So I bombed an incident review this week. More specifically, the facilitating.
I’ve run post mortems/retrospectives/PIRs, whatever you want to call them, for over a decade. Just felt my arthritis kick in a bit as I typed that. It’s hard to quantify, to even qualify, subtle nuances and questions I’ve developed as handy go-to’s to get folks to speak up during interviews and meetings. My friend Lorin Hochstein said that facilitation is the hardest part of the work, which feels pretty on the money. You can always take another swing in an interview, prep what questions you’re likely to ask or come back around during the PIR (post incident review) with everyone. Walking through timelines and dashboards are toilsome, but they’re rarely more than an inconvenience of time and energy. I could see an argument made for summarization and write ups (“Tell me everyting we will need to know, all the tasks to make sure this ‘doesn’t happen again’ – but make it short enough so folks will want to read it”).
But running the meeting, yeah, that can be sneakily hard. You mostly have one shot at it and before an audience who you’ve convinced to spend their time in yet another meeting instead of “the real work” (aside – incidents are part of the real work). It’s very easy to lose folks, say the wrong thing, let emotions run high.
Funny thing is I typically think of myself as worse at the parts outside of the meeting. I’ve got golden retriever energy when it comes to helping folks out, and the PIR meeting is where I shine. It’s my job to care about folks, to make sure they’re heard? And you’re going to pay me to see folks do the “aha!” moment when the parts click? Sign me up, that’s entirely my jam. I’m fairly loquacious and have a knack for vulnerability-as-means-of-disarming folks, getting them to feel that yes it’s ok to say “I don’t know”. I consider that last bit a personal superpower.
So what went wrong? The humor of analyzing the analysis, finding the fault when we’re hunting through the pieces of an outage, isn’t lost on me. It’s also an easy slide into over analyzing everything we do, some college sophomore philosophy student who suddenly falls into a nihilistic hole trying to debate with everyone this sudden newfound enlightenment. To spoil the ending, I leaned too heavily on my tropes, enthusiasm and admittedly a bit of weariness from the week laying on top of a meeting. I’m also trying to get momentum for more PIR meetings, and while I know a surefire way to poison that is to set up a ton of very long and dry discussions, I condensed the review to a half hour to entice folks into joining. “That’ll surely be enough!” he lied to himself.
I tend to talk. I probably say in twenty words what can be said in five. That can be comforting to some folks, vamping while they gather ideas. It’s my crutch as I over explain to really make sure folks understand. That was heavily present in this latest. I got a nudge “Hey, let people talk more” in the meeting. Twice, actually, which is fairly impressive for only 30 minutes. That’s one of my focal points for PIR meetings too – don’t just repeat the narrative of events, let the participants state what happened. Folks will nod and say “Yup!” and agree with facilitators, that small modicum of power within the virtual walls of that meeting, because that’s what we’re inclined to do. Surefire way to get people not to share their expertise.
I was bummed for a few hours, because I felt it immediately after. No one had to mention it, I could see it clear as day. I try to leave five to ten minutes at the end of a meeting as a free space – action items, sure, but “what did we miss?” more so. There were at least two or three ideas of areas we failed to cover which feel pretty core to the learning. “Yeah, we don’t still understand the source of the problematic requests, and…”. etc.
But the world didn’t end. It (typically) doesn’t when we have a major outage and I’m fairly confident we’ll be ok here. It’s good to recognize, even with a ton of experience, facilitators do have tried-and-true methods that can hinder if overused. I’ll also say, in retrospect, I had a question I was drilling down on for at least 15 minutes that I wanted answering, likely in my head before the meeting started. Checking bias at the door, notably when it’s your team in the driver’s seat, is hard.
If nothing else, incidents are surprises. “Well that went wrong and caught me off guard” feels akin to that. I’ll grab this post another day in the future and appreciate it, a few more reviews under my belt that hopefully turn more my way.