Incident writeup as sociological storytelling
Back when Game of Thrones was ending, the sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci wrote an essay titled The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones. Up until the last season, Game of Thrones was told as a sociological story. Even though the show followed individual characters, the story wasn’t about those characters as individuals. Rather, it was a story about larger systems, such as society, norms, external events, and institutions, told through these characters. The sociological nature of the story was how the series maintained cohesion even though major characters died so often. In the last season, the showrunners switched to telling psychological stories, about the individual characters.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post called Naming names in incident writeups. My former colleague Nora Jones expressed similar sentiments in her recent o11ycon keynote:
"Blamelessness: a lot of orgs think it's about being nice and not naming names. That's really not the case. Instead, it's about making it a safe enough space to come forward with information and _to_ name names." —@nora_js #o11ycon
