I don't want the details
michaelheap.com
michaelheap.com
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.
Inner details shouldn't matter. Thats what makes a good summary
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
"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."
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.
- 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.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
The fact the author had never been in a call with the SVP implies incidents that happened before were explained in details, without much process change.
Yeah, for me in these situations it’s often about messaging to stakeholders, and so management in general feels like the problem has been addressed. I do think there’s one important thing missing from the final statement of the post, that he sort of covered briefly when talking about too much process, and that is what is the tradeoff/cost of implementing the change we’re making. Engineering is fundamentally about tradeoffs, and any significant proposed change requires some tradeoff and all too often I see management not asking about this explicitly. I’ve had enough once in a blue moon errors have retros, where the team decided it made no sense to make changes, and others, where the cost was high enough it was worth increasing workflow headaches. I think these tradeoffs being explicit are important at the director and above level, since there are potential real impacts to the team, and that is the level to deal with morale or headcount pressures due to changes to processes.
But doesn't that same logic apply to whether they need to know the details?
No. Leaderships job in this context is to set expectations of what happens next and to drive the team towards a solution that meets those expectations. No amount of trust magically makes that expectation materialize or for it to be met.
Leadership doesn't need to know what happened to set this expectation and then trust their team - who already know the details - to figure out how to meet what's expected.
Perhaps my favorite quote ever about leadership is that it's about holding a vision long enough for others to realize it for themselves, but you can't do that if you dictate and micromanage.
The baseline expectation in the original post also applies to the SVP: he knew enough to know that things aren't unreasonable to start with, this expectation might not apply to all companies.
Offloading the detail onto the team allows the org to scale higher by allowing the leader to bring more teams/problems into the mix. But it also introduces the complexity of keeping those teams in close enough alignment that the overall effect is still positive.
This is by no means guaranteed to be positive, and there's a lot of details to get right for leadership in making this work. But they are different details than what each individual team was bringing to leadership.
Abstractions are helpful, in business management as much as in systems architecture.
It seems like you're trying to rebut my argument by presenting my argument as being against a less strong version of the original claim rather than understanding it as being literally just a counterargument to the specific version of the claim I thought was too strong.
Leaders have the option of trusting subordinates, then operating at a higher level. However part of the job of a leader is to decide who to trust, with what. And why.
Sometimes that means, "Trust, but verify." The leader will spot check randomly to see that the whole is good.
Often, as here, that means, "Trust in some things, but not others." The leader in this case trusted the technical person to produce an accurate description of what happened. But didn't trust that same person to arrive at a solution that met the business of having a similar disaster not happen the next time.
But rather than undermine the tech person with, "I don't trust you to meet the business need," the leader communicated it with, "I trust you on the technical details, but here is the expectation for what you need to produce."
Worse it invites bike shedding most of the time, where folks sit in a room nitpicking pointless details that's cathartic for the people in charge, but once again, doesn't actually do anything productive.
> The statement I initially responded to was "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". I pointed out that the same logic seems like it would apply to the idea that there might be other reasons why a leader might need to know the details.
I'm genuinely confused why this is apparently not clear. Someone said that it's flawed logic to assume there aren't good reasons beyond a lack of trust to want to know next steps. I'm saying it seems reasonable there could be good reasons beyond a lack of trust to want to know the details of the current step. You're saying that I'm finding it difficult to "grok this concept", but I don't even know what concept you're talking about, because none of the responses seem to have been related to this, and I don't understand what anyone else could think I've been saying.
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.
This is a very strong argument that no organization should be allowed to get that big.
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 wouldn't be alive if not for advanced medicine, but if the structures that saved my life are the same ones that constitute our own Great Filter, my life was most definitely not worth the trade. There are too many other people I love to think that.
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.
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 work in a competent team and leadership is required.
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.
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.
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.
Or little to nothing to lose.
Both are good reasons to jump up the hierarchy chain
So you can elide some details when you talk to leadership, investors, and regulators, but you can't elide everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not saying c suite are unquestionable gods, I'm saying that there is no such trust-or-not dichotomy. It's 2 different things.
No matter how ignorant I am in some domain and no matter how knowlegeable some expert is I hire to do something for me in that domain, they can only tell me how to get what I want, or what's the closest that is humanly possible, or the costs of various conflicting priorities and compromises. They can't tell me what to want.
