How to write a post-mortem that always blames Terry

Blameless post-mortems do not apply when Terry is in the room

When things go wrong, you find out who people really are.

You see who has power and how that wins out over real improvement. You can see where the power is by looking where the blame does not land. This is how you find out that it is all Terry’s fault.

To begin finding out that it is Terry’s fault, you first have to find out what happened. One useful tool for this is Five whys, in which you take on the role of a 2-year-old and just ask why until it gets uncomfortable. Who should you ask these questions to? Just grab a few adults that aren’t Terry and keep the answers you like. Sometimes, it takes more than 5 rounds; you sort of have to do it a few times to get a feel of how to blame Terry.

Here is an example:

Problem — The customer table was truncated in production.

• Why? — A manual script was run to remove one account, but all accounts were removed.

• Why? — Because Terry had an error in his script, the WHERE clause was commented out.

• Why? — While Terry was working on the script, someone interrupted him and started scolding him in front of everybody.

• Why? — He messed up another data script earlier that week, and QA found the error and escalated it to a manager.

• Why? — People make mistakes, and Terry puts up with being scolded.

• Why? — He thinks he deserves it.

• Why? — His relationship with his mother robbed him of belief in his own power and agency.

• Why? — Children are very receptive to negative feedback between ages 5 to 13, and parents, through exhaustion, impatience, or anger, can accidentally cause a child to think that something is fundamentally wrong with themselves.

• Why? — When we are small, it is much easier to think of ourselves as weak than that those who care for and protect us are weak.

• Root Cause: Terry has not dealt with his emotional trauma and doesn’t really know who he is.

After making this post-mortem, you can now take further action, like scolding Terry.

Do not take action like figuring out why Terry is so powerful or sending Terry to therapy - that’s too personal and might make it look like the company is at fault. But it isn’t; Terry is at fault.

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If you are reading this and thinking, “well it depends,” or “this is a gross oversimplification,” or “what an idiot,” then you might be interested in Additional Commentary for this post.