Incident review's better question: how did you make the diagnosis?

## Spark

Two highlights from Lorin Hochstein, *How incidents can teach us about what's already working well*: in review, ask the responder *how they reached the diagnosis* — what mental model led them to conclude the system was in state A or B — rather than the standard "how do we prevent this next time."

> "Asking this question will expose details about the responder's mental model of how the system actually works."

## Why it could be interesting

Standard postmortem culture is failure-prevention-oriented: it produces action items aimed at the next incident's mechanics. The Hochstein framing inverts this — it's expert-elicitation oriented, and produces a different artifact (a snapshot of how a responder mentally models the system) that's more valuable for onboarding, resilience-building, and surfacing tacit knowledge that would otherwise stay locked in the responder's head. The post is a short reflection: name the inversion, quote Hochstein, give one concrete example of where you'd apply it.

**Status: open for consideration.** Not yet sure this applies to current workflows — small-team / mostly-solo, no formal incident review cadence. Worth holding until I either have a workflow it fits or find an interesting analogue (e.g. asking the model how it reached a conclusion before correcting it).

## Open questions

- [ ] Does this generalise outside formal incident review? Pair-programming retros? PR review?
- [ ] LLM agent analogue: ask the model "how did you decide X?" before pushing back on X.
- [ ] Is the post stronger as quote+commentary or as a worked example from my own debugging?

## Source material

- Lorin Hochstein, *How incidents can teach us about what's already working well* — https://read.readwise.io/read/01kqp0ekcr0rwgdsr7gbak2hp6 (highlights 1012278576, 1012278621)
- Lorin Hochstein, *The normal work of creating reliability* — https://read.readwise.io/read/01kqpta2qgw8s5bjzw68tnkr3x
- Lorin Hochstein, *Life comes at you fast* — https://read.readwise.io/read/01kqbwmdqhzfjwdhv2cm56r4db