“Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original.” — Frank Herbert
Software Engineering (and many other professions) requires regular diagnostics, retrospectives, postmortems, root cause analysis, etc. We want to reflect on the past and learn something from it, so we can improve, and avoid repeating past mistakes.
But often this process of learning from the past doesn’t work. Some teams identify causes and still keep struggling with the same issues. Some teams “never learn”. They compose a good story of why things happened, and still fail to improve. It seems like we don’t always learn even from the best descriptions and analysis of past events.
Many times I have seen fantastic root cause analysis, and as soon as the next day, the teams reverted to the usual, almost instinctive behavior. Everything was identified, but nothing changed.
Why is this so? Take a look a this excerpt form a book about medical diagnostics: “The Sociology of Medical Screening: Critical Perspectives, New Directions” edited by Natalie Armstrong and Helen Eborall
Because we don’t like ambiguity, we make stories with “logical” conclusions. It gives a sense of safety. I love the term the author used: “delusional clarity”.
When doing a retro, there is no way to know for sure if we took everything that happened into account (unknown unknowns). We may even have a preference where we wish a root cause to be (a specific person, team or a system) — and tailor our story to fit that. A mix of facts and assumptions.
Sure, some people are a bit more objective than the others, but let’s be honest; objectivity often doesn’t mix well with talk about what went wrong and why (depending on the team).
What to do about this and how to learn from mistakes?
The most valuable learning is to find out what was (and what was not) in our minds during the time of the error. Ask this:
Why did it look reasonable for us to do this the way we did? Why the important things were not important to us before the error and at the time of error?