by Serguey Shinder
In 2021 I took over a team whose incident write ups went to our operations directors. They had a reputation for being hard to read, so in my first months I made a point of improving every one before it went out. I would sit with the draft in the evening, move the conclusion to the top, cut the jargon, rewrite the timeline so it made sense to someone who had not been on the call. The directors noticed. I was thanked more than once.
A year later I noticed something else. The drafts were arriving later and rougher. A timeline would stop halfway through. A section headed impact would contain a single question mark. I raised it with one of the engineers, expecting to hear about workload, and she said, quite kindly, that there did not seem much point finishing them, since I was going to rewrite them anyway.
I went back through the year. Of thirty write ups, I had substantially rewritten twenty six. Each rewrite had felt like a favour. Taken together they had taught the team something precise: the version that counted was mine, so the effort they put into theirs was wasted. They had responded entirely sensibly. They stopped spending it.
There was a second cost I had not seen. The directors had begun to think of the write ups as mine. When they had questions, they asked me, and I answered on behalf of engineers who knew the incidents far better than I did. I had become the narrow point between the people who understood the problem and the people who needed to.
I stopped editing their documents. Not reviewing them, editing them. Now, when a draft comes in, I return it with questions in the margin. Who is this for. What do you want them to decide. What would a director stop reading at. Before anyone starts writing, we agree in two lines who the reader is and what they need to come away with. And whoever writes the report presents it to the directors, with me in the room only if they want me there.
The first three months were slower, and some of the write ups went out in a style I would not have chosen. Several were better than mine would have been, because the person writing them had been there. The engineer who had told me about the question mark now writes up our most difficult incidents herself.
Whoever makes the last edit owns the work. I had been taking ownership of my team's reports one sentence at a time, and calling it support.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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