Glossary
Blameless Postmortem
A blameless postmortem examines an incident by asking what about the system — its design, its defaults, its gaps in visibility — allowed the failure to occur, rather than asking who made the mistake. The premise is that a person acting in good faith, under normal pressures, who nonetheless triggers an incident is usually revealing a systemic weakness that would eventually have been triggered by someone else, if not them.
The practical payoff is honesty: people who fear blame tend to omit details that would help prevent recurrence, whether or not they intend to. A review that will not be used to assign blame gets a much more complete account of what actually happened, which is the only account worth learning from.