Why "why" is the wrong question to be asking after incidents with Dennis Henry of Okta The Debrief by incident.io

In last week’s episode of The Debrief, we had on Colette Alexander, Director of Engineering at HashiCorp, to discuss some of the myths around incident response.

In that conversation, one of the myths we spoke about was the idea that asking “why” is better than asking “how.” And how, in reality, asking "how" allows you to focus more on the contributing factors that led to an incident happening, whereas “why” tends to single out a person, which can lead to a lot of blame. 

For this episode, we’re diving a bit deeper into the reasons “how” is not only better for learning, it’s also better for the psychological safety of your team. 

This time around, we’re joined by Dennis Henry who currently works on the Architecture team at Okta. Dennis is a big believer in psychological safety and learning from incidents, so he’s just the person to shed light on this fascinating topic.