Incident Groundhog Day

Learning how to respond effectively to incidents is hard. One of the reasons is that we never see the same incident twice. While we can learn vital lessons during and after an incident, we can’t hop into a time machine, and apply these lessons to the same incident to discover their impact. What if we could experience the same incident over and over again? What might we learn? This talk describes a ‘staged world’ experiment in which 20 incident managers separately experienced the same simulated incident affecting a fictitious e-commerce company. We discuss what we noticed that differentiated some incident responders from others, and some surprising things that we expected to see, but didn’t.