Maybe I DO actually want to burn my whole budget and 5 years of time on some facet that they and most people would say is not important and not worth it to the point of being irrational. Their job is to inform me not to decide for me. I can trust them to inform me honestly and with good judgment and deep knowledge, and then to impliment what I decide also honestly and with competent skill. And yet I still need to be the one who is informed, and then makes a decision and issues a directive.
It's 2 different things.
It's like Steve Jobs being totally unreasonable about tiny details of fit & finish in the hardware products. It makes no sense (to most people) to have custom ethernet jacks manufactured (back when it wasn't so effortless and flexible) just to get them a certain color or material feel, when off the shelf jacks already exist from multiple sources that work just fine for a 10th or 100th the cost, while already meeting a stack of compatibility standards and even safety regulations. No trustworthy engineer would do that. They would actually see it as violating that trust.
As an example, a major rehaul of a core system could push back product (new feature dev) timelines, that can affect customers and their releases, bottomline of the company, reputation, tax repercussions, if it’s an American public company then it’ll affect SOX compliance & audits, could lead to spicy investor/analyst conference calls, and so on.
I've worked with plenty of competent people. Only a few were so good I trusted them completely.
First of all, he didn't say the executive "trusted them completely". Those are your words.
He said "The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying "I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next".".
That can be true even if they don't trust them completely. Let's say he trusted them 80% and not 100%. Isn't that pretty much quite trusting anyway?
Besides, the executive can trust them even 100%, but still want them to give him the general picture. Among other things, it's his job to know and be able to report when asked.
Another explanation is that not wanting the details of operations is based on complete lack of trust, not in the their competence but in the way they would describe things. The boss doesn't want the details because they are sure the details would make it seem like the underling did the right thing and moreover, monitoring that detail would just give the underling leverage over them.
The boss wants to know about changes to avoid this but whatever it is, they'll push back on its extent and won't want to hear about details then either.
There are many reasons an executive needs to know what’s happening even if they’ve delegated the decision making authority.
Nobody can go to their boss and say “I don’t know what’s being done. I let so-and-so handle everything and they’ll figure it out”. Everyone has to know the big things that are happening.
Second, this is the step where the manager surveys the next steps for potential blockers or opportunities to accelerate. Maybe they notice that the plan could benefit from someone else’s help and they ask that person to contribute.
There’s a lot of overthinking happening in this thread. The “I don’t need to know the details” isn’t a literal statement that covers all details. It’s a way of saying “Skip forward to the part I need to hear about”.
[1] realized
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...
Quoting myself here: Amazon is heterogeneous. So much so, that positive anecdotes and negative anecdotes are near worthless without specifying the org. I don't want to name bad orgs but what org are you talking about?
I do think his choice of words was a bit suboptimal. But, it got the point across.
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.
They also have rational choice to not have to get their hands dirty. What incentive is there?
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.
You're inferring a lot of emotion into this writing that I simply did not read.
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.
As I've gotten older, I've grown to appreciate people who are willing to be a little rude in order to avoid wasting people's time or giving them false impressions.
For example, when recruiters reach out to me on LinkedIn now, I almost always say something like "I don't want to waste your time or mine: what is the salary range?" It might be considered a bit "rude" to immediately jump to money, but I figure that that's less rude than wasting 30-90 minutes of time for a job that I have no chance of accepting.
I also try and be a little upfront if I don't like food someone has prepared. I try not to be too much of a dick, but if someone prepared something that I don't like and they ask my opinion, I will say that I wasn't a huge fan. Again, maybe a bit rude, but I also don't want to mislead people.
It kind of goes against my gut; I, like most people, don't really want to make people feel bad and I certainly am not immune to people-pleasing, but I've tried to fight that for the greater cause of being more-honest and upfront with how I speak.
Any resources you suggest?
Providing feedback on the meal is useful for their next guest, if they are interested in improving. If they aren’t, just say it’s fine and move on.
Shifting focus outside of yourself is covered in a lot of areas but Never Split The Difference stuck with me, written by a hostage negotiator.
I mean honestly the last time I gave negative feedback on food I didn't like, it's because I didn't really want to feel pressured to have more.
The first chapter or two of the book is good for the general principles. I found the later chapters about big org management to be less helpful.
I personally go one step further and mentally adjust radical candor to be winsome candor. I'm explicitly adding some empathy and humanity by doing that, so that I'm more likely to treat others how I'd want to be treated, even when the conversation is hard.
