The Human Side of PostMortems: Managing Stress And Cognitive Bias In Devops

By: Dave Zwieback

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Synopsis: Most postmortem writeups follow a predictable, linear format, writtenfrom a point of view of an omniscient narrator: 1) The outage happened (the acknowledgement) 2) Here's what we found out (the reasons) 3) Here's what we're doing to make sure this doesn't happen again (the remediation) 4) Sorry about that! (the apology) What's almost always missing is any discussion of what people working under extreme stress experienced (confusion, frustration, anger, elation, etc.), what cognitive biases clouded their thinking, how they made decisions with imperfect information, what communication patterns worked or failed, etc. Call this the human -- emotional or psychological -- postmortem. This report explains why the human postmortem is as important as the technical one. Learn how it allows for building more resilient teams and processes, and ultimately reduces the duration and severity of future outages.