The Incident Review Nobody Dreads
From blameless in theory to blameless in practice, and the small format changes that got us there.
Everyone says their reviews are blameless. Then the meeting opens with a timeline of who deployed what, and the room reads it as an accusation anyway.
Change what the document opens with
Ours now starts with what the system made easy to get wrong. Names appear later, in the section about who to follow up with, not in the section about causes.
End with owners, not action items
An action item without a name and a date is a wish. One owner per item, stated out loud in the meeting, is the difference between a review and a ritual.