Video and slides synchronized, mp3 and slide download available at URL http://bit.ly/2IFQJvb. Emma Button explores the factors that contribute to psychological safety on a delivery team. She looks at some of the steps that leaders and team members can take to foster a culture of blameless failure that encourages innovation and collaboration. She looks at soft-skills, CI/CD practices, retrospective processes & tooling that can help build a culture of trust and ownership within a team. Filmed at qconlondon.com. Emma Button is the COO and Co-founder at nubeGO Cloud Consulting. She leads engineering teams going through cultural change; inspiring team members to transition from traditional working methods, through Agile and Lean practices and into the DevOps mindset.

1. Who Broke Prod?
Growing teams who can fail without fear
Emma Button
Co-founder, nubeGO.io
@growerofawesome

2. InfoQ.com: News & Community Site
Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/
culture-blameless-failure
• Over 1,000,000 software developers, architects and CTOs read the site world-
wide every month
• 250,000 senior developers subscribe to our weekly newsletter
• Published in 4 languages (English, Chinese, Japanese and Brazilian
Portuguese)
• Post content from our QCon conferences
• 2 dedicated podcast channels: The InfoQ Podcast, with a focus on
Architecture and The Engineering Culture Podcast, with a focus on building
• 96 deep dives on innovative topics packed as downloadable emags and
minibooks
• Over 40 new content items per week

3. Purpose of QCon
- to empower software development by facilitating the spread of
knowledge and innovation
Strategy
- practitioner-driven conference designed for YOU: influencers of
change and innovation in your teams
- speakers and topics driving the evolution and innovation
- connecting and catalyzing the influencers and innovators
Highlights
- attended by more than 12,000 delegates since 2007
- held in 9 cities worldwide
Presented at QCon London
www.qconlondon.com

4. BAD STUFF
HAPPENS

5. SELF-DEFENCE
Photo: Silvia Izquierdo
Respond positively to feedback
Stop seeking blame

6. SELF-DEFENCE
Resilience
• Re-live a painful failure. Find one new way of responding in a painful situation, write
it down and consciouslychoose to use that response next time
• Respond with “Thank you for the feedback”
Stop Seeking Blame
• Correct yourself and others when we find ourselves asking “Who is to blame for
this?” or “What caused this to happen?”– replay the question as “What are the
factors that contributed to the failure?”
• Periodically remind ourselves, our peers and our team “It’s OK to fail”
Improvement Katas – Responding to Failure

7. INCIDENT
Brutal transparency
Collaboration
& Shared Accountability

8. INCIDENT Improvement Katas – Incident Response
Transparency
• Use Slack to share and keep a quick, lightweight, internal record of all actions we
take, record our assumptions
Collaboration & Shared Accountability
• Practice Pair-Incident-Management
• Pair when formulating customer-facing responses
• Pair when diagnosing logs & metrics
• Pair when applying changes
• Get into the habit of using the word “We” instead of They/I/You/Them

9. POST-MORTEM
Blameless Post-Mortem
Learning Review
Beyond Blame; Learning from Failure and Success by Dave Zwieback

10. POST-MORTEM Improvement Katas – Blameless Post-Mortem
Do them!

11. VISIBILITY
Make failure visible
Know your normal

12. VISIBILITY Improvement Katas – Make Failure Visible
Visualise Failure
• Install an information radiator. Put the results of your CI/CD
pipeline onto the screen somewhere that everyone can see.
Know Your Normal
• Draw a flow map of data as it travels through your system on
a big wall or whiteboard.

13. EXPERIMENT
Make time for experiments
Try things you DO NOT know
Practice game days

14. REWARD
Never punish people for trying
Reward positive behaviours
Change starts with US

15. REWARD
Re-enforceBlameless Behaviours
• At least twice a week, make a point of publicly singing people’s praises for
demonstrating behaviours that support:-
• Experimentation
• Collaboration
• Accountability
• Go for lunch as a team to celebrate a honest, but difficult retrospective
Improvement Katas – Reward, don’t Punish
Reward, Don’t Punish
• Practice using supportive language:
• Say “thank-you”to someone who shares their account of what happened
• Say “well done” to someone who tries a new approach to solve a problem, whether
or not it works
• Tell someone their honesty in a post-mortem is appreciated
• Reward honest and blameless contribution to post-mortem with a gift - laptop stickers

16. Emma Button
emma@emmabutton.co.uk
linkedin.com/in/emma-button
@growerofawesome

17. Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/
culture-blameless-failure