Incident Retrospectives Without Blame

Dr. Samson Tanimawo, founder and CEO of Nova AI Ops, argues that effective incident retrospectives focus on fixing systems rather than blaming individuals. Having run over 100 post-mortems, he advises banning phrases that assign blame and pushing past human error to find systemic fixes.

I've run over 100 post-mortems. The worst ones end with 'Alice will be more careful.' The best ones end with 'we fixed the system.' Here's how you get from the first to the second. Ban these phrases from retros: Replace with: People make mistakes. Systems that allow those mistakes to reach production are the actual bug. Classic 5 whys often end at human error. Push through that. Action item: assign an owner to config validation and add the missing test. That's a system fix. Blameless doesn't mean consequence-free. If someone keeps making the same mistake after the system is fixed, that's a management issue, not a retro issue. Handle it privately, not in the retro. Retros are for learning. Everything else belongs elsewhere. Written by Dr. Samson Tanimawo BSc · MSc · MBA · PhD Founder & CEO, Nova AI Ops. https://novaaiops.com https://novaaiops.com