Dead air on the incident call – Dan Slimmon

This wont come as a surprise to folks that have worked with me and managed a production incident — I don't do well with silence in incident response. This article lays out the huge role of communication during an incident, and also shares what can be good silence.

When incident response is going right, everybody understands what's being done by whom, and why. As information comes to light and our strategies evolve, it takes more or less constant communication to maintain this state. That's why silence on an incident call is so often an indicator of trouble: when there's silence, communication isn't happening.

There is, however, a healthy kind of dead air.

Sometimes an investigator needs to go silent for a while to chase down a hunch, or collect some data, or research some question. As long as such a silence is negotiated in advance, with a specific time to reconvene, it can serve a crucial purpose. I call this functional dead air.

Functional silence is a good way to think of it.