Book Review: "Beyond Blame"

"Beyond Blame: Learning from Failure and Success" by Dave Zwieback is a short and educational fictional IT story. The book is really short and cheap, at roughly $10 for under a hundred pages. The fictional nature of the book also lent itself to easy reading. The story is important because it also imparts several crucial lessons, such as avoiding hindsight bias, counterfactuals, and writing brutally honest post mortems. This spins out into the philosophy of post mortem and root cause analysis, which is really the point of the book. Ultimately, I only give the book 5 out of 10 stars, because while I did enjoy the story and the lessons imparted, I think those same lessons could be convened in a less veiled and more technical manner. That said, the book gets much higher reviews in other places. I'de recommend the book to computer science, information security professionals, and those who enjoyed The Phoenix Project. In comparing it to the Phoneix project, I thought it had the same goals of using the fictional story to explain the need for these techniques, however the story here was very flat compared the the Phoenix Project and similarly lacking in the multitude of techniques and strategies that the Phoenix Project offered.  The following are the chapters of the book, to help give you a better understanding of its contents.

Chapter 1: Executive Action
Chapter 2: Dealing with the Root Cause
Chapter 3: Operator Error
Chapter 4: The Bad Apples
Chapter 5: Holding to Account
Chapter 6: Why Things Break
Chapter 7: Who’s to Blame?
Chapter 8: Trade-offs
Chapter 9: Reliable Errors (or Reliably Error-Prone)
Chapter 10: The Second Victim
Chapter 11: The Downside of Blame
Chapter 12: Paradigm Shift
Chapter 13: Executive Support
Chapter 14: Complex, Adaptive Systems
Chapter 15: The Learning Review
Chapter 16: The Timeline
Chapter 17: The Town Hall
Chapter 18: The Learning Review Framework

If your interested in the story or how the dialog looks throughout the story you can read the first few sample chapters here. This will give you a great idea of the writing style. The book also talks extensively about the 'five whys' and root cause analysis, but also talks about complex systems and the proclivity for a system to degrade to a failure state. The book sets up a post mortem analysis framework at the end, which it calls The Learning Review Framework. In the book, The Learning Review Framework is more complex, but it can be boiled down into the following quick steps:

1) Set The Context
2) Build A Timeline
3) Determine and Prioritize Remediation Items
4) Publish The Learning Review Write-up as Widely as Possible

I hope these methods can prove helpful in your own post mortem analysis and if not feel free to leave any techniques you use in the comments. Finally, you can listen to a podcast with the author here, or there is another good, detailed breakdown and interview in the following video: