Interesting article. I don't think I agree with some of the points or maybe I just don't follow them exactly.

For example:

> Oscar announces, “I’m seeing some log entries from the web server that look a little weird. I’m gonna look at those.” This is the beginning of a 5-minute silence.

> During the silence, Deanna, Deepak, and Sylvain are all waiting, hoping that these log entries that Oscar just noticed turn out to be the smoking gun. They’re putting their eggs in the basket of Oscar’s intuition. Hopefully he’s seen this issue before, and any minute now he’ll say “Okay, I’m pushing a fix.”

> An incident commander is responsible for keeping the whole problem-solving effort moving forward. So it’s incumbent on you to interrupt this silence.

> Try drawing more information out of Oscar:

> - “Oscar, do you mind sharing your screen so Deepak and Deanna can see the weird log messages too?”

> - “What’s the error message, Oscar? Can you send a link to a log search?”

> - "Do we know when these log events started? Does that line up with when we started receiving these support tickets, Sylvain?”

This is totally a problem that happens during incidents. The problem of the group selecting on the first "I think I see something weird, let me check" idea is a great point made by the author. But having that person share their screen/talk through their thoughts doesn't really solve that problem, it just focuses the group on that idea (leaving any other ideas to be dropped). _Perhaps_ if other investigators are also familiar with the area being investigated, it's helpful to have multiple people looking at Oscar's screen, but that doesn't seem to scale past having ~3 people on the call. It also immediately makes the call be only dedicated to investigating the problem. That's not bad, but if you're in a scenario where support is being involved, you're likely going to be coordinating broader updates, messaging to customers, figuring out who else to pull in, etc. The point of the incident commander (imo) is to do those things, or ensure that all of those things are happening.

> “Let’s see here…”

> In order to keep a problem-solving effort moving forward, an incident commander should ensure that every new participant gets up-to-date knowledge of what the group is doing and why. For example, you could say to Deepak when he joins the call, “Hi Deepak. Right now, Oscar and Deanna are investigating a web server error message that might be related to failed stylesheet loads. You can see the error message in the chat.”

I think this should be done over Slack, and with like any incident response meeting with more than... 3 people. One thing my org does that I'm happy with is creating a thread for an initial issue (and a Slack channel once it's identified as a bigger issue) and a quick 2 sentence summary. People post comments as they discover new things, which provides a timeline of investigation and does a good job of showing what's been checked (and what hasn't). Honestly, unless the person giving the verbal summary is technically familiar with the issue at hand, they frequently will glaze over important things or highlight irrelevant things when trying to give a summary of what's happened so far. Not their fault, it's objectively hard to figure out what's relevant/irrelevant in the spur of the moment.

That said, I'm probably a bit biased because I don't like being on incident response calls in general. When I'm actively investigating an issue, being in a large incident response room makes things much harder for me to think. It feels like there's more pressure when people are waiting on the call for you to solve the problem, or if they're talking about other things it's just a distraction. My org has a culture of people replying to their own comments in Slack as they investigate, which makes the brainstorming over Slack feel a lot more intuitive, and it's easier to share error logs & snippets, or have multiple parallel conversations at once. And once the incident is over, it's a lot easier to have a precise incident timeline when you can use timestamps of comments.