Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma
summary
Organizations treat outages like trauma: repeated incidents leave a lasting “scar” that drives fight/flight/freeze behaviors such as permanent war‑room vigilance or frozen quarterly releases. Practical fixes include using game days and planned failure injection run as real incidents several times a week, always run the incident process to completion (don’t litigate severity), capture and broadcast incident narratives, and practice blameless postmortems so the organization re‑associates failure with safe, repeatable recovery rather than panic or paralysis.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction and talk origin
- 1:03Content warning and trauma background
- 2:29Fight-or-flight response explained
- 8:12Trauma nuances and organizational parallels
- 10:41Organizational hyper arousal vs freeze
- 13:55Pattern recognition pitfalls in systems
- 16:00Identifying organizational window of tolerance
- 19:30EMDR therapy and organizational adaptation
- 21:55Game days and safe incident practice
- 25:45Planned failure injection best practices
- 27:49Blameless post-mortems and trauma processing
- 30:18Somatic experiencing and incident response
- 32:01Regulating organizational trauma
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