Run blameless postmortems

Incidents are a learning opportunity
An incident postmortem brings teams together to take a deeper look at an incident and figure out what happened, why it happened, how the team responded, and what can be done to prevent repeat incidents and improve future responses. Blameless postmortems do all this without any blame games.
In a blameless postmortem, it’s assumed that every team and employee acted with the best intentions based on the information they had at the time. Instead of identifying—and punishing—whoever screwed up, blameless postmortems focus on improving performance moving forward.
The actual point of blameless postmortems is to remove the fear of looking stupid, being reprimanded, or even losing your job with the ultimate goal of encouraging honest, objective and fact-centric communication that leads to better future outcomes.
They:
- Create a healthy culture between teams
- Decrease the chances of ignoring incidents for fear of blame
- Create an open, always-improving culture of learning
- Increase support and communication
- Free teams up to do their best work
Best practices:
- Communicate an open, mistake-friendly approach up front
- Encourage honesty and acceptance of failure
- Share information and build a timeline
- Be consistently blameless
- Get C-suite buy-in
- Collaborate
- Make decisions, but get approval