The idea of a “postmortem” is something we try to do after every major project. We look back at how things went, be glad about what went well, and work on things to improve for the next one.
The key to a solid postmortem, and to leading a solid team, is to focus on the core issues and not lay blame on humans. If something went wrong, what really was the cause? Google’s SRE (“Site Reliability Engineering”) site explains further:
Blameless postmortems are a tenet of SRE culture. For a postmortem to be truly blameless, it must focus on identifying the contributing causes of the incident without indicting any individual or team for bad or inappropriate behavior. A blamelessly written postmortem assumes that everyone involved in an incident had good intentions and did the right thing with the information they had. If a culture of finger pointing and shaming individuals or teams for doing the “wrong” thing prevails, people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment.
There certainly may be times when a human is at fault, but there is almost always a cause above that. It could be distractions, excessive workload, unclear procedures, or any number of other things.
As Google shares, if you immediately go to finger pointing you’ll get less and less feedback during future postmortems. These can be a gold mine of useful information, so treating them the right way for this one and the next one will help lead to increasingly great results down the road.
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