I’m a big fan of bluntness / honest feedback, but it can still be done very rudely when inappropriate
like the svp observed that the ic was saying the details, not because the ic needed to share them, but because the ic was anxious that the svp didn’t view them as competent. So the svp cut to the chase and addressed that directly
For your food example, a host might ask if you like the food - not because they care about their cooking skills - but just want to make sure you had a good time. So, saying you don’t like the food and giving cooking suggestions would need to be accompanied by some reassurance that you still enjoyed their company or beautiful home or something. Otherwise it’s still rude
They didn't seem to be too upset over it, but they know me pretty well.
Phrases I've heard:
- This isn't my favorite
- Um, not really my cup of tea
Plenty of people would have come away from this interaction without the level of introspection the author had, and thought, “Man, that SVP is a jerk.” This can add up into frustration and, given time, turnover.
My claim wasn’t that SVP was ineffective - the point was clearly made and understood.
My claim is that it would have taken slightly more words to get that point across without any reputational downside to the SVP.
Whether that cost is worth paying is a question of culture and style.
> 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.
Otherwise, what will be the discussion when it's time to question it later?
This should not be exclusive.
It’s like when cloudflare does a blog post saying they were out for three days and it was because they let someone slopcode the DNS. How has that achieved anything? It will go down again the following week. The customers want to know how you will prevent it happening again, they don’t really care how entertaining your blog is.
Maybe if the changes you're doing are small and cheap, sure. But if they are invasive and costly...
Because the author wanted to write another "thought leadership" article with a clickbait headline that would make it to the HN frontpage (and maybe even featured in the TLDR Newsletter). It worked.
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).
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.
https://how.complexsystems.fail/
and one of it's associated HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32895812
Whereas it’s usually easy to point at a specific tree and say “that one has got to go”.
Keep doing this and you maintain the forest without ever getting overwhelmed.
In the running example I think it is clear that you could stop at any point and address the problem from that point rather than continuing. Questions such as "Why do we permit last minute changes at all?" are given no space.
In a complex system sometimes there is no root cause (cf. aviation crash investigations and the Swiss Cheese nature of risk). By allowing one person to shoulder the entire context of the incident and for that person be the one to suggest lasting corrective actions it leaves little need for the VP to even be involved. How would they know if the proposed corrections are worth the time and money to implement? I don't see any leadership in the example described in the article - I just see a knee-jerk reaction rather than any kind of proactive reflection.
> "I thought we fixed this last time!?"
> "This time was different in a way that our corrective actions didn't address."
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Oops, now I'm fired.
>> "The requirements changed three days before launch."
> Of course they did! What happens when requirements change inside the launch window?
What answer is wanted here? "Moving forward, we'll ignore the VP of Marketing's last minute 'must haves'"?
"We will be more proactive and agile, and volunteer to work during the entire weekend to keep our customers happy, sir!"
"Good, good, but don't bother me with the details."
> 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.
In order to figure out a good solution, you have to have mastery over the problem. That takes a bunch of work.
> Understanding an issue is not the same as fixing it. A good explanation can make things worse. Once everyone agrees that the behaviour was reasonable, the urgency to change anything disappears.
This is a non-sequitor. We're not here to evaluate whether the behavior was reasonable, we're here to figure out how to avoid bad outcomes. If all the behavior was reasonable, then the problem lies somewhere else, and that's an important finding when crafting a proper solution.
The author is literally saying that asking why is the wrong question, and instead asking "What will we change?" is the right question. I get where this comes from, but you can't really answer what will change until you deeply understand why it happened.
> The SVP wasn't interested in understanding how the issue happened or who was involved. They didn't want to be convinced that everyone involved behaved reasonably. That's a baseline expectation.
Their question became:
“Given that reasonable people produced this outcome, what needs to change?”
Of course you have to know the problem, but he trust and excpect a sulution from them. So this does just work this way, if you can trust the people. If not, then the top person has to check the solution for himself.
In my experience, lots of ineffective leaders propose solutions that don't actually fix the problem. In fact, I'd say it's the primary failure mode. I tell folks I work with to watch out for managers that will respond to a problem you raise by saying "Yes, and we're going to solve that with this new program...", and then they conveniently stop talking about the problem, and continue to give updates on the new program. My issue is that the new program is usually just pushing paper around, because actually solving the problem is hard. I don't like approaches that proxy "I understand the problem" with "I have a solution", and saying I trust someone doesn't cover this; it's firmly in the "trust but verify" category.
Good article write-up, I didn't need to read more than one paragraph to get all the information from the whole page.
