Beyond Blame

"Beyond Blame - Learning From Failure and Success" by Dave Zwieback

Review by: Nick Holder – Platform Development Manager

This work appears to be taking the same approach as The Phoenix Project in creating a fictional narrative to illustrate a point, in this case, the focus is on how to learn from experiences to improve for the future.

Again the lead character is named Bill (as in the previous book – I don’t think there is meant to be a connection) and he is working at an organisation with a strong blame culture. The book starts with the aftermath of a network outage and in the name of “accountability” one of Bill’s staff takes the fall. 

With the help of some friends, Bill looks into whether there is a better way to handle these things.

The themes are again familiar to a DevOps audience but this book is very much focussed on learning ways to make sure accountability is not synonymous with blame. It encourages organisations to learn from their experiences by not engendering fear of blame in the employees, leading to better sharing and understanding of WHY things happened.

Again it has the key points summarised at the end for ease of reference but I did not feel as engaged in this book. The cast are not as well developed, maybe because the book is so short and there is no time to establish the characters.

The author has probably self-mockingly, said it is deliberately a quick read as he has trouble engaging with larger books (Food Fight Podcast, 2015)

As a primer to learning reviews, as opposed to Post-mortems, it is a useful read particularly when read alongside The Phoenix Project as part of learning how important the culture of a business is.

A good learning tool to introduce learning reviews and the dangers of blame culture but a bit light.