3 Strategies To Turn Incidents Into Learning Opportunities

Incidents inevitably happen, but they also offer invaluable information that teams can learn from to help them build more resilient operations. Success lies in viewing failures as improvements to level up the entire organization’s expertise to resolve and recover faster from any system disruption. That’s the ultimate goal of post-incident reviews: to unlock continuous improvement to deliver seamless customer experiences and gain a competitive edge.

Granted, the post-incident review process can feel too overwhelming, especially in the aftermath of a major incident. Oftentimes, this leads to approaching it as a blaming exercise from which no one extracts any knowledge. By rethinking the post-incident review process, organizations can truly turn every incident into an opportunity to learn and future-proof their operations.

Here are the three pillars for a successful post-incident review process:

1. Run Human-Centric Post-Incident Reviews 

Software is built by humans for humans and response teams are made of people, not machines and apps. To really learn from an incident, it’s important to acknowledge human expertise to be an organization’s biggest source of resilience. Meaningful incident reviews need to account not only for technical challenges but also for the social context in which they were handled.

By retracing the human actions taken during an incident and why they were taken, organizations are empowered to surface performance improvement opportunities, but also what was done right as a source of resilience to be nurtured.

2. Create a Blameless Environment

Post-incident reviews are not a blame game. The focus isn’t on who is right or wrong, but what might have enabled people to make certain decisions. Shift from finger-pointing to curiosity — instead of asking “Why did this happen?”, ask “Why did it make sense for us to respond this way?”

Here are some more tips for conducting blameless post-incident reviews:

• Foster psychological safety: Create an environment where team members feel safe to share their thoughts and experiences without fear of blame or retribution. This openness is essential for uncovering the true causes of incidents.
• Engage a neutral facilitator: Assign a neutral party to lead the post-incident review. This individual should not have been directly involved in the incident and can help guide the conversation objectively, ensuring that all perspectives are considered.
• Focus on facts and context: Encourage the team to focus on the facts of the incident and the context in which decisions were made. This approach helps to understand the systemic issues that contributed to the incident.

3. Connect the Dots Between Incidents 

Incidents don’t live independently of one another. They’re best viewed as a connected series of events to be analyzed as a whole. Cross-incident analysis enables organizations to identify patterns and surface actionable insights to drive continuous improvement and ultimately mitigate the risk and cost of incidents.

Aggregating and correlating data from disparate tools into a single platform is key to gaining deep insights into a team’s dynamics to foster well-being and optimize performance. It can help to uncover high-stress areas and pinpoint individuals at risk of burnout and attrition. This empowers leaders to create a supportive environment through data-driven decisions and, in turn, build a more effective incident management process.

Don’t Wait To Start Learning From Incidents

Knowing incidents will keep coming our way, there’s no better approach than fostering a learning culture to enable organizations to protect business continuity, reputation and revenue. The post-incident review process can also play a crucial part in keeping teams engaged and motivated. By improving over time, they can spend more time on high-value work instead of firefighting.

Ready to learn more to stay ahead of the next outage? Check out this free on-demand webinar hosted by Nora Jones, senior director of product at PagerDuty.