A P1 ticket lands in the inbox early in the morning.
Urgent. Production impact.
You prepare for the worst.
A failed release?
Corrupted data?
A broken integration chain?
You open the incident.
Same issue as two days ago.
No root cause identified.
No securing action taken.
No real ownership established.
Just the assumption that it probably wouldn’t happen again.
Until it did.
Again.
This time, the issue comes from a Snowflake file retrieval process orchestrated through OPCON.
The chain itself is simple:
retrieve files, trigger downstream jobs, feed the planning flow.
But one failure at launch was enough to disrupt the entire sequence.
The process failed once.
Nobody truly understood why.
The incident was handled operationally, but never structurally.
So the system moved on without actually becoming safer.
Two days later, the exact same issue returned.
Another urgent ticket.
Another interruption.
Another morning redirected toward firefighting instead of meaningful work.
And this is where many operational environments slowly become fragile:
not because of catastrophic failures,
but because unresolved details accumulate silently inside the system.
A lot of organizations confuse:
“the process runs”
with
“the process is reliable.”
But reliability starts after the first successful execution.
The real work begins when you ask:
- What happens if this fails at 2 AM?
- Who owns the issue?
- How quickly can the root cause be identified?
- What downstream systems depend on this flow?
- How much operational friction does one unresolved failure create?
Because systems rarely collapse all at once.
They degrade progressively through:
tolerated uncertainty,
undocumented assumptions,
missing ownership,
fragile dependencies,
and recurring incidents accepted as “normal.”
What makes this dangerous is not only the technical issue itself.
It is the invisible operational cost surrounding it.
Every recurring incident creates hidden friction:
context switching,
interruptions,
duplicated investigations,
delayed priorities,
reactive communication,
fragmented accountability.
And over time, the organization adapts to the dysfunction instead of removing it.
The incident becomes part of the routine.
Resilient systems are designed differently.
Not because failures never happen,
but because failures are anticipated before they occur.
That means:
defining ownership before go-live,
documenting root causes even for temporary fixes,
implementing retries and fallback logic,
securing dependencies,
analyzing recurring incidents as design weaknesses rather than isolated bad luck.
Because unresolved incidents are rarely random.
They usually reveal something the system was never truly prepared to handle.
Murphy’s Law is often misunderstood.
Murphy is not targeting your systems personally.
Failures are not “unlucky.”
They simply expose the gaps that were left open:
the assumptions nobody challenged,
the edge cases nobody secured,
the ownership nobody clarified,
the instability everybody learned to tolerate.
One ignored detail can slow down an entire chain.
And most operational friction starts long before the incident appears.
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