Reasoning Practice · Intermediate

One outage creates a permanent rule

A rare database failure causes a severe outage. The team proposes an expensive control for every system without checking how often the failure occurs or whether the control addresses other risks.

Production incident review Metacognition Predefined update criteria

Your decision

What should happen before the control becomes policy?

A
Define the evidence and recurrence threshold that would justify the control across systems.
B
Approve it quickly because severe incidents should always produce broad rules.
C
Wait until the incident feels less memorable, then use intuition again.

Show the best first move

A. Define the evidence and recurrence threshold that would justify the control across systems.

Why this move helps

The vivid outage can dominate risk judgment. Predefined criteria make the policy depend on recurrence, exposure and control effectiveness rather than memory alone.

Evidence still missing

Base rate of the failure mode.
Systems with the same exposure.
Expected risk reduction and operating cost of the control.

Evidence note

Availability is a plausible risk because one severe event dominates the proposal. A rare event can still justify a broad control when expected harm is high.