Postmortems are for learning, not blame
After the incident is over, the value lives in what you decide to change. A postmortem that assigns blame gets a defensive team; one that asks “what can we change so this does not happen again” gets durable improvement. Blame kills the honest report The moment anyone asks ‘who is to blame’ the room quiets and the timeline shortens. People retell only what makes them look safe, so the record loses the decisions nobody wants to own. A blame-free report treats the timeline as a fixed record of what happened and treats people as the working part of a system with real constraints, not as its cause of failure. ...