Blameless postmortem
A post-incident review practice, formalized in Google's Site Reliability Engineering discipline, that treats the human action which triggered an incident as one fact in a factual timeline rather than the review's central finding, directing accountability instead at the systems, processes, and owners that should have prevented or caught the mistake.
Defined in 3 GAGE programs, which carry 4 distinct definitions of it. The wording above is taught in AI Data Governance: The Data Chair.
How each discipline defines it
The same term does different work depending on who is using it. These are the definitions as each program teaches them, unedited.
A post-incident review practice, formalized in Google's Site Reliability Engineering discipline, that treats the human action which triggered an incident as one fact in a factual timeline rather than the review's central finding, directing accountability instead at the systems, processes, and owners that should have prevented or caught the mistake.
A reporting discipline, formalized in Google's published Site Reliability Engineering practice (2016), that structurally separates what happened from who is at fault, on the reasoning that a culture where individuals fear blame produces incomplete or defensive factual accounts.
The evidence-based practice, codified in software site-reliability engineering, of analyzing an incident for systemic causes with an explicit rule against punishing individuals, so that the people present tell the truth. Blame is an information strategy, not only a moral one.
A post-incident review discipline that separates honest disclosure of what happened from personal blame, encouraging fast, complete reporting of decisions and mistakes rather than concealment; it does not eliminate accountability, it removes the incentive to hide facts out of fear. Owned in depth by Topic 11.7. (see Topic 11.7)
Where it is taught
The exact lessons this term appears in. The first 7 topics of every program are free with a free account.
- The 2 a.m. data incident: run the response live, stakeholders calling · Data Incidents, AI Data Governance: The Data Chair
- The post-incident review: fixing the estate, not blaming the intern · Data Incidents, AI Data Governance: The Data Chair
- The post-incident review: what you missed, written without blaming the tool · Shipping AI and Surviving the Incident, AI Governance: Applied Mastery
Terms it appears with
Not an alphabetical neighbourhood: these are the terms taught in the same lessons, ranked by how often they appear together.