Making Better Decisions in Incidents (Why Playbooks Aren’t the Answer)
summary
Argues that heavy playbooks cause rigidity and poorer responses and replaces step-by-step rules with three concrete pillars: severity levels that map to business priorities, heuristics like Protect data at all cost to speed judgment under uncertainty, and tooling/automation—for example automating executive escalation paths and status updates—to remove toil. Recommends trip wires such as email customers if support >3x so thresholds, not vague rules, drive consistent, context-aware decisions.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 0:52Speaker background and motivation
- 3:40The problem with playbooks
- 7:08Playbook overload and confusion
- 9:15Mindset shift for better decisions
- 10:59Automation in incident response
- 13:27Using heuristics for quick decisions
- 15:30Trip wires for better judgment
- 16:51The role of culture in response
- 17:35Closing and Q&A invitation
related talks
49mHard Choices, Tight Timelines: A Closer Look at Skip-level Tradeoff Decisions...
46mGames We Play to Improve on Incident Response
39mNavigating the Chaos: A Holistic Approach to Incident Management
28mRevolutionizing Incident Response
15mSustainable Incident Management for happy SRE teams
30mThe Perfect Storm - How We Talk About Disasters
40mBuilding Resilience: How to Learn More from Incidents
13mThe Incident Is The Way: Using Your Incidents to Win...