Calm During Outages Comes From Preparation, Not Personality

Engineer Serguey Shinder argues that composure during system incidents is not an innate trait but the direct result of advance preparation. He notes that the worst time to make critical decisions is when a system has already failed and adrenaline clouds clear thinking. Effective incident response relies on tools built beforehand — runbooks, early-warning alerts, and documented system dependencies — rather than on improvisation under pressure. When an incident occurs, a well-prepared team follows steps already thought through during calm conditions, which merely looks like coolheadedness. Shinder concludes that if on-call shifts consistently feel chaotic, the root cause is deferred thinking, not a lack of nerve.