No, he's right.

Remember you can conduct only one of the two different types of postmortem, the air crash style blameless one (to find out what happened) and the blame-based one (to find out who to punish). Once you conduct the latter, everyone psychologically "lawyers up". You get a lot more meetings. A lot more paper trail. A lot more delay. You don't just pick a database, you commission a sub-committee for database choice to review the available options over the next six months.

That's why government / civil service operations are so slow. They operate in a very high blame political environment.

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Right, so say we have this situation where you're choosing a SQL database. The organization made a choice that leads to lots of complications, where often times the reason for the complication is because the organization made yet another bad choice. Repeat a couple of times.

We do a blameless postmortem about each one of these, where essentially we only focus on the root causes of the actual problems, but somehow it never comes up that there was one individual who made those bad choices over and over, which lead to the situations arising in the first place.

Do you just never address this? Do you continue to say "Well, it wasn't X's fault, it's the system around X that let X make that decision that needs fixing" even when it repeats, and the humans involved can already see what's going on?

In my mind you need to be able to address bad behavior in organizations where choices have an impact on something produced, otherwise we cannot change the quality what is being produced, or prevent production issues, since it's based on the choices we make, and if "we" make bad choices, the quality will be bad.

Ultimately I agree with you in more serious engineering-heavy domains, like airplanes and what not, and it's a sane default mode, to try to address what's happening around rather than decisions by individuals. But I also don't think that should mean that other domains aren't better served by some hybrid model, especially when it's about producing artifacts of some sort, and similar things.

	▲	otherme123 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>was one individual who made those bad choices over and over This was never said, or even implied, in the article. We don't even know if this was a single person choice. You are making up "facts" like calling the person who makes mistakes "toxic", or saying that the choice was made by someone who only made bad choices. We are talking Uber here, in 2017, which was not only playing "move fast and break things" but "move really fast while shooting an AK47 blindfolded". Not only they expected mistakes, but they encouraged them. It would be plain wrong to start firing individual people for making mistakes if that is the environment.