**Parent Topic**: [[Software/README]] ## Finger-Pointing Wastes the Outage When something breaks, people deflect ("can't be the transcoding system, that hasn't changed... must be your streaming servers"). Hammond: "Until a fix has been pushed it doesn't matter who broke things, and every minute spent being defensive is another minute something is broken for users." Good teams "focus on trying every possibility until they've found what was broken." ## The Asymmetry of Proof "It's impossible to prove any slightly complex system has no problems. In comparison, it's really easy to prove your code or system *has* a bug." So during an incident, hunting for causes is productive while assigning blame is not — and even a fruitless search usually surfaces things to improve. Contrast two messages: "I'm not even going to look until you check the transaction logs — I know it's your system" versus "I'm stepping through the payment flow now; haven't found it yet — could you check the transaction logs to help?" The second is "usefully motivating" and infectious: when someone visibly works the problem, others join in. ## Reframe the Postmortem A blameless culture is sustained by inclusive postmortems that ask **"What could we do better next time?"** rather than "What did we do wrong?" — the latter "very quickly turns defensive." Grounded in [[No Single Root Cause Exists]] and the discipline of [[Blameless Postmortem Culture]]; the fix-now corollary is [[Quick Fix First Right Fix Later]]. --- *Source: [[Web Operations]] (Allspaw & Robbins, O'Reilly 2010) — Ch 10 — Dev and Ops Collaboration and Cooperation*