Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture¶
Allspaw, J. (2012). Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture. Etsy Code as Craft.
Cited by¶
7 citations across 7 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Fabula And Syuzhet
- Debugging and incident retrospectives. The reconstructed timeline of events is held separate from the causal narrative that explains them; conflating the two hides latent contributors.
This sourceArticulates the postmortem discipline of reconstructing a bare timeline of events before and separate from the causal narrative that explains them.
- Debugging and incident retrospectives. The reconstructed timeline of events is held separate from the causal narrative that explains them; conflating the two hides latent contributors.
- Improvisation
- And the high-reliability-organization framing of anticipated improvisation has ported into software operations through blameless postmortems, chaos engineering, and game-days.
This sourceBlameless-postmortem practice that builds incident-response vocabulary and in-action perception so competent moves can be generated in novel outages.
- And the high-reliability-organization framing of anticipated improvisation has ported into software operations through blameless postmortems, chaos engineering, and game-days.
- Swiss Cheese Model (Layered Defense with Aligning Holes)
- And patient-safety analysis shaped software engineering's blameless-postmortem culture, focusing post-incident practice on hole-pattern and latent conditions rather than individual blame.
This sourcePatient-safety and human-factors analysis shaping software engineering's blameless-postmortem practice, focusing on latent conditions over individual blame.
- And patient-safety analysis shaped software engineering's blameless-postmortem culture, focusing post-incident practice on hole-pattern and latent conditions rather than individual blame.
Mechanisms¶
- After-Action Learning Review
- Run blameless
This sourceExplains that blameless postmortems elicit fuller accounts of actions and context, producing a more useful causal record than a blame-focused review.
- Run blameless
- Cross-Team Retrospective
- The classic misuse is running it as cross-team blame assignment, which teaches each team to arrive with a defended narrative and turns the honest boundary account into theater; the discipline that guards against this is the blameless postmortem posture
This sourceExplains that blame discourages detailed accounts of failures and advocates blameless postmortems in which contributors can describe their actions and assumptions without punishment.
- The classic misuse is running it as cross-team blame assignment, which teaches each team to arrive with a defended narrative and turns the honest boundary account into theater; the discipline that guards against this is the blameless postmortem posture
- Postmortem Review
- The blameless postmortem, associated with John Allspaw's engineering-safety work, is the discipline that keeps the analysis honest by separating learning from punishment.
This sourceExplains blameless postmortems as learning-focused investigations that elicit detailed accounts without fear of punishment.
- The blameless postmortem, associated with John Allspaw's engineering-safety work, is the discipline that keeps the analysis honest by separating learning from punishment.
- Retrospective Context Mapping
- That reframing is what turns the postmortem into a fix instead of a blame assignment, and it is the explicit aim of a blameless postmortem
This sourceDefines a blameless postmortem as a learning-focused account of an incident that seeks mechanisms and improvements without punishment or blame.
- That reframing is what turns the postmortem into a fix instead of a blame assignment, and it is the explicit aim of a blameless postmortem
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