The Power of Stories
summary
Argues that incident stories beat bullets for getting the right information into people’s heads, because good incident stories are anomalous and immutable (they surprise current models and preserve crucial detail). Gives concrete examples — Therac‑25’s mixed causes, Challenger’s competing explanations, logging spikes filling disks and bringing services down — and concrete practices: a single narrative description section in postmortems, chunked episode timelines in an appendix, quarterly “Once Upon an Incident” storytelling sessions, and capturing second stories to avoid moralizing.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00The power of storytelling
- 2:49Stories in engineering
- 5:22Learning from expertise
- 10:34Criteria for effective stories
- 14:13Therac-25 case study
- 18:33Styles of incident stories
- 21:20The second story approach
- 22:56Multiple perspectives
- 27:27Writing incident reports
- 31:59Practicing the craft
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