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Planning is hard, and no one at Netflix has come back with the perfect way to plan, or to run feedback, leveling, and compensation. The usual instinct when things get complicated is to wrap the problem in constraints, which feels like simplifying it. Every time that happened, the added process cost time and the results stayed the same.
The alternative is to look for a more creative way to plan, make people decisions, or set priorities. That is uncomfortable, because it means resisting what many bigger companies would do and staying with the discomfort for long stretches.
The same pull shows up after a mistake. When somebody screws up, the tempting response is a new checklist or gate to stop it from happening again. The best people want a blameless retro instead, and they feel so individually responsible that they ask how to share what they learned and how to do the work differently so the next outcome is better.
Why does process keep piling up in big organizations?
British historian C. Northcote Parkinson described the pattern in a 1955 essay in The Economist. He studied the British Admiralty and found its administrative staff kept growing even as the fleet shrank. His observation that work expands to fill the time available became known as Parkinson's Law. The essay was written as satire, and the name stuck as shorthand for bureaucratic growth.
How do blameless postmortems actually work?
A blameless postmortem reviews an incident by asking what the system allowed to happen, instead of who made the error. Engineer John Allspaw popularized the approach in a 2012 blog post about his time at Etsy. Google's Site Reliability Engineering book also describes blameless postmortems as a core practice. The reasoning is that people who fear punishment hide details, and hidden details are the ones that explain the failure.
When do checklists work well?
Surgeon Atul Gawande popularized checklists in his 2009 book The Checklist Manifesto. A 2006 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, led by Peter Pronovost, tested a short checklist for inserting central lines in Michigan intensive care units. The median rate of catheter infections fell from 2.7 per 1,000 catheter days to zero within three months. The checklist had only five steps.
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