Other commenters defend the SVP's framing as maturity
3 Yesterday 10:43 AM · 14h ago · 7 comments · 1 source · development 3 of 4
Several commenters side with the essay's core point, describing the SVP's stance as a sign of organizational maturity that prioritizes fixing systems over assigning blame.
“I already believe we reached this point through rational choices. Let's talk about how to change the system so it doesn't happen again.”
cushychickenMichael Heap Author of the essaySVP of engineering (unnamed) Subject of the essay
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What people said 7 voices · verbatim
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A lot of times, people just need a gentle nudge, or an official blessing from an authority figure, to go ahead and make the change that is necessary. You can tell people to manage up, to fully own their work and their process, etc. But a lot of humans don’t want to step on others’ toes or be perceived as acting out of line. A worker on the…
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> To drive change in your organization, don't ask "why did this happen?".> Instead, ask:> What are we changing so that the same class of failure is less likely next time?Why are these framed as being almost mutually exclusive? I don't get it. "How/why did this happen?" informs how you answer "What are we changing?" Even the following section…
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The best leaders know what they need to pay attention to. You cannot know everything. You can know any one thing (or perhaps several), but there are more things to know than you will have time to learn in your lifetime. The question is what is important for you to know, and what you leave to somebody else.You will have to trust someone will figure…
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There's still some problem with that approach. OK, I will tell what I'm going change to prevent recurrence of the issue. How does that makes sense to the audience? Unless they just want hear that "some" change will be there and don't care about how that change would make any sense.It boils down to what exactly is the ownership or accountability of…
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I think the problem is when the execs aren’t looking at change-for-the-better. Instead they’re looking to appoint blame. Moving to a position of assumed competency in your staff and taking the perspective of how-to-improve-next-time is a real step forward in maturity. My guess is it’s rare and blame is easier: most management doesn’t reach this…
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I'm here for the sentiment expressed by the SVP in this article: "I already believe we reached this point through rational choices. Let's talk about how to change the system so it doesn't happen again."I do think his choice of words was a bit suboptimal. But, it got the point across.
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My version of this is: "This is the kind of mistake that we get to make once. How do we prevent it from happening again."I usually do want the details, but I also want to communicate my expectations up top and unambiguously.
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