Handling Incidents Mindfully 🧘🏽 — Circles of Control and Chaos

Namaskar 🙏🏽

Has your team complained about the stress level when there are incidents?

Is your incident resolution time usually high?

Does an incident increase anxiety levels among team members?

I have just coined a theory about how we can answer and resolve these issues — Circle of Control and Chaos. Here we talk about how we can empower people to handle incidents better and reduce the anxiety and stress that comes with it. A few years back, I saw this great video of Stephen Covey explaining the circle of concerns and circle of influence from his book 7 habits of highly successful people. This concept is based on the similar principle of 2 circles but with a different approach.

Everything that is to be done to handle an incident is inside this outer Circle of Chaos. Inside this outer circle, every person involved has things that are possible for them to do based on skills, authority, access, knowledge etc. they fall inside their inner Circle of Control and all the other things that are not possible for them or are irrelevant for them to handle the incident remain in the Circle of Chaos. The circle of control is a subset of the Circle of chaos. Things inside and outside of the circle of control are different for every person involved in the incident. Any organization that needs to handle incidents effectively needs to do 2 things for every person involved in the incidents

• Increase the Circle of Control.
• Make sure no one is working on things that are in the circle of chaos

What are the things that will increase the circle of control and decrease the circle of chaos?

Giving Authority, Priority and Clarity

By giving the person handling the incident authority to dictate and prioritize an item and clarity in case of conflicts, you increase their circle of control. Let’s take an example: If a person is accountable for an incident and only another team which can fix the issue is already working on an important project. This clearly increases stress and anxiety in a person handling the incident and also increases the time in resolving the incident. One of the best ways to solve this is that we should provide

Clarity — by deprioritizing any one of them.

Authority — to the person handling the incident to take any actions necessary to resolve the incident and restore services as soon as possible.

Priority — Providing them quick and prioritised access to people and resources helping then to resolving the issues faster.

Doing all these 3 things helps in increasing the circle of control. The bigger the circle of control the faster is the resolution to the incident.

Defining Clear Roles and Responsibilities

Just like we have evacuation policies defined for the workplace “In case of emergency you need to …” so that there is no chaos at the time of calamity, We should also have policies beforehand defining clear roles and responsibilities for every person “In case of an incident you need to …”.

We also need to make sure that the roles and responsibilities assigned to a person reside inside their circle of control. For example, Communicating to stakeholders about an incident may be inside the circle of control for a product manager but the same task is in a circle of chaos for an engineer/developer.

If you are a person with a high sense of ownership and responsibility, It is very likely that you will tend to think and articulate all things inside both the circles and thereby increasing your stress. Having clear roles and responsibilities reduces the stress, knowing that a thing which is in my circle of chaos is in someone else’s circle of control, someone who has better knowledge, more authority/knowledge to solve a problem. The lesser the number of items in the circle of chaos the lower is the level of stress among the team handling the incidents.

To summarize, by giving Authority, Priority and Clarity we empower the person handling the incident to do their jobs better and by defining clear roles and responsibilities we reduce the stress by assigning items to the people that they are comfortable with. I will also add that these things are not always possible and may depend on the type of incident, availability of people etc. But we can try our best to follow these guidelines so that an incident is resolved as quickly as possible with the least amount of stress and anxiety.