Postmortems: free-recall review
Free-recall prompts across the postmortems unit. Answer each in your own words first, then reveal the model answer and compare.
Retrieval beats re-reading. For each prompt, say or write a full answer from memory before you open the model answer — the effort of recall is what makes the reasoning stick, not the polish of the explanation.
Reconstruct the unit’s spine from memory — why blameless is an information decision, the four load-bearing sections, contributing factors vs root cause, the five-whys critique, what makes an action item real, and how to ration the ceremony.
- 01Why is blameless an engineering decision rather than a courtesy?
- 02Name the four load-bearing sections of a useful postmortem and what each must contain.
- 03Why does the unit prefer 'contributing factors' over 'the root cause'?
- 04Summarize Allspaw's 'Infinite Hows' critique of five-whys.
- 05What distinguishes a real action item from a non-item, and why does it matter for the cost of the retro?
- 06How do you ration the postmortem ceremony so it actually pays off?
If you could reconstruct each answer from memory, you hold the unit’s spine: blameless is an information decision because blame drives reporting underground; a useful postmortem has a neutral timeline, quantified impact, two to five contributing factors, and owned dated action items; ‘root cause’ is the wrong singular frame for multi-causal failure; Allspaw’s ‘how’ beats ‘why’ because it surfaces conditions instead of culprits; a real action item is specific, owned, and dated; and the ceremony only pays off when you ration it with a severity trigger and track items to closure well above 85%. Now when you next hear “who pushed it?” in a retro, you will know which question to ask instead — and why the answer actually prevents recurrence.
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