Responder teams fall into fix-forward trap

The author argues that incident responders often fall into the fix-forward trap, continuing to pursue an imperfect fix rather than rolling back to mitigate customer impact immediately. This behavior is driven by the sunk-cost ratchet and plan continuation bias, where small delays are easily rationalized away. The author recommends prioritizing mitigation first, using pre-set decision points, and applying strict criteria before attempting to fix forward, a danger exacerbated by AI SRE tools. Open article →