The Blameless Postmortem That Still Blames You

Short summary

While 'blameless postmortems' claim to promote learning, they often become covert performance-review ammunition that undermines psychological safety. Engineers strategically avoid incident visibility to protect their careers, which eliminates the transparency needed for real systemic improvements. True blameless culture requires institutions to separate postmortems from performance accountability entirely.

• •Blameless postmortems often serve as disguised performance-review documents rather than learning tools
• •Engineers game the system to avoid incident timelines, creating perverse incentives that undermine safety
• •Real psychological safety requires institutional commitment to use postmortems only for automation and systemic fixes

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.