Learning from our mistakes, without the finger pointing
Many organizations want their employees to learn from when something goes wrong. But the process an organization uses to do so can meaningfully differentiate it in the areas of overall team collaboration and future incident prevention. This is where Blameless Postmortems and Incident Reports come in, which has been crucial to Adwerx’s innovative engineering culture.
For perspective, the opposite of a Blameless Postmortem is finger pointing and asking questions like “who’s fault was it?” when someone makes a mistake. If your organization has some of these challenges, it may take some time to increase the psychological safety of your team members who may currently be motivated to hide learnings out of fear of being punished. Although, that behavior doesn’t change overnight, building a team environment that is focused on humility, respect, and trust will certainly pay dividends in the long run through increased innovation and collaboration.
At Adwerx, our engineering team has been honing our Blameless Postmortem process for years. We have found them so productive that we’ve spent the last few months teaching everyone in our organization how to conduct them. As a result, our business colleagues are now writing incident reports and performing the 5-whys, just as the engineering team has always done when technical issues have arisen with our software.
Background
Adwerx did not invent the Blameless Postmortem process, of course; we’re lucky to follow in the footsteps of companies that have helped shape this process for the technology industry. We have also continued to tailor this process to meet our needs at Adwerx and the Google SRE Handbook and Etsy’s Debriefing Facilitator Guide have been major sources of inspiration when designing this process.
For Adwerx, Blameless Postmortems provide a way to focus our conversations and outcomes around fixing systems and processes, without finger pointing at individuals and teams. The Blameless Postmortem framework also requires us to be intentional about the language we use, ensuring that statements are substantiated, objective, and verifiable without any unnecessary personal jabs or negative innuendoes, which may be demotivating and humiliating. And, as referenced above, the 5-whys are a critical part of our root cause analysis and help steer our conversations into actionable dialog.
Additional Reading: The samples of “Bad Postmortems” provided in the Google SRE handbook are very helpful to understand what to avoid when educating your team on what language not to use during these sessions.
A starting place
The following 6-step process is what Adwerx uses when we conduct Blameless Postmortems.
While your team may have a different variation, the two most important outputs of your process should be:
- A list of criteria for what events should trigger a postmortem (a simple incident report may be all that’s needed for minor issues instead of something as grandiose as a Postmortem) and
- An accessible document that outlines the process your teams should follow (like what’s pictured above!)
Additional Reading: Hootsuite’s blogpost on this topic is great for inspiration around what steps to consider when putting together your Blameless Postmortem process.
Closing
Although this post only scratches the surface for why Blameless Postmortems are so important to innovation at modern organizations, I hope it inspires you to develop a consistent process that works for your team! In addition, Blameless Postmortems paired with a consistent Incident Report template will set your team up for future success.
