Further reading on just culture and blameless post mortems

Here’s the reading list to accompany my Monktoberfest talk on just culture, blameless post mortems, and local rationality.

The talk was very much inspired by Sidney Dekker’s fantastic book The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error. Here’s a short video where he explains Just Culture. There’s also a PDF of an old edition of the book available online.

The rationale and methodology for post mortems at Etsy are explained in Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture, written by John Allspaw in May 2012.

Daniel Schauenberg, an engineer at Etsy who serves as a post mortem facilitator, wrote up our process in Practical Postmortems at Etsy for InfoQ.

The source code for Morgue, Etsy’s post mortem tracker, is available on GitHub.

This talk was in part based on a post I wrote last year, also entitled Management is not about sorting apples.

Other links:

• The Symantec blog post mentioned in the talk, A Tough Day as Leaders.
• Also mentioned: Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption and Related Impacts in the US-East Region
• Loss of Thrust in Both Engines After Encountering a Flock of Birds and Subsequent Ditching on the Hudson River, the NTSB report on “The Miracle on the Hudson.”