PuppetConf 2014

Cognitive biases can deeply affect our behaviors toward others and our ability to process information by herding us towards mental shortcuts that are optimized for timeliness over accuracy, at the expense of rationalizing irrational behavior.

In the first edition of this talk we looked at cognitive biases in the context of teamwork—how biases affect our ability to interact with other people and limit effectiveness of teams that collaboratively solve problems.

In this second edition, we turn our focus to cognitive biases during high stress situations—outages and incidents.

You know that running drills are important, but what's stopping you from doing them? What, during a stress-filled outage, convinces you that relationships between systems exist, when in hindsight it's obvious they don't? What develops common narratives that lead you to the same contributing factors at every incident retrospective?

Attendees will leave the talk with an overview of biases they run into during incidents, how to hack their brains to use these biases to their advantage, and some tips on how to mitigate the effects of the limitations baked into their wetware.

More confusion! Less rationality! Bigger cognitive dissonance! All this and more in the second edition of "The DevOps Field Guide to Cognitive Biases".