The Third Way - Enable and Inject Learning into Daily Work

18 important questions on The Third Way - Enable and Inject Learning into Daily Work

Why kept Netflix's system working when Amazon AWS US_EAST went down in 2011.

They had a resilient application, which they developed with Chaos Monkey.

What is the Bad Apple Theory according to Dr. Sydney Dekker?

The theory that accidents are the result of a few bad apples. Most everything is safe, if it were not for a few unreliable humans.

What is Just culture according to Dr. Sydney Dekker?

Just culture is that we should expect people to screw up. We must design for human error, Dekker says, whether we are making a machine, a factory, a road, or an apartment building.
  • Higher grades + faster learning
  • Never study anything twice
  • 100% sure, 100% understanding
Discover Study Smart

Name two effective practices to create a just, learning based culture.

  • Blameless post-mortems
  • Controlled introduction of failures into production.

When do we plan a post-mortem also known as post-event retrospectives?

As soon as possible after the problem is solved. To avoid fading away the links between cause and effect or changing circumstances.

What do we do in a post-mortem meeting?

  • Construct a timeline with details from as many perspectives on failures
  • Empower all engineers to improve safety to give detailed accounts of their contributions to failures
  • Enable en encourage people which made the mistake to be the expert on how to not make them in the future
  • Accept that humans can decide to take action or not.
  • Propose countermeasures to prevent similiar accidents and ensure that they are recorded with a target date and an owner for follow-up.

Which stakeholders should be present at a post-mortem?

  • The people who contributed to the problem
  • the people who identified the problem
  • the people who responded to the problem
  • the people who diagnosed the problem
  • the people who where affected by the problem
  • and anyone else who is interesting attending the meeting

Why should counterfactual statements as 'I could have..' or ' If i had known, I should have...' be avoided in post-mortems?

  • To avoid people blaming themselves for things outside their control
  • to avoid people questioning their own abilities
  • it frames the system as imagined while we should look at it as how the system actually exists.

What do we do when a post-mortem is done?

We make all information about the post-mortem available in easily accessible place.

What is the advantage of making all information about a post-mortem available?

The possibility for the whole organization to learn.
And to clients to give transparency so their trust in usvincreases.

How is the tool which Etsy used for recording post-mortems called?
What could be recorded and how was it usefull?

Morgue.
Recorded: Scheduled or unscheduled incident, post-mortem owner, Relevent IRC, Relevant JIRA tickets, Links to consumer forum posts.
It was usefull because it was more easy to record the post-mortems so the number of reported post-mortems increased and therefore enabled organizational learning.

Organizations are typically structured according to one of two models.
Name the models.

  • Standardized model
  • Experimental model

What is a next step when organization tends to have less failures?

To decrease incident tolerances to find ever weaker failure signals.

What is necessary for a learning and calculated risk taking?

A management that enforces this.

How can you make you're application more resilient?

  • Inject failures in production to learn how to deal with it

What's the name of Google's resilient program?

Google's Disaster Recovery Program (DiRT).

What are Game Days?

Specific disaster recovery rehearsals. It comes form resilient engineering.

What are the advantages of Game Days.

  • You will find failures which you didn't expect and can take countermeasures
  • A way to test the systems and the business processes at once.
  • People know who to call
  • Creating a routine

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

  • A unique study and practice tool
  • Never study anything twice again
  • Get the grades you hope for
  • 100% sure, 100% understanding
Remember faster, study better. Scientifically proven.
Trustpilot Logo