I do like the term "organizational folklore" though. Actually properly documenting processes & expectations is important (and rare).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't be the only person who thought this is a highly intelligent person being inadvertently gaslit by the SVP into thinking the exec is right to be dismissive with "I don't want the details" because introspection is common in intelligent people.
Had someone said that to me I'd have walked away after saying "fine I'll sort it'.
This illustrates that "trust" to do the job, and since they didn't want the details of the problem, they therefore don't need the specific solution description. This kind of response is also the same level of respect, it's either seen as trust in ability, or just downright disdain with plausible deniability for being rude.
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.
In any case, the actually important question "How to make sure this won’t happen again?" would presumably include the relevant parts of what "this" is as well. But in a more actionable frame.
The issue is when the calls and urgency are raised before making some mental space to even verify that there is enough clarity on what happen and these interrupt the clarification and remediation planning process.
Saying you shouldn't ask "Why did this happen?" and you should ask "What we're changing?" instead is wanting to jump the gun and pretend a required step doesn't exist.
It does exists, is just the executive anxiety reasonable in terms of wanting to be protective of the business but as protective as a family member of a patient wanting a good outcome from the surgeon during the surgery.
Only worst because the surgeon's boss is this anxious family member, and she has a laboral gun pointing to the doctor's neck.
The executive is there to help with the big picture, but you can't see the big picture if the canvas is blank.
- what happened
- impact
- root causes
- what will be changed (commitments)
It's fine for executives to get only a summary of impact + commitments. But the whole post-mortem process has to be followed, and some people have to be aware of all the details.
I usually do want the details, but I also want to communicate my expectations up top and unambiguously.
When "Something had gone wrong that shouldn't have" bubbles up that far, you have an organizational issue, not a technical issue.
Everything else is a conversation that takes up space on a post-mortem or runbook.
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.
That line is absolute gold
Maybe I'm a bit of a pollyana, but 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
I would not say the hiring has been highly competitive (certainly not FAANG level) but the number of jobs are low because they are small. The tech was not cutting edge.
Could be luck?
FYI, $curjob is hiring: https://fusionauth.applytojob.com/apply
Now it just needs to learn how to answer it, and act on the answer.. but step one seems solvable.
This really feels like the sort of senior manager who would say "oh, this/these team/s screwed up, so here's the plan they came up with", talking about their team/s.
Speaking as a C-suite guy, "they" is about as contrary as I can think of what I expect a leader to do: it's "we", and your job is to take responsibility, both in the problems (big problems need to be explained all the way up and sometimes externally) and in the solutions (which to be comfortable with, you obviously need a sufficiently thorough understanding of the problem).
Because up the chain, I will take responsibility for it.
I think i’m going to call our ticket support system “folklore” from now on. It sure is used that way.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Edit: I was wrong. It still reads like LinkedIn to me but “translating” doesn’t help. Thanks in any case.
A lot of leaders like to hide in the details because the bigger picture is a harder problem.
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.
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.
I don't understand. The implication of "don't" and "instead" is that we should somehow be able to figure out what to change, without understanding the problem.
I like this plan of action, it removes focus from what happened in the past to how can we prevent it from happening in the future.
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.
The author is right-- often the details become an excuse for blaming someone, and not learning any lessons.
Only thing that matters-- figure out what system failed and fix it for next time
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...
I appreciate this.
There's something about the way this is drafted that irks me. It reads like AI, but not floridly so. Mostly, it's the optimistic assumptions layered throughout. That management care about reasonableness, that the reasons it actually doesn't want the details is because it 'trusts' you.
No, more likely is that this leader didn't want you to spew minutae. "Keep it simple simon, I want results not a play by play."
>> 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.
Solutions aren't always good solutions. We need to drill into the details, but not the problem's details. We need to look at the solution's details.
I'm not so sure this means "I trust you."
...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.
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.
If our overarching objectives don't impact our on-the-ground decisions, what are you even for?
too often, the 'details' are used as a justification or reason for sloppiness or neglect.
i use this in my life as well: if sth went wrong, I don't care why or how, just as long as I put my finger on the possibility of this thing never happening again.
Now, you can't do that without considering some details, but one can also get lost in the trees and miss the forest. The key point is identify the culprit responsible, leave all the tangentials alone.
I couldn't disagree more. "A problem well stated is a problem half solved."
Neurotypical executive toxic attitudes should be shamed.
Making informed decisions based on assumptions or guesses is always going to result in terrible outcomes.
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.”