Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously

by Jeff Gothelf

One culture-building practice that organizations use to create permission to fail is the blameless postmortem. This regularly occurring meeting provides an opportunity for the entire team to go through a recent time period (product release cycle, quarter, etc.) or to review a specific incident and honestly examine what went well, what could be improved, and what should not be continued. Often, these postmortems are facilitated by someone outside the team to avoid any bias or conflict of interest. Think of this activity as continuous improvement but applied to the way the team works rather than the product it’s working on. The motivation for this process is that failures should be treated as learning opportunities. In order to learn from failures, you need to make an accurate assessment of what happened, why it happened, and how it can be prevented next time. It would be simple to treat this inquiry as a hunt for the person responsible so that this person can be disciplined. But if this is the outcome of the inquiry, then the people involved will not be motivated to share the truth of what happened. Instead, they will cover it up to avoid punishment. So, in order for people to learn, the blameless postmortem process must include an ironclad guarantee that they can speak without fear of punishment. And that guarantee must be upheld each and every time.