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Approaching Incident Response Compassionately With Connie-Lynne Villani

Why Connie-Lynne is Excited about speaking at Summit

Connie-Lynne shares her excitement about speaking at PagerDuty Summit, and where her talk stemmed from. She talks about the notion of how we can be both being effective and still acknowledge the humanity within ourselves and our colleagues.

Connie-Lynne: “I’m so excited about this topic of compassion and being kind to people, and actually taking this approach with integrity to work and to incidents.”

Approaching Incident response Compassionately

As a continued topic on the podcast, Connie-Lynne and Julie discuss why it is important to have compassion during the incident response process. Connie-Lynne discusses the stresses on people when an incident happens, and how it can affect thinking.

Connie-Lynne “To make yourself feel ok is really important, because that way you are open-minded when you are coming to solve a problem.”

How Do We Make Things Blameless

Connie-Lynne talks to us about how there are contributing factors to incidents, and how avoiding blame is important, she shares with our listeners words she uses on her team at Fastly.

Connie-Lynne: “Root Cause, particularly when you are talking about complex systems is an outdated concept.”

She continues to talk about the language used in incidents, and using the words trigger and contributing factors instead of terms that point blame.

Talking about the Clown

Connie-Lynne talks to us about how there may be mistakes, but they can also be “happy little trees”. She continues to talk about how methodologies are tools to use, and how the goal is to make things better and learn from mistakes.

Connie-Lynne: “That’s what we want to look at, how do we make things better… and that is where compassion comes in, you are looking at the positives. You aren’t focused on the negatives, the negatives happen, you acknowledge that the negatives happen.”

To see Connie’s full talk on 9⁄23 register free for PagerDuty Summit at the link below.

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