Trauma and Process

This is a post about a simple yet profoundly influential vicious cycle that occurs frequently in software development environments.

We can one-line it like this:

Mess ➝ Incidents ➝ Trauma ➝ Restrictions

Modestly unpacked, this cycle looks like this:

Unmaintainable code is written and deployed, most likely on top of preexisting Mess. This mess gives rise to production Incidents. These incidents put the fear of God in one or more important business people or stakeholders, creating Trauma that ripples through the organization. As a result of this trauma, increasingly prescriptive process Restrictions are imposed to ensure incidents are not repeated. This calcification of process makes it increasingly difficult to innovate and tackle many pernicious forms of technical debt. This begets further Mess, and so the vicious cycle continues.

When seeking to understand and address this reinforcing feedback loop, many organizations get hung up on Mess and Restrictions:

• We don’t have the right codebase
• We don’t have the right people
• We don’t have the right process

While there are measures (both constructive and non-) that we can employ to address each of these concerns, very few organizations focus on understanding or addressing Trauma — we are too scared to bring courage, lightheartedness, and creativity to our work.

Trauma, like shame, is perpetuated by silence. In many cases, a powerful and poorly visible contributor to suboptimal project outcomes is that organizational participants do not have the self-awareness, emotional intelligence, or courage to own and speak about their feelings.

As a consequence:

• Project participants may not give themselves permission to experience fear
• If they do give themselves permission, they may do so only sporadically
• If they have the maturity to allow themselves to routinely feel fear without either suppressing it or acting it out, they may not speak openly about it
• If they do speak openly about it, unless the pervading workplace culture sees the virtues of vulnerability, they may frame it within a narrative of an ephemeral and one-time struggle (i.e. “I was scared when I realized how much my team was going to have to accomplish in this release, then I remembered how awesome they were and forgot all about it.”)

The fact of the matter is, fear and trauma are at the heart of what it is to be human. Making it acceptable and even laudable to speak openly and constructively about these subjects is part of what it takes to establish a workplace climate of psychological safety — to allow people to bring their whole selves to work.