This is a practice that I’m trying to get traction with at work, but it’s not something I’ve seen or read about other people doing. But then it seems so obvious that other people must be doing it, so I’d love to hear more about that.

It’s pretty typical for a post incident review (aka ‘post-mortem) to include a detailed time line of what was done. But was each action helpful, harmful, or of no consequence (other than maybe wasting time)?

For this I’m suggesting a traffic light system:

• RED – this is the stuff that made a bad situation worse. Next time we’re dealing with something similar we want to make sure to avoid doing that again.
• AMBER – this is stuff that we tried, but it didn’t help. Thankfully it didn’t make things any worse, but it also took time, so best avoided next time around.
• GREEN – this is the helpful stuff that actually drove us towards resolution. If we can just do green next time then we’re on the happy path to a quick resolution.