I'll never forget my first post-mortem meeting. I was a junior engineer, and the server had crashed at 3 AM during a holiday sale. The report started with "John deployed faulty code without proper review." John was sitting right next to me. The tension in the room was thick enough to cut with a knife.
That report didn't fix anything. It just made everyone defensive.
Here's the thing: post-mortems aren't about pointing fingers. They're about building better systems. When you use blame language, you kill curiosity. People stop asking "why did this happen?" and start asking "how do I avoid getting blamed?" That's the opposite of what you want.
Let me show you how to write post-mortems that actually work.
Why Blame Language Fails
