Why I don’t like discussing action items during incident reviews
My whole shtick is that I believe updating people's mental models will have a more significant positive impact on the system than discussing action items, but boy is that a tough sell.
Judging from the incident review meetings I’ve attended throughout my career, this is a minority view, and I wanted to elaborate here on why I think this way. For more on this topic, I encourage readers to check out John Allspaw’s 2016 blog post entitled Etsy’s Debriefing Facilitation Guide for Blameless Postmortems, as well as the Etsy Debrief Facilitation Guide itself. Another starting point I will shamelessly recommend is Resilience engineering: where do I start?
First, let’s talk about what an incident review is. It’s a meeting that takes place not too long after an incident has occurred, to discuss the incident. In many organizations, these meetings are open to any employee interested in attending, which means that these can have potentially large and varied audiences.
I was going to write “the goal of an incident review is…” in the paragraph above, but the whole purpose of this post is to articulate how my goals differ from other people’s goals.
