Incident Writeup as Sociological Storytelling
Back when Game of Thrones was ending, the sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci wrote an essay titled The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones. Up until the last season, Game of Thrones was told as a sociological story. Even though the show followed individual characters, the story wasn’t about those characters as individuals. Rather, it was a story about larger systems, such as society, norms, external events, and institutions, told through these characters. The sociological nature of the story was how the series maintained cohesion even though major characters died so often. In the last season, the showrunners switched to telling psychological stories, about the individual characters.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post called Naming names in incident writeups. My former colleague Nora Jones expressed similar sentiments in her recent o11ycon keynote:
“Blamelessness: a lot of orgs think it’s about being nice and not naming names. That’s really not the case. Instead, it’s about making it a safe enough space to come forward with information and _to_ name names.” —@nora_js #o11ycon
— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) June 9, 2021
A good incident writeup is a sociological story about our system. Yes, there are individual engineers who were involved in the incident, but their role in the writeup is to serve as a narrative vehicle for telling that larger story. We care about those engineers (they are our colleagues!), but it’s the system that the story is about. As Tufekci puts it:
The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero/heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. “Yeah, I can see myself doing that under such circumstances” is a way into a broader, deeper understanding. It’s not just empathy: we of course empathize with victims and good people, not with evildoers.
But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone. The alternative is an often futile appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they exist along with baser and lesser motives. The question isn’t to identify the few angels but to make it easier for everyone to make the choices that, collectively, would lead us all to a better place.