Uh-oh.
Something Very Bad has happened at your organization. The immediate fire has been put out (maybe some cinders are still smoldering), but now it’s time to get some people into a room and figure out a) how on earth did that happen, and b) how do we make sure it never, ever happens again.
Congratulations, you’re running a post-mortem.
This talk addresses the deep challenges that you’re going to face when you have a roomful of human beings ashamed about some Bad Thing that they were a part of. And, once you understand those challenges, it explains how you can overcome them (spoiler: humor is critical).
It knits together ideas from psychology (e.g. various kinds of ‘cognitive biases’; how the moral instinct works in humans; what humor is and how it functions; etc), with personal experience both running a wide variety of post-mortems, and also building a lot of systems that have failed (sometimes spectacularly).
This talk aims to give you a vision of how crazy valuable an effective post-mortem process can be, plus a wide variety of specific tactics to improve your own practice.
Some topics addressed:
Everyone seems to agree that learning from failure is hugely important, but it can be a surprisingly hard thing to do.
Dan Milstein is Director of Supply Chain Engineering at Wayfair, in Boston. His teams build all kinds of systems to support the physical movement of goods — which turns out to engender a marvelously hard and satisfying series of challenges. Before he joined Wayfair, he worked a programmer, architect, team lead and product owner at a variety of startups over the last 20 years. In general, he is deeply fascinated by the interactions between complex systems and the humans who build and maintain those systems.
Comments on this page are now closed.
For information on exhibition and sponsorship opportunities at the conference, contact Gloria Lombardo at (203) 381-9245 or glombardo@oreilly.com
For media partnerships, contact mediapartners@ oreilly.com
For media-related inquiries, contact Maureen Jennings at maureen@oreilly.com
View a complete list of Velocity contacts
Comments
@Aminie, Dan posted this link to his deck on Twitter: http://www.slideshare.net/danmil30/how-to-run-a-postmortem-with-humans-not-robots-velocity-2013
Are the slides for this presentation posted anywhere? Loved the presentation and would like to share it with co-workers. Thanks!