Incident Retrospectives Without Blame

Short summary

A concise guide to running blameless incident retrospectives based on 100+ post-mortems. Ban blame-oriented phrases like 'Alice forgot to' and replace with system-focused language like 'The system let this happen because.' Push 5-whys analysis past human error to find systemic gaps. Blameless doesn't mean consequence-free — repeated mistakes after system fixes are a management issue, not a retro issue.

• •Replace blame language ('Alice forgot') with system language ('The system let this happen because')
• •Push 5-whys past human error to find missing tests, owners, or signals
• •Blameless ≠ consequence-free; repeated mistakes after fixes are a management issue

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