Fight, Flight, or Freeze - Releasing Organizational Trauma
summary
Organizational trauma is defined as systems stuck in hyperarousal or freeze after outages, with measurable symptoms like constant vigilance, analysis paralysis, and halted innovation. Practical fixes include running low-stress gamedays and deliberate failure injection such as Failure Fridays, rotating alert tones to reduce conditioned panic, using contributing factors instead of single root causes, and turning postmortems into blameless postmortems that are processed and shared. Resilience requires people, not just robustness in code and infrastructure.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction and personal connection
- 1:50Defining organizational trauma
- 4:40Humans vs. zebras in trauma response
- 8:56Window of tolerance in organizations
- 12:51Pattern recognition pitfalls
- 17:08Resilience vs. robustness in systems
- 20:58Gamedays and planned failure injection
- 25:16Blameless post mortems and trauma
- 28:45Resilience and helplessness
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