Re: blameless postmortems, i think the primary reason for blamelessness is because if you have blameful postmortems, they will rapidly transform (at least in perception) into punishments, and consequently will not often occur except when management is really cheesed off at someone. This was how the postmortem system ended up at Amazon while i was there.
Blameful postmortems also result in workers who are very motivated to hide issues they have caused, which is obviously unproductive.
+1; to expand on a related thought—it also seems to me like it connects well to most of the suggested changes that have been sitting as unhandled pull requests for the justice system for the past 50+ years. various types of restorative, rehabilitative, etc justice also focus on reducing or, for some offenses, even removing, the “blame”—even from some of the most blameful of human situations.
Re: blameless postmortems, i think the primary reason for blamelessness is because if you have blameful postmortems, they will rapidly transform (at least in perception) into punishments, and consequently will not often occur except when management is really cheesed off at someone. This was how the postmortem system ended up at Amazon while i was there.
Blameful postmortems also result in workers who are very motivated to hide issues they have caused, which is obviously unproductive.
+1; to expand on a related thought—it also seems to me like it connects well to most of the suggested changes that have been sitting as unhandled pull requests for the justice system for the past 50+ years. various types of restorative, rehabilitative, etc justice also focus on reducing or, for some offenses, even removing, the “blame”—even from some of the most blameful of human situations.