The Hidden Cost of Over-Centralized Incident Response: When Stability and Reliability Are Not the Same Thing
There can be appeal to a heavily centralized incident response approach. A dedicated team, highly trained in triage and response. A team accountable for resolving most incidents. System owners' involvement is minimal. The central team handles detection, triage, mitigation, and recovery. Metrics improve. Time to detect drops. Recovery speeds accelerate. For months, maybe years, everything feels stable. But here's the thing — stability isn't the same as reliability. A few months ago I wrote about a different road to this same failure — when AI absorbs too much of the operational thinking, and engineers slowly lose the muscle that hard incidents demand. This post is about the same atrophy, but the cause here isn't AI. It's organizational. It's what happens when incident response gets so centralized that the people who built the systems are removed from the loop entirely. A system can appear stable under routine conditions while being fundamentally fragile when thin...