Post-Incident Reviews

Chapter 4. Understanding Cause and Effect

When problems occur we often assume that all we need to do is reason about the options, select one, and then execute it. This assumes that causality is determinable and therefore that we have a valid means of eliminating options. We believe that if we take a certain action we can predict the resulting effect, or that given an effect we can determine the cause.

However, in IT systems this is not always the case, and as practitioners we must acknowledge that there are in fact systems in which we can determine cause and effect and those in which we cannot.

In Chapter 8 we will see an example that illustrates the negligible value identifying cause provides in contrast to the myriad learnings and action items that surface as the result of moving our focus away from cause and deeper into the phases of the incident lifecycle.

Cynefin

The Cynefin (pronounced kun-EV-in) complexity framework is one way to describe the true nature of a system, as well as appropriate approaches to managing systems. This framework first differentiates between ordered and unordered systems. If knowledge exists from previous experience and can be leveraged, we categorize the system as “ordered.” If the problem has not been experienced before, we treat it as an “unordered system.”

Cynefin, a Welsh word for habitat, has been popularized within the DevOps community as a vehicle for helping us to analyze behavior and decide how to act or make sense of the nature of complex ...