Imagine a colleague comes to you and says, “I’m doing the writeup for a recent incident. I have to specify causes, but I’m not sure

What’s allowed to count as a cause?

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2021-07-19 04:30:05

Imagine a colleague comes to you and says, “I’m doing the writeup for a recent incident. I have to specify causes, but I’m not sure which ones to put. Which of these do you think I should go with?”

There’s a sense in which all of these can count as causes. If any of them weren’t present, the incident wouldn’t have happened. But we don’t see them the same way. I can guarantee that you’re never going to see power dynamics listed as a cause in an incident writeup, public or internal.

The reason is not that “incorrect configuration value” is somehow objectively more causal than power dynamics. Rather, the sorts of things that are allowed to be labelled as causes depends on the cultural norms of an organization. This is what people mean when they say that causes are socially constructed.

And who gets to determine what’s allowed to be labelled as a cause and what isn’t is itself a property of power dynamics. Because the things that are allowed to be called causes are things that an organization is willing to label as a problem, which means that it’s something that can receive organizational attention and resources in order to be addressed.

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