The Art of Leadership by Michael Lopp

Author:Michael Lopp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published: 2020-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Play, Learn, and Repeat

Here’s the deal. Your company probably already does onboarding. You probably know the name of the human in the building who bangs the table preaching about postmortem processes. Disasters have occurred, and someone ran to the internet for help. They read an article just like this years ago, discovered a compelling argument for onboarding or postmortems, assigned a DRI2 to the task, and moved on to the next crisis. My question: did they fix the problem?

My third and last piece of advice is the hardest. When things break, you must learn from the failure.

I was feeling pretty good about our postmortem process at a prior start-up. It was engineering-focused (not company-wide), but we trained folks in running an efficient postmortem, we took copious notes, and we religiously logged next actions in our bug tracking system.

After a particularly bad incident, I read the postmortem write-up, and something seemed familiar. A quick scan of the bug database revealed we’d triggered the same bug that had been discovered during a prior incident. A critical bug logged, but not fixed. Becoming alarmed, I ran the following query: “How many issues identified by a postmortem have been resolved as fixed?”

14%.

In our fury to fix, we forgot to finish.

An epic failure has the unique attribute that when it occurs, you have everyone’s attention. It is relatively easy to instigate change after an epic failure because everyone is staring at the sky, not blinking, prepared for it to fall once more. Learning from epic failures isn’t hard. Disciplined learning from all failures requires thoughtful work.

I can’t think of a better inoculation to what ails all rapidly growing companies than building a healthy culture of learning from failure—which means not just identifying the critical fixes, but acting on them. Completely implementing them. You’re thinking I’m talking about bugs in your product, but I am also talking about critical bugs in your company.

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