Lots of insights here I agree with…
The gaps in our understanding of how the system works contributes to incidents. Because we don’t have a full understanding of how the system works, we can’t ever fully reason about the impact of every single change that we make. I’d go so far as to say that, in every single incident, there’s something important that somebody didn’t know. That means that gaps in our understanding are dangerous in addition to being omnipresent.
In particular:
Action item discussions are likely to be of interest to a smaller fraction of the audience.
This is a very subjective observation, but my theory is that people tend to find that incident reviews don’t have a lot of value precisely because they focus too much of the time on discussing action items, and the details of the proposed action items are of potential interest to only a very small subset of the audience.
Definitely has been my observation as well. I’ve been trying to pull the review meetings I run at work away from action items, but it’s really hard. What’s worse, once broached, the conversation about action items tends to take over, and it becomes hard to pull back. Thinking about action items is alluring. It’s a simpler, more tangible conversation.
