I've worked at places where postmortems were conducted mainly to punish someone. Extra work, extra oversight, rhetorical superiority, display of dominance were all typical punishments. The reasons for the punishments often weren't clear. Area near as I could yell at one mountain west phone company, problems were ginned up and blaming got used to avoid accountability for business problems, like getting contracts signed on time, or picking a genuinely incompetent contractor.
All that to say fair accountability is very rare. I suspect that a practice of blameful postmortems would easily slip into punishing the innocent, and praise for the guilty.
> Accountability Is Fair
I've worked at places where postmortems were conducted mainly to punish someone. Extra work, extra oversight, rhetorical superiority, display of dominance were all typical punishments. The reasons for the punishments often weren't clear. Area near as I could yell at one mountain west phone company, problems were ginned up and blaming got used to avoid accountability for business problems, like getting contracts signed on time, or picking a genuinely incompetent contractor.
All that to say fair accountability is very rare. I suspect that a practice of blameful postmortems would easily slip into punishing the innocent, and praise for the guilty.