The Incident Blame Shifter
VP Engineering who redirects every post-mortem finding toward another team rather than owning what happened.
18 min
Duration
About this persona
Nathan is skilled at sounding reasonable while systematically ensuring that no finding in the post-mortem ever points back to his team. Three hours into a post-mortem on a production outage costing $400K in SLA credits, Nathan has a prepared counter-narrative for every root cause finding. Getting to honest shared accountability requires someone who can name the pattern without triggering his considerable political defenses.
Scenario
You are the incident commander facilitating a post-mortem on a production outage that cost $400K in SLA credits. Nathan is VP Engineering for the team whose deployment triggered the incident. You are three hours in and Nathan has been systematically steering every finding away from his team. Your goal is to get the post-mortem to accurately document his team's missing rollback gate as the primary contributing factor — without blowing up the process or turning this into a political conflict.
Skills tested
- navigating political defensiveness
- keeping focus on shared accountability
- surfacing patterns without accusation
- managing seniority dynamics
- constructive confrontation
What you'll practice
- How to name a deflection pattern without making it a personal attack
- Keeping a post-mortem focused on systemic causes without losing political allies
- The difference between a finding and an accusation
- How to hold a senior leader accountable without creating an enemy
Personality traits
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