Beyond Blame

Chapter 13. Executive Support

“Is there anything else we need to discuss?” Roger asked, looking around the room. The staff meeting was drawing to a close, and Bill, Ollie, Raj, and Linda had just finished giving brief updates about their past week and sharing their plans for the next. Bill cleared his throat, and spoke more slowly than usual.

“Actually, there is one more thing, Roger. The four of us have been talking a lot about the last outage, and how we dealt with it. We all agree that we could learn more from it.”

“Could you?” asked Roger. “I was under the impression that we already identified the root cause.”

“We’ve constructed a comfortable story,” Ollie said, “with a simple and single root cause—a villain. And having done that, we short-circuited the possibility for developing any deeper understanding of the complex systems we work with. We haven’t really made them safer or more resilient.”

“Are you saying that Mike didn’t cause the outage?”

“Roger,” Bill said, “How was it that Mike was able to do that? What conditions needed to be present for the network to crash? These are the important questions.”

“I’m guessing you know the answer to these questions?”

“We know some of the conditions,” Bill said. “The security patch, for instance, is one of them. The fact that it was the biggest trading day on record is probably another one. But because we didn’t really dig deeply enough, there are most certainly other conditions that we missed.”

Bill turned to look at Raj, who shifted ...