Chapter 10. The Second Victim

“How do you think I’m doing?” Mike shot back at Bill. They were sitting across from each other at a diner not far from Mike’s house. It was Saturday, and they’d just ordered breakfast. Then Mike sighed, and said, “I’m sorry for snapping. It’s just that it felt pretty awful to have my career at the firm end that way.”

“We’ve been talking a lot about you,” Bill said. “Linda and Ollie and I.”

“Yeah?”

“And also about what happened—the outage. We’re learning that we haven’t been dealing with outages in the best ways. Or with our people.”

“Really? I just keep replaying it in my head, and all that I can come up with is, ‘What a stupid mistake!’ I’ve been doing this for close to 20 years, and I behaved like a total newbie. I totally deserved being fired. I would have probably resigned in shame anyway.”

“I hear you, Mike. I’ve been there myself, both in my career and as an E.M.T. Thinking, ‘If only I got there a minute earlier, I could have saved her.’ Or seeing in retrospect so clearly what I should have done, and feeling like an idiot for not doing it.”

“That pretty much sums up how I’m doing.”

“But here’s the thing, Mike—a few things, actually. Do you think anyone would have done anything different from what you did?”

Mike turned toward the window, which overlooked a busy highway. He was still for a few moments before speaking. “Well, who knows? I guess I’m glad it was me, and not any of the guys.”

“Mike, the one thing I’m sure of is that if it weren’t for you, it would have taken us a lot longer to recover. And I also know that pretty much anyone would have done what you did. I mean, you did everything right. You had no idea—no one had any idea—that it would blow up. No one had any clue!”

“Yeah, well, I sure could have been more careful. I could have stopped to think. I could have connected that using the router status command would brick the router. I could have done more testing before rolling out the patch.”

“But, in fact, you didn’t do any of these things, and no amount of wishful thinking now would have helped back then. Also, don’t forget that you were under a ton of pressure—it’s not like you had all day to figure things out, what with the firm losing its ability to trade all of a sudden. In reality, you did what any experienced engineer would do: log in and look around. Who knew that the very act of looking would have this effect? It’s some kind of Schrödinger’s router, man!”

Mike nodded in agreement, a hint of a smile appearing on his lips. “Yeah, there was an extremely unlikely, black swan event hiding in the system, waiting for just the right set of conditions to manifest.”

“And once the system broke down,” Bill said, “we adapted and brought it back to life. We learned a bit more about the system, and we made it a bit more resilient. But not as much as if you were still there. I consider letting you go to be one of the biggest mistakes of my career.”

“Wow, Bill, it means a lot to me to hear you say that. I knew that it wasn’t entirely your choice. I know how the firm deals with people who lose them money.”

“Yeah, we’ve been talking about that a whole bunch, too—our culture of blame and punishment. Ollie thinks it’s even risker than any kind of technical issue. And I agree.”

“Really?”

“Well, it leads to the covering up of important information. Which leads to even more fragility. I think the type of black swan event that could happen here won’t just lose the firm money, but might put it out of business entirely. Who knows what types of risks are not being disclosed when people are afraid to speak up.”

“I’ve never thought about it that way. I’ve always been honest about my screwups, and assumed everyone else was, too. But that’s probably a naïve assumption.”

“People want to do the right thing, Mike, but sometimes our culture gets in the way. I think Raj and his folks could share more of their side of the outage. But I can’t blame them for not volunteering the information. That’s why in my E.M.T. squad, you literally can’t be prosecuted based on the information you disclose during a postmortem. It’s treated as privileged information. And unlike the postmortems at the firm, ours sometimes involve dead people.”

“So you can’t get fired from your volunteer E.M.T. role?” Mike asked.

“It’s great to see you smiling, man,” said Bill. “To answer your question, you can’t be prosecuted as long as you provide a full account of what happened. That’s the real meaning of ‘accountability.’”

“I didn’t know that. Why does your town do that?”

“So that we can learn fully, and improve at our jobs, which means saving and helping more people in the future.”

“Huh!”

“One more thing,” said Bill. “Blame has two sides. One is when we blame others—it does give us a sort of satisfaction, as long as the story we’ve constructed is nice and believable. But there’s another side to blame, and that’s blaming ourselves, or accepting blame from others. Sometimes when accidents happen, we hear about the victims—the people who die or are injured. But there is often a second victim—whoever we blame for the accident. Even if they’re not prosecuted, they sometimes get really depressed or worse. And I get a sense that you haven’t exactly been taking the whole thing well.”

“You think?” Mike said. “No, I haven’t. I’ve been taking it pretty hard. But don’t worry; I’ll be OK. I’m sure there’s a silver lining in here somewhere.”

“You’ve got a lot to be proud of, Mike. You worked through a nasty outage, and you got the firm back to trading. You provided a full account of what happened, despite the personal risk. You acted professionally when you were let go. You took full responsibility, and I think you took a bunch of blame, which you didn’t need to take. You don’t have to be a second victim.”

Mike looked directly at Bill with a hint of a smile. He took a padded envelope from the seat beside him, and put it on the table, resting his right hand on it. “In the spirit of accountability, I made a quick decision the day of the outage to keep my BlackBerry for a few extra days because I wanted to sync my personal contacts and calendar before the device was wiped. I take full responsibility for my actions, and I have now provided a full account of what happened. And I take none of the blame.”

Mike paused, still looking directly at Bill. He slid the envelope toward Bill and said, “Will you please make sure this gets to Elaine?”

“I will,” Bill said, smiling.