In my experience, writing and distributing the postmortem is the least-practiced part of incident management. That is a shame, because it’s the bridge between resolving an incident and making sure it doesn’t happen again.
The point of a postmortem is to capture the knowledge of what happened from the person who was there. If you don’t have good processes in place, then it very quickly becomes a game of finger pointing and looking for someone to blame, when it should be about learning from these failures and turning them into company-wide resilience.
So why is it often overlooked? Well, there are many possible reasons, but I think the main one is simply that, after an incident is closed out, there often isn’t a strong desire to go back and revisit it. Especially if the postmortem template for your company has multiple data entry fields; it just begins to feel like homework.
That’s why I want to encourage and normalize the idea of the single-sentence postmortem. In the majority of cases, you’ll get 80% of the value of the practice just by taking a minute to write down something. That’s not to say there isn’t value in longer postmortems, or that some situations may require longer reviews, given the complex nature of the failure. But in the majority of cases, the same sentence you would say to a colleague over coffee or in the conference room about what went wrong, is the same sentence you could write down and disseminate across the organization!
The crucial thing is to have and record insight about what went wrong and why from the person who was there when it happened. Even if it’s something simple. Having a process that formally documents it and then shares that knowledge can prevent a lot of unnecessary, repetitive failures.
Similar to exercise, the hardest part is often just putting on your shoes. If you get in the habit of writing down a single-sentence postmortem after closing out an incident, you will begin increasing the resilience of your organization significantly. And who knows — once your shoes are on, you may even start to enjoy going on those longer runs.
