In Part II of the Multi-Party Dilemma (MPD) drill retrospective, we reconvene to dig deeper into the implications and nuances of the simulated incident exercise hosted on the Uptime Labs platform. Eric Dobbs (incident analyst), Alex Elman (deputy IC), and Sarah Butt (incident commander) continue their debrief with Courtney, reflecting on how team behavior evolved under stress, the importance of expertise in managing non-technical aspects of an incident like saturation, and how deeply held assumptions often go unspoken until tested under pressure.

This episode emphasizes the complex social and cognitive dimensions of incident response, such as how people coordinate, communicate, and construct shared understanding. It highlights the value of analyzing drills not for failure points, but for what they reveal about real work, adaptation, and human coordination.

Key Highlights

• Incident Analysis as a Practice:
  • Eric Dobbs emphasized understanding how people make sense of unfolding events, rather than judging decisions in hindsight.
  • The goal is to study the “why it made sense at the time,” not what was “right” or “wrong.”
• Drills Expose Hidden Assumptions:
  • Even experienced responders bring unspoken mental models into incidents.
  • The drill revealed assumptions about communication flows, authority boundaries, and vendor interactions that were not made explicit in planning.
• The Value of Human Expertise:
  • Everyone involved in this incident brought an unparalleled level of expertise to the work. 
  • Often this kind of expertise goes unnoticed or is taken for granted, however this kind of knowledge is precisely what makes for smoother, better coordinated (and sometimes), faster incident response.
• Importance of Framing:
  • The way questions are asked in retrospectives can shape what is revealed—e.g., “What made that hard?” is more productive than “What did you miss?”
  • Reframing incidents around constraints and tradeoffs leads to deeper insight.
• Team Learning and Culture:
  • Safe, high-trust environments enable better learning during drills.
  • Psychological safety allows team members to admit confusion or raise alternate interpretations during real incidents.

Resources and References

• Episode I
• Model of Overload/Saturation as part of the Theory of Graceful Extensibility
• Lorin's Law

In this episode I'm joined by a group of seasoned incident response professionals to discuss a simulated incident drill conducted on the Uptime Labs platform. The conversation centers around the Multi-party Dilemma—the challenge of coordinating incident response across teams or organizations with different missions, contexts, or incentives.

Eric Dobbs, our incident analyst, joins to break down the drill and provide deep insights into the incident dynamics, team interactions, and what true incident analysis looks like when it's done well. Participants Alex Elman and Sarah Butt, who served as deputy and lead incident commanders respectively during the drill, recount their roles and experiences, highlighting realistic stress responses, decision-making, and coordination failures and successes. Hamed Silatani, CEO of Uptime Labs, provides context and insights into the behind-the-scenes work he and his team provide as the other "characters" driving the narrative of the drill.

The episode uniquely showcases the value of structured incident analysis and the benefits of using drills to expose hidden assumptions and improve resilience in complex systems.

A few key highlights include:

• How detailed incident analysis leads to an understanding of the context and rationale behind responders' actions, rather than identifying errors or assigning blame.
• The real goal is to learn how the system and people actually function, not just fix a broken component.
• Themes revealed by the analysis and subsequent discussion
  • Saturation and the value of trust in delegation (especially between Sarah and Alex).
  • The role of deep expertise and how it often makes work appear effortless.
  • Importance of recognizing the real work done during incidents—often messy and improvisational.

References/Resources 

• What Experts See That the Rest of Us Miss During Incidents
• Incident Fest (Uptime Labs event)
• Law of Fluency 
• Handling the Multi-Party Dilemma (Sarah & Alex paper)
• Embracing the Multi-Party Dilemma (Sarah & Alex conference talk)

The other new thing is we now have sponsors! These folks help make this podcast possible, but they don’t have any say over who joins us or what we talk about, so fear not. 

This episode’s sponsor is Uptime Labs. Uptime Labs is a pioneering platform specializing in immersive incident response training. Their solution helps technical teams build confidence and expertise through realistic simulations that mirror real-world outages and security incidents. When most of investment these days in the incident space goes to technology and process, Uptime Labs focuses on sharpening the human element of incident response.

In this episode, we talk to Simon Newton, Head of Platforms at Canva, about their first public incident report. It’s not their first incident by any means, but it’s the first time they chose as a company to invest in sharing the details of an incident with the rest of us, which of course we’re big fans of here at the VOID. 

We discuss:

• What led to Canva finally deciding to publish a public incident report
• What the size and nature of their incident response looks like (this incident involved around 20 different people!)
• Their progression from a handful of engineers handling incidents to having a dedicated Incident Command (IC) role
• Avoiding blame when a known performance fix was ready to be deployed but hadn't yet, which contributed to the incident getting worse as it progressed
• The various ways the people involved in the incident collaborated and improvised to resolve it

Related Resources

• Preempting Problems in a Sociotechnical System (the incident report)
• Work as Imagined vs Work as Done
• Resilience in Software Foundation
• On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects
• Hitting the Brakes
• 2024 VOID Report
  
   

• A set of incidents she's been involved with that featured some form of control plane or automation as a contributing factor to the incident.
• What we can learn from fields of study like Resilience Engineering, such as the notion of Joint Cognitive Systems
• Other notable incidents that have similar factors
• Ways that we can better factor in human-computer collaboration in tooling to help  make our lives easier when it comes to handling incidents

References:
Slack's Outage on Jan 4th 2021
A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day at Slack
Google's "satpocalypse"
Meta (Facebook) outage
Reddit Pi-day outage
Ironies of Automation (Lissane Bainbridge)

• How their product is designed, and how that both contributed to, but also helped them quickly resolve, the incident
• The role that organizational scaling (hiring lots of folks quickly) can play in making incident response challenging
• What happens when reality doesn't line up with your assumptions about how your system(s) works
• The importance of taking a step back and making sure the team is taking care of each other when you can get a break in the urgency of an incident

• Metrics, both good and bad
• Moving away from MTTR after they found it to be unreliable
• How incident analysis is akin to archeology
• Getting managers/executives interested in incident reviews
• The value of studying near misses along with actual incidents

• The precarious dynamic where business successes (traffic surges based on cultural whims) are hard to predict, and can hit their systems in wild and surprising ways.
• How incidents like these have multiple contributing factors, not all of which are purely technical
• How much they learned about their company's processes, assumptions, organizational boundaries, and other "non-technical" factors
• How people are the source of resilience in these complex sociotechnical systems
• Creating psychologically safe environments for people who respond to incidents
• Their motivation for investing so much time and energy into analyzing, writing, and publishing these incident reviews
• What studying near misses illuminated for them about how their systems work

Resources mentioned in this episode include:

• Reddit's r/wallstreetsbets incident anthology, which links to all the reports we discuss.
• "Work as imagined and work as done" by Steven Shorrock (video)

• Complex socio-technical systems and the kinds of failures that can happen in them (they're always surprises)
• Transparency and the benefits of companies sharing these outage reports
• Safety margins, performance envelopes, and the role of expertise in developing a sense for them
• Honeycomb's incident response philosophy and process
• The cognitive costs of responding to incidents
• What we can (and can't) learn from incident reports

Resources mentioned in the episode:

• Kafka Migration and Lessons Learned by  Honeycomb
• Managing the Hidden Costs of Coordination by Laura McGuire
• Above the Line, Below the Line by Richard Cook
• "Those found responsible have been sacked": Some observations on the usefulness of error by Richard Cook and Christopher P. Nemeth

Published in partnership with Indeed.