That quote is exactly why I have mixed feelings too
I don’t think blameless postmortems mean “no accountability” or “nothing bad happened.” They’re more about separating learning from discipline.
In my experience, the postmortem is the wrong place to assign consequences — once people feel personally on trial, the document becomes defensive and you lose signal about system failures.
You can and should still hold people accountable elsewhere, but the writeup itself should be boring, factual, and focused on how the system allowed the failure. This tool is opinionated in that direction, which definitely isn’t universal.
I have mixed feelings about blameless postmortems. Maybe I’m partially influenced by the David Cutler in Showstoppers.
> If you break the build then your ass is grass and I’m the lawn mower.
That quote is exactly why I have mixed feelings too
I don’t think blameless postmortems mean “no accountability” or “nothing bad happened.” They’re more about separating learning from discipline.
In my experience, the postmortem is the wrong place to assign consequences — once people feel personally on trial, the document becomes defensive and you lose signal about system failures.
You can and should still hold people accountable elsewhere, but the writeup itself should be boring, factual, and focused on how the system allowed the failure. This tool is opinionated in that direction, which definitely isn’t universal.