SREs believe that failure is normal and that progress is about learning from mistakes and ensuring that they don't make the same one in the same way again. As you learned in the previous video, a key practice of SRE is conducting a postmortem after an incident or outage occurs. An SRE postmortem is blameless, which means that the incident is looked at objectively without designating a person or team as the root cause. Blamelessness can have an immense positive effect on the culture of your organization. Specifically, it creates a culture of psychological safety for your teams. So what is meant by psychological safety? Psychological safety is the belief that a person will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Feedback to a time when you had a concern about a task you are asked to perform as a manager or individual contributor. Maybe there was an approach your manager asked your team to take, and while everyone else agreed, you had some reservations. What did you do in that situation? Did you speak up and voice your concerns, or did you stay quiet? If you stayed quiet, do you remember why you did? In work environments with low psychological safety, team members are more likely to keep their concerns or ideas to themselves because they feel that they will look incompetent, or ignorant, or even be ridiculed for having a different opinion. This fear can have a lasting impact on your teams. So what do you think is a consequence of low psychological safety among teams? When you don't say what you want to say, you're actually robbing yourself and your team members of small moments of learning. Maybe the concern or question you have has a simple clarification or answer. If you express it, you and others can easily learn what that answer is, but maybe what you have to say or ask isn't so straightforward. Perhaps it will cause others to think differently, spark a new conversation, or lead to a new idea. When people are busy managing impressions, they don't contribute to creating a better organization. In short, low psychological safety in the workplace can stifle learning and innovation. Knowing that psychological safety is important in your organization is the first step. Next, how do you build it? As a leader, you can start with three simple steps. Framework as a learning problem and not an execution problem. Let your people know that you need everyone's voice and ideas, acknowledge your own fallibility, let them know that you may miss something you need from them, and encourage them to ask questions. Model curiosity, make sure that you yourself ask a lot of questions. How do psychologically safe environments affect software delivery? Well, research has shown that they have high impacts on it. In these work environments, bridging is encouraged. There is high cooperation, messengers are not punished when delivering bad news, failure is treated as an opportunity for improvement, new ideas are welcomed. These attributes lead to improvements in lead time, deployment frequency, and time to restore. Psychological safety plays a key role in both boosting SRE team dynamics, and also directly influencing operational excellence and software delivery. Google has seen it working with our customers and partners, and also within Google itself. Shifting team focus from blaming individuals to analyzing processes is a transformation in how engineering teams operate and has long-term benefits in fostering psychological safety, and establishing trust. Now let's talk a bit about blamelessness. In order to truly employ the practice of postmortems, you need to foster psychological safety in your organization. Blamelessness is the behavior that fosters psychological safety. But why do people blame? Research has shown that there are two major factors that fuel people's tendencies to blame others: hindsight bias and discomfort discharge. Hindsight bias is the tendency of people to overestimate their ability to have predicted an outcome, even though it could not have possibly been predicted. People often fail to realize that it's only obvious now that it has already happened. A simple example of hindsight bias is insisting that you knew that the losing team of a sporting event was going to lose all along just because you originally said you predicted it. In working environments, however, hindsight bias can often lead to blaming the person in charge, saying that they should have seen the obvious and planned for it. The second factor is discomfort discharge, which says that blame exist to discharge comfort and pain at a neurobiological level. Sociologists Pardy Brown claims that we are pretty much wired for blame because it's a natural way to release discomfort, but blaming people only hinders the ability to learn from mistakes. People tend to hide information or don't declare incidence because they're scared of punishment. Similarly, people are afraid to ask questions that may lead to identifying the root causes of an incident if they feel their question may lead to punishment or ridicule for themselves or their peers. Mistakes are valuable opportunities to learn and improve only if the correct procedural and systematic causes of the mistake are properly identified. In short, blaming people creates environments that are not psychologically safe. So how can you focus on blamelessness in your organization and with SRE practices such as postmortems? Blamelessness is the notion of switching responsibility from people to systems and processes. In finger pointing organizations where the first question of manager asks after an incident is, who did this? Employees become much more risk averse and fearful. It's best practice to assume that individuals act in good faith and make decisions based on the best information available. Investigating the source of misleading information is much more beneficial to the organization than assigning blame. In short, don't focus on people, focus on systems, and processes to better support people making the right choices when designing and maintaining complex systems. It's also important to mention that aside from the ability to learn from previous mistakes, blaming people instead of systems and processes has a negative impact on the organization's ability to innovate and improve. As innovation inherently requires some degree of risk taking, no new product, service, or process has 100 percent probability of success. So no one wants to propose improvements if they're going to be blamed for if it fails. Google's professional services teams has taken this topic to several of its customers who like you are interested in developing SRE culture within their business. They were able to help expose certain aspects of team culture that needed attention and offer SRE culture focus training to create a plan for improvement. A top online retailer in the Netherlands learned about psychological safety for the first time during one of Google's SRE workshops. They were very enthusiastic about the concept, but found it very difficult to implement. Due to their then current blaming culture, they considered identifying the person to blame as a solution to their incidence. Google introduced them to SRE philosophy and through intense internal training coupled with performance management changes, they're now on the right path to create a psychologically safe environment. You can see how blamelessness and psychological safety are important organizational aspects to foster in developing your business, especially if you want to implement SRE. The success of shifting your IT teams to SRE is highly dependent on your commitment to these as cultural norms.
