blameless postmortem term
incident review focused on systems, not individuals
Incident review focused on systems and contributing factors, not on assigning fault. The premise: people make rational decisions given the information they had at the time; if outcomes were bad, the system shaped the choice. Asking 'why did Alice push that bad change?' produces a story; asking 'why did the system make Alice's decision look reasonable?' produces a fix. Originated in aviation safety; brought into software by the SRE / DevOps community. Doesn't actually work in a blame culture — it's the surface ritual; just culture is the substrate that makes it work.