Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma
summary
Compares PTSD treatment to organizational recovery and argues that simulated outages plus disciplined processing change how teams respond, not just what they know. Recommends EMDR-style game days that run like real incidents using Slack and PagerDuty, a recurring program called failure Fridays, and always run incidents at initial severity so people get practice. Stresses blameless postmortems that are shared across teams, on-call self-care rituals, and cites ~$300,000 as the average cost to replace a burned-out engineer.
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chapters (26)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:23Fight, Flight, or Freeze Releasing Organizational Trauma
- 1:30Content Warning: Discussion of trauma and post- traumatic stress
- 4:19Humans are not zebras
- 8:53How does this apply to an organization?
- 9:43Hyperarousal fight or flight
- 10:44Hypoarousal freeze
- 11:58Inappropriate response
- 14:06"We have a saying in medicine that when you hear hoofbeats, the first thing that should come to mind is a horse, not a zebra." This too cute by half phrase has killed
- 14:52Identify your organization's
- 16:32Regulate
- 17:48Organizational EMDR
- 18:19Game days
- 20:04Planned failure injection
- 22:14Process failure
- 25:04A word about somatic experiencing
- 25:47Cognitive distortions
- 26:25Polarized thinking
- 26:57Overgeneralization
- 27:39Fortune telling
- 29:13Control fallacies
- 32:02Context switch
- 33:01Allocate mental bandwidth
- 33:40Treat yourself
- 34:26Stay healthy
- 34:59Tips from the twittererverse
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