Postmortem Culture¶
Lunney, & Lueder. (2016). Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems.
Cited by¶
5 citations across 5 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Mechanisms¶
- After-Action Repertoire Review
- The classic misuse is running it to assign blame, which suppresses exactly the gap reports it needs.
This sourceExplains that blame in postmortems suppresses disclosure of problems and undermines organizational learning.
- The classic misuse is running it to assign blame, which suppresses exactly the gap reports it needs.
- Cross-Boundary After-Action Review
- The discipline that keeps it honest is a blameless posture,
This sourceDefines a blameless postmortem as a record-based incident account with a timeline and tracked follow-up actions assigned to owners.
- The discipline that keeps it honest is a blameless posture,
- Cross-Scale Retrospective
- It works best in the spirit of the blameless postmortem, where the goal is to fix the system of loops rather than to find a culprit, which is what keeps the cross-level signal honest.
This sourceAdvocates blameless postmortems that investigate systematic causes, improve systems and processes, and encourage people to surface and escalate issues.
- It works best in the spirit of the blameless postmortem, where the goal is to fix the system of loops rather than to find a culprit, which is what keeps the cross-level signal honest.
- Incident Sensemaking Session
- A blameless framing is what makes the honest reconstruction possible in the first place, since people who fear punishment supply sanitized accounts.
This sourceExplains that blameless postmortems enable honest reconstruction because fear of punishment causes people to conceal incident information.
- A blameless framing is what makes the honest reconstruction possible in the first place, since people who fear punishment supply sanitized accounts.
- Stage Transition Log
- The classic misuse is turning the log into an instrument for assigning individual blame rather than for fixing the stage, which teaches people to log defensively and quietly degrades the record; the corrective is the blameless postmortem stance, where the trail is read to improve the process, not to punish.
This sourceExplains that blame suppresses candid incident reporting and that blameless postmortems use the record to improve systems and processes rather than punish individuals.
- The classic misuse is turning the log into an instrument for assigning individual blame rather than for fixing the stage, which teaches people to log defensively and quietly degrades the record; the corrective is the blameless postmortem stance, where the trail is read to improve the process, not to punish.
Verification¶
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Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 5 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.
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