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Product Description Failure is inevitable. Our increasingly complex world demands that we continuously learn from failures (and successes) in order to survive and thrive. And yet, our learning is too often undermined. We construct biased but comfortable stories, which often feature a simple, single "root cause"--a villain, someone to take the blame. Having done that, we short-circuit the possibility of developing any deeper understanding of the complex systems we work with. With this common approach, our systems will become more fragile and drift into failure. In this concise and entertaining book, I.T. veteran Dave Zwieback describes an incident that threatens the very existence of a large financial institution, and the counterintuitive steps its leadership took to stop the downward spiral. Their novel approach is grounded in proven concepts from complexity science, resilience engineering, human factors, cognitive science, and organizational psychology. It allows us to identify the underlying conditions for failure, and make our systems (and organizations) safer and more resilient. Get a clear understanding of the downside of blame Learn how to identify (and counteract) cognitive biases in groups See how organizations can determine the real root cause of problems Establish real accountability with your organization Use the Learning Review Framework to fully learn from failures of complex systems Find practical insights and tips for moving beyond blame in your own organization Review "Beyond Blame is a compelling, well-written story about avoiding some of the most natural and dangerous problems that derail teams." - Patrick Lencioni; president, The Table Group; author, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Advantage "Anyone who has assigned, received or witnessed blame resulting from a high profile outage will find this fictionalized story an uncomfortable read. And yet the lessons of how to translate failures into learning are essential for any high performing organization." - Gene Kim, co-author of The Phoenix Project: A DevOps Novel "Zwieback's fable feels instantly familiar to anyone who works with complex systems. In his short, rapid fire chapters, he quickly boils down a colossal amount of information to answer the most relevant questions: What keeps us from learning when we fail or succeed? How can we learn better? A fine read. " - Michael Lopp, head of engineering at Pinterest, and author of Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager and Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook "Let Zwieback take you on a journey straight into the heart of failure, complexity, forgiveness and restorative justice. Well worth your time." - Professor Sidney Dekker, MA MSc PhD, Safety Science Innovation Lab, Griffith University. Bestselling author of Field Guide to Understanding Human Error. "A novel approach, explaining learning retrospectively (and the application of Cynefin) through an extended narrative. Rich context, good understanding." - David Snowden, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Cognitive Edge, creator of the Cynefin framework. About the Author Dave Zwieback has been working with complex, mission-critical I.T. services and teams for two decades. His career spans small high-tech startups, non-profits, and behemoth engineering, financial services, and pharmaceutical firms. To learn more about Dave, the Awesome Postmortems workshop, and other services offered by his firm, Mindweather LLC, please visit mindweather.com or follow @mindweather.