Quick thoughts on short papers: “Failure to adapt or adaptations that fail: contrasting models on procedures and safety”

I’ve been consuming a lot of content in the last few months — books, papers, blog posts, talks, podcasts, you name it. I’ve seen exciting aha! moments and spent hours trying to wrap my head around seemingly simple but, in fact, maddeningly complex concepts. In this setting, the right sort of short paper is like a refreshing cold drink on a hot, humid day. These papers argue a core idea of goldilocks size and serve as landmarks and reference points as I sail through seas full of dragons.

The most recent paper of this type I have run into is Failure to adapt or adaptations that fail: contrasting models on procedures and safety by Sidney Dekker, from 2001 (hat tip to John Allspaw for passing it along). This paper has become my go-to for the idea that work as imagined and work as done are not the same. That is,

People at work must interpret procedures with respect to a collection of actions and circumstances that the procedures themselves can never fully specify (e.g. Suchman, 1987). In other words, procedures are not the work itself. Work, especially that in complex, dynamic workplaces, often requires subtle, local judgments with regard to timing of subtasks, relevance, importance, prioritization and so forth.

And:

 Procedures are resources for action. Procedures do not specify all circumstances to which they apply. Procedures cannot dictate their own application. Procedures can, in themselves, not guarantee safety. 

Applying procedures successfully across situations can be a substantive and skillful cognitive activity. 

Safety results from people being skillful at judging when (and when not) and how to adapt procedures to local circumstances. 

And, finally:

There is always a tension between centralized guidance and local practice. Sticking to procedures can lead to ineffective, unproductive or unsafe local actions, whereas adapting local practice in the face of pragmatic demands can miss global system goals and other constraints or vulnerabilities that operate on the situation in question. 

To apply to software engineering, simply replace procedures or guidance with runbooks or documentation, think about the last time someone in your organization went “offroad”, and what the response was.  The beauty of short papers is that they don’t need much more analysis than that. Just read it yourself — and let me know what you think!