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Comment by scsh | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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Because answering the “why” feels like you’ve achieved something. You all blame Gary, pat yourselves on the back and then go home satisfied.

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.

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.

How can you talk about what you'll do w/o talking about cost, cost of opportunity, impact of motivating incidents, etc.??

Maybe if the changes you're doing are small and cheap, sure. But if they are invasive and costly...

> Why are these framed as being almost mutually exclusive?

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.

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