Imagine your accounting system has crashed. Probably one of your worse nightmares. However, you’ve been able to recover it and everything is back running smoothly.
Whew!! You dodged a bullet. Since it’s up and running you’re done, right?
WRONG!
After the system is back up, it’s time to explore what happened and how you can stop it in the future. It’s time for the blameless post-mortem.
What is a Blameless Post-mortem?
A blameless post-mortem is a meeting, after the fact, in which you review problems to learn why they happened and prevent them from reoccurring. The key thing is there is no finger-pointing. Hence the term “blameless”.
You’re not there to point fingers and figure out who was responsible for the problems. You want to investigate problems and incidents without making accusations or blaming any particular person or team. A blameless mindset assumes that all parties were doing the best they could with the information that they had at the time.
Why have a Blameless Post-mortem?
By eliminating the blame in the post-mortem meeting, people are more likely to speak up. People aren’t worried about covering their own actions or having to defend themselves. They feel like they can be more open and honest about what really happened. This allows you to get to the root cause and identify more issues that might have remained hidden. Making it better for everyone!
The blameless environment creates a trusting culture between employees and teams. It leads to better communication and support. Ultimately, you create a culture of continuous improvement, which creates an environment where people can feel free to take risks and do their best work.
Since you have better data about the causes of problems, processes can be constantly improved as they are tested by new situations that expose issues.
The Process
Now that we’ve looked at what a blameless post-mortem is and why you want to have one, let’s look at the process. How do you conduct blameless post-mortem?
As the leader of the meeting, it’s your responsibility to make sure the meeting remains “blameless”. Keep an eye out for language that starts to point blame to specific teams or people.
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Steps to run a blameless post-mortem:
- Ask everyone that was involved in the incident or project to provide details for the BPM documentation. Consolidate the information you receive into one master document.
- Prior to the meeting share an agenda that includes all items to review. Remind everyone that will be attending that it will be blameless.
- During the meeting, make sure you sent the right tone and continue to remind people that it isn’t a blame game.
- Acknowledge what went right during the incident. Don’t forget to highlight your successes and focus on the good things that happened.
- Focus actions or processes that caused the issue. What actions did you take? What assumptions did you make?
- Try to define a timeline of events that everyone can agree on.
- Use the 5 Whys to get to the bottom of an issue.
- Make a list of potential improvements that you can make to procedures
- Assign changes to specific people. Get commitments from people to make changes that can drive improvements
- Document the meeting. Share the notes in a public place where anyone can see them. Post them on the company Intranet. Share them with company leaders.
- Track results and have a method for following up on action items.
Conclusion
Continue to utilize this process for any incidents, outages, or projects and you’ll get benefits from the blameless culture you’re creating at your company. Don’t worry if it doesn’t go perfectly at first, continue to work through it and refine it to fit your needs.
Many well-known companies use the blameless post-mortem model, including Google, Etsy, and others. Maintaining the blameless mindset can be challenging, but the resulting information will make it worthwhile.