alt Hacker NewsThere's still some problem with that approach. OK, I will tell what I'm going change to prevent recurrence of the issue. How does that makes sense to the audience? Unless they just want hear that "some" change will be there and don't care about how that change would make any sense.
It boils down to what exactly is the ownership or accountability of your SVP around the issue. Why are they even bothered to ensure that there will be some change? If they are responsible for ensuring that the issue doesn't happen again, then they do need to say "I want the details".
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What you describe is exactly what a 'leader' is supposed to 'see'. When to know when details are needed, and when to trust their delegate. The trust is also balanced: if what you say does not align with what the leader is 'seeing', then trust falls apart.
Everyone has some measure of the 'big picture' and the person at top is supposed to see the biggest, final picture. Where everyone and their processes fit, within the big picture. Delegation could be perfectly aligned (and trust would be easy) if not for quality:
Quality determines how well the relationship works between leader and delegate.
The amount of quality is determined by the amount of need, and urgency available. The relationship (and communication) evolves over time as quality is determined by leaders.
Regardless, there's always going to be difficulty because there's never an ideal system where quality is perfectly measured. That's why communication with people, as people, is also very important. When we perceive disrespect: communication shuts down. Humility must be respected.
If you can't communicate, there's definitely no measure of quality available for the relationship between leader and delegate. If communication is there (and communication should be measured as transmission of real information), then trust is more easily measured.
Once you know how much you trust something, then you know how much detail you need when you 'need to get something done'. Because you know the big picture, and where this thing you need fits. And how well it works.
OP is already at the director level. The further you go up the management chain, the less people are involved in process or technical decision making -- they are primarily concerned with organizational decision making. It sounds like the issue was something that was fully within the management scope of lower levels of management here:
> Something had gone wrong that shouldn't have.
The SVP is trying to determine what change in management is taking place, not what technical change is taking place.
I think there is a subtle additional level of trust that the author didn't call out. As the author noted, the SVP trusted that everyone involved in the issue responded rationally and professionally. But they left out the part where the SVP also trusted that the author and their engineering counterpart had already analyzed what happened and how.
The SVP doesn't have time to dig into the "who did what and when" timeline of a problem. They do need to communicate that they're willing to invest resources in preventing recurrence. Was the team burned out by noisy alarms? Then the SVP needs to hear "We're spending time improving automation to reduce alarms, and tuning remaining alarms to make them less noisy. This will take engineering time away from feature work." Or maybe the system had a single point of failure that broke, and the SVP needs to hear "We're redoing X to eliminate a single point of failure, but it will increase our infrastructure budget by $Y".
The SVP is inviting a higher level discussion around what resources need to be consumed in order to be sure this doesn't happen again. And they're opening the door to defending that use of resources.