Postmortems

Not asking why is very expensive

Your project is dead. Your outage went way too long. Your customers are mad. Your bosses are in damage control mode. Why? You don’t know. You think you do, but you don’t. And you need to find out. But most likely you won’t, because you’re wounded, your emotions are raw, and the last thing you want to do is stare directly at the embarrassment that was your project. So you do the easy thing, you tell yourself a story about what happened. It was a fluke. Management just doesn’t understand. Our sister department is incompetent. Pick one, it doesn’t matter.

Everyone tells themselves a story that’s a little different (or a lot different). If you listen closely, you can hear the inconsistencies. But you leave them unchallenged, at least publicly. Why? Because you’re not really trying to uncover the truth, you just want to feel good enough to move on. Everyone “learns” something that’s at best incomplete, and there’s no consensus created on what to do. Maybe some procedures are changed, but without understanding this is merely a ritual, perhaps best understood as a form of secular prayer.

Fortunately, the way to learn from a terrible event is not that complicated. Get everyone involved into a room or video call and talk honestly about what happened, working together to find the full truth without blaming one another. It’s only about the most vulnerable and painful thing one can do in a professional context. It is so difficult to keep asking why. Why didn’t we check this before shipping? Why don’t we ever have time to test? Why did so-and-so feel they had to say that the project would ship in a month when they knew that was unlikely? Why does our team culture keep producing flashy products that don’t really work? Why do frontline employees lie by omission to the boss? Yikes.

Why is this so painful? I believe it is because the answers demand change, and change is dangerous. Change could mean your job gets harder, or doesn’t exist anymore. Change puts you in conflict with someone you like or are afraid of. Change could mean your skills aren’t as valuable as they were before. All the cheap stories are a way to convince ourselves that everything can continue as before (except for the new rituals procedures) and yet the problem will not return. The pain is having to face that this is not true.

I have no solution to making this less painful or making it require less courage. But what I have learned is that postmortems are not just extremely helpful, they are mandatory. If you are not doing postmortems, you cannot succeed. Organizations have problems, and if you’re not working on solving them, you’re not working to any effect at all. Problems are not solved by accident; they require effort, so they must be understood and faced directly. Postmortems are the only way to produce a shared understanding. Not doing postmortems will cost you an impactful career.