When it starts raining, nobody stands in the street and shouts:
“Which engineer allowed this weather?”
Because that would be ridiculous.
Rain happens.
Storms happen.
Even on well-planned days.
And incidents work the same way.
Outages are frustrating. Expensive. Stressful. But they are not proof that your team is lazy, careless, or incompetent.
Sometimes they’re just weather.
Good Teams Still Get Storms
You can be a careful driver and still hit fog.
You can build a strong house and still get hail.
You can run a skilled engineering team and still have an incident.
Because complex systems live in changing conditions:
- Traffic spikes
- Dependencies fail
- Bad deploys happen
- Hardware ages
- Networks wobble
- Humans misunderstand things
None of that means your team is bad.
It means your team lives in the real world.
Weather Is Bigger Than One Person
Storms usually don’t come from a single cause.
It’s not just:
- one cloud
- one gust of wind
- one drop of rain
It’s a combination of conditions building over time.
Incidents are usually like that too.
A small config change meets an old assumption.
A retry storm meets a slow database.
A harmless bug meets unusual traffic.
Then suddenly: thunder.
That’s why blaming one person is often both unfair and inaccurate.
You’re not looking at one bad decision.
You’re looking at a weather system.
Blaming People for Rain Doesn’t Help
Imagine a town responding to a storm by holding a meeting to decide who caused the clouds.
Would that make the roads safer?
Would it repair the power lines?
Would it help next time?
Of course not.
It would just waste time and make everyone nervous when the sky gets dark again.
Blame does the same thing in engineering.
It teaches people:
- to hide mistakes
- to stay quiet
- to avoid risk
- to protect themselves instead of the system
That makes the next storm worse.
Mature Teams Build for Weather
Nobody can stop all storms.
But mature teams prepare for them.
Cities do this with:
- drainage systems
- weather warnings
- emergency plans
- strong buildings
Engineering teams do it with:
- monitoring
- alerts
- rollback plans
- runbooks
- redundancy
- postmortems
The goal is not to create a world with no bad weather.
The goal is to create a system that can survive it.
Calm Beats Shame
When incidents happen, teams need two things:
First: practical response.
Second: emotional stability.
That means asking:
- What is happening?
- What is affected?
- What do users need right now?
- What made this storm stronger than it should have been?
Not:
- Who do we blame?
- Who messed up?
- Who gets punished?
Shame is not an operational strategy.
What This Means in Real Life
The next time an outage happens, try this reframing:
An incident is not a confession of failure.
It is a weather event in a complex system.
Some storms are small.
Some are severe.
All of them teach you something about your shelter.
Good teams are not the teams that never see rain.
They are the teams that:
- notice it early
- respond calmly
- learn where the roof leaks
- prepare better for next time
🌧️ Reframe to Remember
Incidents are storms.
They can hit even strong teams.
And blaming people for rain has never fixed the forecast.
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