Leveraging Cognitive Diversity to Tackle System Complexity (opens in new tab)

When we compose teams or staff an incident review, we almost always use identity as a proxy for perspective. We include someone from platform, someone from the application layer, someone from the team that owns the affected service. We assume that different roles and tenures will produce different mental models of the problem, and sometimes that assumption holds. But research on how people actually build mental models of complex systems suggests it fails more often than we'd expect.