The Human Toll of Incidents & Ways To Mitigate It

The presentation by Kyle Lexmond focuses on understanding the impact of significant incidents on individuals involved and proposes methods to make incident management more considerate.

Key Points Discussed:

• Definition of an Incident: Incidents are events impacting business metrics in a negative direction, requiring immediate response, and necessitating mitigation to restore normalcy. The emphasis is on mitigating impacts rather than solving the entire problem.
• Human Aspect of Incidents: The talk emphasizes the pressure and emotional impact on individuals involved in incident management. Factors influencing this include personal pride, professional obligations, and company optics.
• Incident Management Process:
  • Focuses on efficient coordination and responsibility allocation, with clear communication as a key element.
  • The importance of having a dedicated incident manager to streamline operations and facilitate better outcome management.
  • Encourages the use of collaborative tools like shared documentation for real-time updates and future reviews.
• Mitigation over Solving: Lexmond points out the importance of focusing on mitigation, i.e., reducing customer impact promptly rather than a complete fix during an active incident.
• Learning from Incidents: Incidents are not inherently negative; they can be avenues for learning and reprioritizing work. Incident management should be guided by human-centered approaches to alleviate stress and improve responses.

Conclusion: The overarching theme of the talk encourages considering human factors in incident management to drive efficient and compassionate responses to technical setbacks.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

Have you ever wondered what it's like to respond to a significant incident? Walk through an hour by hour reconstruction of an incident response or two, focusing on what it was like to be "in the room" and the human response to the incidents. Learn about some actions that could help you while you respond to the next outage, as well as changes you can drive to make incident response more considerate of the humans involved.