Incident Cognitive Costs

The choreography of joint activity is shown to be a subtle and highly integrated into the technical efforts of dynamic fault management. A core contribution of this research was to define the elements of choreography needed for smooth coordination and their corresponding overhead costs. An example of this is in recruiting needed resources to an anomaly response underway. bookmark

Costs of Coordination, Dr. Laura Maguire dissertation

Secret Lives of SREs, Dr. Laura Maguire, SRECon20. youtube

Coordination paradox. Everyone's model of the system will be partial and incomplete. We need multiple, overlapping areas of expertise to handle the exceptional events. There is additional cognitive load in working with others.

The more diverse the perspectives needed to resolve an event, the less that these groups have previously worked together, the higher the coordination costs are.

Remote, distributed work makes this even harder. Contrast the NASA control room during Apollo 13 event with the panel of faces in an incident video call.