"No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story" Daniel Kahneman.

#srecon

How to get better at storytelling? Lots of practice! If you're involved in incidents you'll have lots of practice, and you can tell them to people at SRECon :D

#srecon

(Is this a good time to plug ACRL's one public postmortem? 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣)

https://blog.appliedcomputing.io/p/postmortem-intermittent-failure-in

#srecon

"So what, Lorin, you told us all this stuff, what am I supposed to do with it?"

One take-away: when you do your incident writeups, tell it as a story.

#srecon

A third story told by Diane Vaughan said that challenger was a story about normalization of deviance.

If you tuned a noisy alert, that is normalization of deviance: if the alert is firing, but the system is healthy, we make the alert less noisy! We do this all the time.

#srecon

Another story, told by Edward Tufte (of Visual Display of Quantitative Information fame) said this was about "poor information presentation and bad visualization".

Not surprising that an info-vis guy said it was an info-vis problem 🤣

#srecon

The details of a story depend a lot on the perspective of the storyteller.

Example: the Challenger disaster. Feynman wrote an appendix to the "official" synopsis of the accident. He said this was a story about "management underestimating risks"

#srecon

When it comes to incidents, there are different kinds or styles of stories you can tell:

1. "The horror story": we failed over and the problem followed us to the new region! 😱
2. "The morality tale": the engineer ignored the failing test and the bad code made it to production 😡

#srecon