Your incident postmortems aren't investigations; they're fan fiction.
The article, published on DEV Community, contends that typical incident postmortems fail as investigations and instead resemble 'fan fiction.' The author argues that postmortems often serve to construct a comfortable narrative that protects teams or individuals rather than rigorously uncovering root causes. This approach, the article suggests, leads to missed opportunities for genuine learning and allows recurring incidents to persist. The piece criticizes the tendency to write postmortems that justify decisions and avoid blame, which undermines the purpose of incident analysis. It calls for a shift toward more honest and thorough investigations that prioritize understanding over storytelling.
Flawed postmortems prevent teams from learning from incidents, leading to repeated failures.