The Human Side of Postmortems: Managing Stress and Cognitive Biases

Book Reviews | Computing

This past week I read David Zwieback's The Human Side of Postmortems: Managing Stress and Cognitive Biases which was a short book with the perhaps obvious conclusion that a blame free work environment is the only real level management has to reduce stress during an incident. If an individual knows that they cannot be labeled the "root cause" of an incident then they are more likely to be unhindered by the stress that can lower there performance during a critical period.

Unfortunately Zwieback's book also highlighted how widespread the flouting of this simple rule is and how many companies play the blame game when an incident occurs. The all-too-often tale being that politics leads people to hide their mistakes and misteps in postmortems and the organize doesn't really learn how an incident happened and how it can be prevented. The manpower, time and money lost thereby is inexcusable.