Bran van der Meer on YouTube · Open on YouTube
Technical leadership: reviews, mentoring, incidents and influence · Expert · Lesson 85 of 98 · 8 min video, then about 6 hours of practice
Facilitating blameless postmortems
After this you can write and facilitate a postmortem that finds systemic causes and produces action items that actually get done.
Why it matters
A postmortem's purpose is learning, not blame. If people fear punishment, they hide information and the same failure happens again. Focus on what made the mistake possible and easy: missing safeguards, confusing tooling, unclear ownership. Good postmortems have a precise timeline, contributing factors (rarely one root cause), what went well, and a short list of owned, prioritised action items. Trap: twenty action items. Pick the three that matter and see them through.
How to use this resource
How to run the meeting itself, step by step.