Risk Sharing In Data Failures

On one team, engineers reported their own near-misses weekly. Incidents dropped within a quarter.

“Who did this?” and “what let this happen?” produce different companies over time.

Westrum’s research named it decades ago: in generative cultures, risks are shared. Failure is treated as a property of the system, and information flows toward whoever can act on it. In pathological ones, failure is a personal event, so bad news learns to hide.

Data teams feel this harder than most, because their failures are public. A broken dashboard is on a screen in the board meeting; nobody has to file a bug report.

What sharing the risk looks like in practice:

1. Postmortems that name causes, never people, and get read outside the team.
2. On-call rotations that include the seniors who designed the system.
3. Near-misses reported without ceremony, because those are free lessons.
4. The person who surfaces a data error gets thanked in public, every time.

Every item on that list is free. The hard part: the most senior person in the room going first with their own mistake.

What was the first question asked after your last data incident?