Thank you for raising the point about contradictions in values. I tried to work it into the original blog post, but I felt like it detracted from my main point.
I previously felt these contradictions are problematic because they make it harder to use values for prioritisation. It's a good point you make about different values being applicable in different contexts. I wonder whether the context can be incorporated into the value?
For example "Bias for action when the cost of failure is low". In an oncall incident, restarting a stateless service is worth trying even before the problem is understood in depth, because risk of failure is low. There are potential actions in an oncall incident that could quite easily make things much worse - then it's probably worth diving deeper before taking action.
It might not be pithy enough for the value itself, but I think it's at least adding this kind of context to the subtext like Amazon have done in the page you linked to.
I previously felt these contradictions are problematic because they make it harder to use values for prioritisation. It's a good point you make about different values being applicable in different contexts. I wonder whether the context can be incorporated into the value?
For example "Bias for action when the cost of failure is low". In an oncall incident, restarting a stateless service is worth trying even before the problem is understood in depth, because risk of failure is low. There are potential actions in an oncall incident that could quite easily make things much worse - then it's probably worth diving deeper before taking action.
It might not be pithy enough for the value itself, but I think it's at least adding this kind of context to the subtext like Amazon have done in the page you linked to.