The Human Side of Postmortems

Mindful Ops

Relative stressors and cognitive biases are both mental phenomena — thoughts and feelings — which nonetheless have concrete effects on our physical world, whether it is the health of operations people or the length and severity of outages. The best way to work with mental phenomena is through mindfulness. Mindfulness has two components:

The first component involves the self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience, thereby allowing for increased recognition of mental events in the present moment. The second component involves adopting a particular orientation toward one’s experiences in the present moment, an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance.^[30]

One of the challenges with mitigating the effects of stress is the variance in individual responses to it. For instance, there is no known method to objectively determine the level of social evaluative threat that is harmful for a particular individual. Measuring stress surface, vital signs or stress hormone levels are, at best, proxies for — and approximations of — the real effects of stress. However, by practicing mindfulness, an individual can learn to recognize when they’re experiencing (subjectively) harmful levels of stress and take simple corrective actions (e.g., take a break or ask for a second opinion in a high-risk situation). Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) — a “meditation program created in 1979 from the effort to integrate Buddhist mindfulness meditation with contemporary clinical and psychological practice” — is known to significantly reduce stress^[31].

We can similarly mitigate the effects of cognitive biases through mindfulness — we can become aware of when we’re jumping to conclusions and purposefully slow down to engage our analytical System 2 thinking.

The practice of mindfulness requires some effort, but is also simple, free, and without negative side effects. As we’ve seen, increased mindfulness — Mindful Ops — can reduce the effects of stress and cognitive biases, ultimately help us build more resilient systems and teams, and reduce the duration and severity of outages.

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^[30] Bishop, Scott R., Mark Lau, Shauna Shapiro, Linda Carlson, Nicole D. Anderson, James Carmody, Zindel V. Segal et al. “Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition.” Clinical psychology: Science and practice 11, no. 3 (2004): 230-241.

^[31] Chiesa, Alberto, and Alessandro Serretti. “Mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: a review and meta-analysis.” The journal of alternative and complementary medicine 15, no. 5 (2009): 593-600.