Reactions To Failure

Great article on system failures in IT and how groups/people react to them. Here is a summary:

tl;dr: Catastrophic system failures are remarkably common in IT-dependent environments. The reactions to such failures varies but is often some version of blame-and-train. There are a number of problems with blame-and-train but perhaps the most important is it is a form of organizational blindness that forestalls improvement.

Three things:

  1. These failures are markers of systemic brittleness, the inverse of resilience.
  2. The blame-and-train reaction is a diversion, a red herring, and counterproductive; it increases brittleness.
  3. There are productive reactions to failure but they are difficult to accomplish, especially when the failure has big consequences.

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