From the course: DevOps Foundations: Effective Postmortems

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Controlling cognitive bias

Controlling cognitive bias

From the course: DevOps Foundations: Effective Postmortems

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Controlling cognitive bias

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- [Instructor] All right, now we're ready to start analyzing our incident. As we move into this stage of our postmortem, let's take a look at how to do it most constructively. The single biggest challenge in postmortem analysis is to overcome our very human problems with analyzing data after the fact. Earlier in this course, we mentioned blamelessness and the falsity of root cause. Now let's talk a little more in-depth about some of the common cognitive biases in postmortem reviews and how we can compensate for them. The first is confirmation bias, also known as cherry-picking. It's easy to filter out facts that don't fit your preconceived theory of what went wrong or what should be done going forward. That's why we start with the timeline and source gathering separate from the analysis. We want those facts to generate our conclusions, not vice-versa. Also, we should make sure and have as many viewpoints in the…

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