Failures get buried or blamed
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Blameless Review
Review failures by asking what conditions made them possible, not who to blame. That makes it easier for people to say what actually happened.
Try this first
Ask two questions. What did we know at each step? What would have caught this earlier? Skip the full timeline.
Borrowed from the blameless postmortem, as practiced in site reliability engineering and described in Google's Site Reliability Engineering book. Read the original source.
Other moves for this problem (7 of 7)
Kind of change
- The 5 Whys, liveFor when: The same failure keeps recurring and teams keep patching symptoms.
- Hindsight is unfairFor when: Reviewing a past decision that looks wrong in hindsight.
- Judge the Bet, Not the ResultFor when: An AI-assisted call happens to pay off and hides a bad process.
- Pain + Reflection = ProgressFor when: Failures are buried or spiraled over rather than learned from.
- Near-miss reporting + a Lessons Learned Center · Log the close calls, not just the failuresFor when: Only actual failures get surfaced, so warnings are missed.
- The Failure BudgetFor when: The team freezes at the first error and has no room to experiment.
- The Turnaround TimeFor when: A struggling AI initiative is being kept alive by "we've invested too much to stop.".