Learning from Major Incidents: The Opportunities We’re Missing

Incidents, despite being untimely and stressful, offer valuable learning opportunities for organizations that often go unrecognized as the focus tends to be on stabilization and narrative control. Many organizations rely on a small group of experts to manage incidents, missing the chance to expand expertise across the workforce. Instead of replacing these experts with Generative AI (GenAI), organizations should use AI to train more employees, thereby broadening the pool of skilled individuals. Post-incident, separating public and internal reviews is crucial, with internal reviews focusing on learning and improvement without immediate promises. Engaging someone technical but uninvolved in the incident for reviews can provide an objective analysis, bridging the gap between executives and technical teams and enhancing return on investment. As highlighted by PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada, while software is imperfect and incidents are inevitable, combining AI tools with human-centric analysis can foster learning and development, leading to employee retention and business growth.