Life in IT is a series of interactions with technology that sometimes get you the expected outcome and sometimes do not. Leadership in IT is a series of decisions to delegate those interactions, then learning how they went.

Sometimes things go wrong, and depending on how you choose to retrospect, you can undermine continuous improvement:

“Understanding an issue is not the same as fixing it. A good explanation can make things worse. Once everyone agrees that the behaviour was reasonable, the urgency to change anything disappears.”

I’d like more of a culture of “I don’t want the details,” but hold open some space for stepping through the details in another context, after the urgency to improve has been preserved. There are coaching opportunities in those kinds of conversations, and sometimes people just want to be reassured that they had done the reasonable thing.