This talk is really a way to start a conversation … with me right after the talk
During the conference
or once you’re back at work next week at your organization
Specifically, what it is
Why it happens
When it starts
how to tell if you're in an organization that suffers from it
It may not be as hard as you think!
How many of you have heard the term ‘Error Culture’ before?
Lack of understanding of
Have you ever had to click ‘OK’ a bunch of times? Have you ever had users complain about how many times they have to click OK?
Potentially most insidiously …Hero Culture
These next few slides have one of my favorite comics from
The Work Chronicles comic
“Prevention and Cure” https://workchronicles.com/prevention-and-cure/
we find our hero finding a problem
we find our hero watching the problem get bigger
and bigger
our hero tells everyone about the problem that they have ‘found’
our hero fixes the problem
our hero is recognized for their efforts
How many of you have ever been the person the the LEFT?
How many of you have been the person on the RIGHT?
Which one feels better? The one on the RIGHT
which one is actually better for problem solving? The one on the LEFT
Two main classes of reasons
WE need to be notified when THIS happens …
This alert MIGHT be useful …
Opted In … Perhaps you’re sent an alert of an error but there is no context, or missing context
When a consultant indicates that it is ‘best practice’ to be notified of an alert but doesn’t provide more context. This is similar to the WE need to be notified about THIS from the internal section before
When defaults for external software come with enabled alerts but no context or steps for resolution
You might be surprised at the answer … or maybe not
Since we're at a tech conference, the obvious answer is folks in tech. This can be ....
but you might not realize this has the potential to happen in other areas of life as well.
Honestly, this can happen to anyone!
How can you tell?
Does your deleted inbox look something like this?
With a whole bunch of items from a no-reply style email address?
But we’re all smart people in this room, so maybe you get 'smart' and create a rule to get rid of that email so you don't have to see it any more?
Maybe you get alerts with no context that are NOT actionable
Do you have experiences similar to the one we saw in Prevention and Cure?
Stated Another way:
Do you see others around you put out fires that you BOTH knew were coming
and did nothing until the fire got BIG enough to let EVERYONE know about
… and then they get ‘rewarded’ for putting out the fire?
to one or more of the questions from before
Hopefully I’ve convinced you that Error Culture is bad
And you might ask …
No matter where you are in the 'ladder' at work (i.e. IC, or CTO) you can make a change
You can have agency
A word of caution … change should not be made
until the reasoning
behind the current state of affairs
is understood
And how can you gather information to understand?
Because we don’t want ANYONE to have to delete this alert
We have an important alert
The superhero Verb from Schoolhouse Rocks
School house rocks was a short cartoon on between other cartoons on Saturday mornings in the 1980s
Which server?
We know which server now, but what am I supposed to do about it?
an actionable alert should have a verb in it ... i.e. the server is unresponsive. To fix this, do X ...
The verb here is do
an actionable alert should have a verb in it ... i.e. the server is unresponsive. To fix this, do X ... The verb here is reboot
we have an actionable alert now
we have an actionable alert now, but do we know WHY we have the alert? If not, we should determine the WHY and document it
knowing why an alert exists can help you to determine if it's still needed in the future
Here, we’ve added a link to our Knowledge Management System to help provide context for the alert
Since today is February 8. 2025 …
maybe this alert isn’t important anymore
But I’d need to verify before disabling the alert
oh no ... drop everything and get this taken care of now!
In my examples the context was provided by links …
But embedded context can work as well
No one size fits all
make sure the right people are being notified
The Claims team and the Business Analyst can't do anything; given the security infrastructure, the developer might not be able to do anything either!
This might be good information for them to have, but sending an actionable alert to the wrong people doesn’t help anything
this is a person that can actually perform the action of do from above
Frustration -> What am I supposed to do with this information?
Time Waste -> Why did I just do this?
Confusion -> what am I supposed to do?
Error Culture is / can be pervasive.
But you can make it better
