A hallway in a tech company office. A and B are standing in the hallway. B is holding a multiple page document.
A: Wow, that incident from a couple of weeks ago was a real doozy. Do you know how it happened?
B brandishes the document.
B: As it happens, I just finished reading through the incident write-up. They did a pretty thorough investigation.
A: You printed it out? I didn’t know we even had printers in the office anymore.
B: Yeah, I find it easier to read on paper than a computer screen. Anyways, there’s a lot of great detail here, about the history behind the changes that contributed to the incident, about how confusing things were for the responders during the incident response, the tools that the responders used to diagnose what happened, the levers they pulled to actually mitigate the customer impact… I learned a ton from it. Would you like my copy?
A looks skeptically at the document.
A: Wow, that’s a long report.
B: Yeah, it’s about thirty pages. But that’s what it took the authors to explain everything. Like I said, lots of great detail.
A: I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty busy these days.
B: To be honest, I am too. The upcoming launch is keeping my whole team really busy. Not to mention all of these migrations that are going on, that we need to spend time on.
A: Tell me about it! I just don’t have the time to spend reading a doc like that. Can you just tell me the high points, so I can get the most out of it without reading the whole thing?
B: Well, the thing is, I’m pretty sure you’d learn different things from the write-up than I would. I’m sure there’s stuff in here that you already know, that I didn’t. And also, vice versa.
A: Hmmmm…
B: And even if I try to recount what I learned… well, it’s not the same as reading it. I’m not good at articulating what I learned. Just giving you a list of bullet points is not going to be as effective at just going through and reading the whole thing. And, from experience reading lists of “learnings” don’t stick in my head the way the same way as the stuff I learn reading a well-written incident write-up like this one.
A: I see what you’re saying, I really do. I’d like to be able to sit down and spend the time really reading through this whole document. But, given all of the current obligations that business has placed on me, I don’t have that time to invest. I want to learn from this incident, and I know I would learn more if I spent the time on reading the whole thing, but there’s a limit to how much time I can commit to that. So I need to have the important details summarized.
B: Just to make sure I understand: you’re saying that, even though you admit you’d learn more if you read the entire write-up, because of the various work pressures that you are facing, you’re making an explicit trade-off to reduce the amount of time you spend on this task, in order to have the time to spend on other tasks you have to work on?
A: Yes, exactly!
B: Well, now you know how the incident happened.
END OF SCENE
Surfing Complexity 