Delivery and execution

Incident & Crisis Leadership

4 lessons · ~24 min total

Your job in an incident is not to fix it

~6 min

Run the incident: assign roles, keep one source of truth, and decide, instead of grabbing the fix yourself.

Key takeaways

The incident commander coordinates and decides; the moment they start debugging, nobody is running the incident.
Structure beats speed: named roles, one channel of record, a promised next update.
Mitigate first, diagnose after, and preserve the evidence so the rollback does not erase the trail.

~5 min

Keep stakeholders calm and useful with updates that state impact, action, and when the next update comes.

Key takeaways

Every incident update: impact in user terms, current action, and the exact time of the next update.
Promise the next communication, which you control, never the fix time, which you do not.
The commander absorbs stakeholder traffic so responders stay in flow.

~7 min

Run a blameless review that finds contributing causes and produces fixes the team actually ships.

Key takeaways

Blameless is an information strategy: people report what they saw only when reporting is safe.
Replace who-made-the-mistake with what made it the reasonable choice at the time.
Action items need an owner, a date, and a size that competes with feature work: five small shipped fixes beat one grand unshipped one.

~6 min

Sustain a team through a multi-week grind without burning it out or letting standards slide.

Key takeaways

A long crisis is a staffing problem: rotate by schedule, because the fatigued never self-report.
Enforce rest and write handoffs down, so the crisis's memory lives in a log, not one exhausted head.
Quality slips in week three are fatigue signals; answer with system adjustments, not exhortation.

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