Great Circle Waypoints Blog
Items of interest to Great Circle clients and friends
What managing emergencies at Burning Man teaches me about incident management in tech
Every summer, I spend two weeks helping run emergency dispatch at Burning Man. Many of the practices the public safety world takes for granted adapt readily to software incident response, but they’re often unfamiliar to engineering teams.
How senior leaders disrupt incidents just by showing up
A senior leader who joins an incident channel and says nothing still changes the room. The disruption isn’t caused by anything they do. It’s caused by what they are.
When declaring an incident becomes everyone’s favorite workaround
When teams start declaring incidents for their side effects (e.g., deployment unfreezes, resource prioritization, or cross-functional coordination), that tells you something important about what’s missing from your normal processes.
Incidents start before the response does
Incidents start when customers first experience problems, which is often well before the company learns of it and the response begins. Four investments help close that gap.
Respecting fatigue isn’t coddling
Most companies don’t recognize the impact that responder fatigue (especially after overnight incidents) has on next-day performance, for both normal work and further incidents.
Heroic saves are near misses
Every heroic save is also a signal: the company’s incident response capability depends on specific individuals’ availability.
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