Blameless postmortems

A topic we have touched upon is the key adjective usually attached to postmortems—blameless. Postmortems used improperly can lead to really dangerous and toxic cultures, where people are afraid of outages or feel incapable of doing their jobs because of the fear of failure. Start with a fact—we all fail. As humans, failure is one of our most defining traits. One of the key tenets of SRE is that if you are going to fail, set up your organization so that it is not a big deal and you can quickly recover and learn from the failure. Another tenet is that reliability is a team sport. Everyone needs to feel comfortable raising issues, responding to outages, and working on improving the system. Fostering that level of psychological safety is difficult and constantly needs reinforcement and help.

Note that, in the Root cause section, we did not point out the person who made the change that broke the system, nor the person who wrote code that couldn't handle the user interaction...