"I have done this, it was not awesome"

Hilarious presentation about failure and morals. Having been part (in a sometimes, ahem, active role) in some spectacular screwups, I can relate a LOT.

Watch this now, and after the next screwup at your organization, watch it again.

Besides being really funny, I like that presentation for a number of reasons. Firstly, it discusses morality and shame -- big parts of any screwup. It also introduced me to the "Fundamental Attribution Error"; and it discourages the search for a "root cause". The "root cause" often was a topic in the postmortems I was part of, but it is not, in fact, a very helpful concept. Instead of searching for a kind of primordial evil, it'd be more helpful to search for ways of preventing the broadest class of problems (and choose a set of measures with a price/performance that's right for your organization).


How To Run a 5 Whys (With Humans, Not Robots) from Dan Milstein

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peter