Problems don’t always arrive through a calendar invite during business hours. In my experience, it’s more likely at 4 a.m, and I’ve been on those calls and followed whatever the crisis was to the painstakingly detailed postmortems. I’ve even built out incident management tooling as part of my role in a Central SRE team.
Of course, we want to improve reliability and reduce downtime because it mitigates financial losses. But an incident is usually just a symptom, so when we completely outsource or automate incident response, we’ve lost the chance to diagnose the underlying issue that could cause future similar problems or even bigger ones.
It’s why I feel hesitant about companies like incident.io that offer (in their own words) an “all-in-one platform for on-call, incident response, and status pages.”
The incident management process does not just address technical failures, but it also acts as a mirror, reflecting the organisation’s communication dynamics, informal decision-making hierarchies, and cultural attitudes towards failure and learning.
By analysing and refining these reliability systems, organisations can gain insights into their own structures and behaviours. This process is akin to therapeutic work, where bringing unconscious patterns to light allows for growth and resilience.
The stories we tell ourselves
C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology offers a framework for understanding the self through archetypes, which are universal, symbolic figures that reside within our collective unconscious (think the pilgrim, the jester, the ruler, the caregiver, the sage, and so on and so forth). These archetypes manifest in the stories we tell, shaping our identities and guiding our personal development.
Joseph Campbell, influenced by the likes of Jung, identified a common narrative pattern we know as the Hero’s Journey. This structure, found in myths and stories across cultures, describes a hero who embarks on an adventure, faces a crisis, and returns transformed. This journey serves as a mirror to our inner psychological processes.
The structures that shape us
While Jungian psychology emphasises the personal and symbolic, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory shifts focus to the structure. Lacan posited that our identities are not solely shaped by internal narratives but are also constructed through language and social structures.
Central to Lacan’s theory are the three registers: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The Imaginary pertains to images and perceptions, the Symbolic encompasses language and societal norms, and the Real represents what is beyond language and symbolisation. According to Lacan, our entry into the Symbolic order through language fundamentally structures our unconscious and shapes our interactions with the world. More concretely, consider the Imaginary as our subjective experiences, the Real as objective reality, and the Symbolic is how we describe and relate to both. Our identities and behaviours are influenced by all three together as they are inherently interconnected.
This perspective suggests that to understand ourselves and our behaviours, we must examine the linguistic and structural systems that we inhabit. Our subjectivities and idiosyncrasies are not just personal narratives but are also products of the broader symbolic orders we engage with daily.
It is for this reason that we see a strong pivot towards values-based organisations. Values and principles influence codes of conduct, which together influence individuals thoughts and feelings, which ultimately influences actions and behaviour.
There’s a law for that
“Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” - Dr. Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?
Conway’s Law suggests that the systems and products an organisation creates are reflections of its internal Symbolic structure and order. The most commonly understood manifestation of this is that centralised, hierarchical teams may develop more monolithic architectures and conversely, more distributed teams separated by domain as opposed to function are more likely to develop microservice architectures.
None of these patterns are necessarily good or bad, they all offer their own unique advantages and disadvantages, and it’s important to understand that when it comes to designing and engineering systems; everything is a trade-off.