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Blameless postmortems work phenomenally at Etsy which is a pretty low risk setting (after reading Sidney Dekker's book The Field Guide to Understanding Human Er
by benihana 12y ago
Blameless postmortems work phenomenally at Etsy which is a pretty low risk setting (after reading Sidney Dekker's book The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error [highly recommended] I would say that blameless post-mortems are even more important in a high-risk setting). Except failure isn't the correct word - the book makes the case that these are natural artefacts of complex systems.
1: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
2: http://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error/dp/0754648265 http://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error/...
- amirmc 12y agoNice article. Something it doesn't point out, which can become one of the elements in the cycle of name/blame/shame, is the creation of 'heroes'. This is the figure who throws themselves at the issue and brings it back from the brink of disaster. If the culture isn't fixed and failure easy to talk about, then this can play out repeatedly. Since it's usually a celebrated event ('we survived!'), it creates poor incentives for fixing the culture. One can also play this game by noticing a potential failure mode, figuring out how to fix it, but only leaping in once it's struck. I'd rather find another employer though.
- DigitalBison 12y agoWe do this to pretty good success at the Big 4 I work at as well. The process by which these post-morterms get assigned can occasionally get political -- e.g. manager A dislikes or is trying to make a move on manager B so he pushes for a detailed post-mortem for every little issue that B's team has -- but the post-mortems themselves tend to work very well in exposing and correcting process failures without placing individual blame.