I had the chance to hear Nora Jones on how to deal with incidents that occur in companies. For her, creating an environment with psychological safety is essential for learning with errors. Nora Jones worked at companies like Netflix and Slack and later founded her organization Jeli. She is the author of the book “Chaos engineering.”
How an organization deals with mistakes makes all the difference in its ability to learn, innovation potential, and maintain a diverse and engaged team. Nora Jones knows this and is passionate about the subject.
For Nora, a change in mindset is needed. Organizations should focus on something other than whether or not a mistake will happen but on accepting that mistakes will happen. She admits that everyone works with some constraint, and often this condition will only become noticeable when the error occurs. In moments of failure, the tendency is to seek to find blame, name people, and focus on what should have happened rather than what happened. In this case, understanding how it happened is more important to generate learning. She also draws attention to the fact that many people work without questioning the why of the procedures. There needs to be a historical understanding of why specific rules or norms exist. It is necessary to expand the critical capacity of professionals.
According to her, it is still common to find “BATMAN” professionals with many tools and knowledge who evaluate a problem and suggest a solution, and that’s it. This “heroic” leadership posture contributes a lot to short-term solutions, but what about the others in terms of chances of learning, contribution, and development?
Nora suggests ways to improve learning, holding facilitated meetings to review what happened so that people can bring their different perspectives and listen to other voices to broaden their understanding of the topic and share insights. It is necessary to analyze the data and create a narrative that serves as a learning experience for everyone and generates improvement actions.
According to Nora, language change is essential to create an environment where people are not defensive and open to contributing. Simple changes in expressions better demonstrate the intention to learn and not blame. For example: instead of Incident Investigation, at Jeli, they use Incident Analysis to replace root cause analysis, and learning review is used.