credibility.
If you don’t know what happened how would you be able to tell if the changes are addressing the problem? If you don’t care about the problem being addressed why jump in a call in the first place?
We write up timelines. We reconstruct decisions. We explain dependencies. At the end of it, we hand over a document that contains the specific combination of events that led to the incident. Everyone nods their head, says "that makes sense", and we all move on with our day.
...huh? I've been in corporate America for 19 years now and I've never once had this happen. I've never seen anyone just look for the cause and not ask what can be done to prevent it in the future. Everyone KNOWS that question is coming next.
Learned this doing incident reviews. If the exec asks for details it usually means they don't believe you yet, so "skip to what changes" is actually the good outcome.
I thought keeping details away from c-suit regardless of how technical these people are was the standard thing to do. Your job is to make these guys work the minimum. We fucked up, we fixed it and it won’t happen again. They don’t need to know anything else. You could upload the forensics report to a share drive and make the link available if they want to see it, but most times they won’t bother.
How you can have an informed conversation about change without hearing the problem out?
If you trust someone that much, why are you even in the loop? Why are you badgering them at all? This is just bad management pretending to offer underlings autonomy. As soon as it fails, everyone loses their job.
> ...I'll empathise with you. Then it'll happen again.
I'm not so sure this means "I trust you."
> At first I thought "I don't want the details" sounded dismissive.
Well that is because it was delivered by someone who was actually being dismissive!
If they want to know what "we are changing" but don't want to know any detail as to why, even presented at an appropriate level, they are very likely looking for you to take all the risk of the decision and they are dismissing your need to have the necessary informed consent for it to become the we.
Now, if you're presenting that information at a level of detail that is truly irrelevant or deep, that is your problem to fix.
But otherwise be very wary of this pattern of communication where "we" might mean "you". Anyone with any sense of risk management should know not to do this.
If you have not seen it, watch Margin Call. When you get to the boardroom scene [0] you'll see this play out, but you will also see the (pretty rapacious, direct) boss understand properly that the information he is getting from a low ranking employee is nevertheless his problem to understand, even if only at a 10,000 feet level.
Beyond the drama of the way the scene ends, it's actually a very good model of how that interaction should play out for everyone — making it clear that everyone in the room shares in the "we" of it, including the decisionmaker.
I have been in rooms where it played out at least something like that, where the boss wants to make an attempt to share the burden of the detail, and I've been able to leave them feeling somewhat supported, or at least without feeling like I was being shafted.
And I've been in rooms with people who don't want to know the details but just want to know what "we" are going to fix — those guys have never been as good to work for. If they say "we" but leave you with the impression they may mean "you", it's bad.
[0] said scene, but really, really, watch the film if you never have:
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechma...
> [The Manager] continued:
>> I know that if we get into the details, the reasons will be perfectly reasonable. You'll explain what happened, I'll understand why everyone made the decisions they made, and I'll empathise with you.
>> Then it'll happen again.
>> So I don't want the details. I want to know what we're changing.
Even if the manager's approach was correct, this is just a hurtful way to frame it to your team. It's great that the author could reverse-engineer what the manager was doing, but it shouldn't come to that.
Why couldn't the manager say something like:
> You are all great engineers, so I already know that everyone made the best decision available with the information they had at the time. What are we going to do differently moving forward?
I'm still not sure I agree with the strategy, because I don't see how you can understand what happens next without understanding what went wrong. But I can see how the framing might help steer the discussion.
This is just a LinkedIn post.
Is this Five Whys from First Principles?
No. They should always get the full details.
Neurotypical executive toxic attitudes should be shamed.
Making informed decisions based on assumptions or guesses is always going to result in terrible outcomes.
Your svp is a bad manager
> The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying "I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next".
Apropos, I was once told a Japanese saying: "Fix the problem, not the blame."
I must have repeated this charming story a dozen times before realizing it makes no sense in Japanese -- it relies entirely on English idioms.
i don't want to sound like a douchebag but isn't figuring out what went wrong and how to prevent next time kind of an obvious goal
Why are these SVPs even needed anymore? They seem to do nothing of value.
If you ask them, of course they will make up a bs story with their fake answer. The fact is that they fail the ablation test.
I learned this myself while yelling at AI.
SVP seems like such a useless appendage in the story.
He doesn’t want the details, he just wants someone else to tell him what they’re gonna do. But if he doesn’t know the details, he won’t understand if the plan will make things better or worse.
So… what exactly is this presumably valuable person there to do? Just to gage the confidence in the room? Presumably everyone was confident before the mistake happened.
What does this person who just wants a solution add? Why isn’t he fostering a discussion and adding his insight? Why is he in the room at all?
I can understand the inclination, but actually I /do/ want the details, because without the details I cannot consider and measure if the change proposed is a reasonable pathway to help manage the class of problem. Many times, people in organizations while well-meaning are siloed and focused specifically in their own niche and therefore will propose changes that cannot be coherent in any holistic manner across all the parts of the organization that would need to be affected by the change. That means you /do/ need to understand the details, and also have a big picture view.
The executive is there to help with the big picture, but you can't see the big picture if the canvas is blank.
If I'm to explain what needs to change, that will by definition address processes or lack thereof that led to the problem, no? Which is then explaining what happened and why in an indirect manner, so many of the proposed changes may not make sense without more context.
I would not have said that. I would have asked for the details and tried to find the gaps because, almost always, something could have been done. Then the question is how much risk reduction are you willing to pay for.
Isn't that the same with just more steps? Seems the svp was focusing on what they will do differently next time
Presumably the SVP joined the meeting because the incident was significant. The team can present the options but the executive may need to make a judgement call, and he can't do that responsibly if he turns his brain off. For instance, what if it happened due to understaffing or things falling between the cracks among teams, possibly indicating inadequate org design? Such things are the responsibility of management.
I'm giving you the details because I'm going to give you options for solutions and I need priority information about those solutions, and you need to be informed about the trade-offs and costs of each option because you have better knowledge of our overarching objectives than I do.
If our overarching objectives don't impact our on-the-ground decisions, what are you even for?
The quote box at the start of the article is the essence of it, the rest is AI-speak dressing it up.
TLDR:
Some outage causes a meeting with an SVP. SVP preempts the discussion with the following:
“I know that if we get into the details, the reasons will be perfectly reasonable. You'll explain what happened, I'll understand why everyone made the decisions they made, and I'll empathise with you.
Then it'll happen again.
So I don't want the details. I want to know what we're changing.”