Learning over prevention

Great post about incident prevention—or, really, about how trying to prevent an incident prohibits your ability to learn from it. I’d expand this out even further to say that in any kind of retrospective (whether about an incident or otherwise) the urge to look for and prescribe preventative measures often works against you, in that it funnels your interpretation of events down a very narrow path. Sometimes the best thing you can do is sit with complexity—get to know it, become familiar with it—rather than trying to simplify it into something else. One tactic I’ve found helpful here: if you can’t wholly let go of the impulse towards prevention, at least delay it a day or two. That will create some space for other lessons to emerge more clearly.