Dave Zwieback - Beyond Blame: Learning From Failure and Success

Learning from the past is incredibly difficult, despite what our hindsight-colored glasses might lead us to believe. Zwieback tells a tale that is all too familiar to many, and does an excellent job introducing the reader to the new perspective on errors, mistakes, and accidents. This perspective sits upon a firm foundation of scientific research across many disciplines over decades, and Dave presents it quite nicely.

John Allspaw, CTO at Etsy

Beyond Blame reminds the reader to assess difficult situations from multiple, diverse viewpoints, consciously addressing the individual biases that play a much larger role in our lives than we would expect. The easily recognisable everyday situations portrayed in the book illustrate the destructive nature of blameful environments, their effect on both the organisations and individuals, and ways to overcome them.

Kaimar Karu, Head of ITSM at AXELOS

Dave Zwieback has a knack for telling stories that show how to take an organization from a culture of blame, fear, and distrust to one that enables real accountability and learning. An insightful, practical, and indispensable read for any executive wishing to effectively manage complex systems and organizations.

Pedro Canahuati, Director, Production Engineering and Site Reliability at Facebook

This is a highly practical and accessible guide to critical, and possibly counter-intuitive, rules of the road in working with complex system breakdowns, guidelines that are increasingly essential as our world becomes ever more wired together.

Michael Chender, Founding Chair of ALIA (formerly Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership) and founder and CEO of Metals Economics Group

Beyond Blame beautifully illustrates why and how organizations benefit from putting trust in their teams and adopting more just and human-centered cultures.

Mathias Meyer, CEO at Travis CI

Dave Zwiebacks tale masterfully dissects the gross and the subtle ways in which blame undermines functional and productive behaviours in our workplaces and in our personal lives: A must-read to cut through all clutter created by shying away from taking responsibility for what we do and who we are.

Dr. Anja Hartmann, Executive Counsellor, Owner and Principal at bucketrider.org

In this parable about ITs well-intentioned but vicious cycle of incident responses, Dave Zwieback has given us a great gift: the ability to see the dynamics in our organizations more clearly. He gently, yet convincingly, helps us understand how our intuitive reactions work against us, because our prior experiences create biases and assumptions that reinforce the systems that sabotaged us in the first place. More importantly, as the title suggests, he shows how we and our teams can respond more empathetically, and build more intelligent and resilient organizations.

Baron Schwartz, CEO at VividCortex

Finally a book for non-technical managers and executives that explains what really causes outages and how they can create a culture that prevents outages by learning from them. This book will change your life, and your company!

Thomas A. Limoncelli, co-author of The Practice of Cloud System Administration