Accepting that humans make errors unintentionally, the purpose of Blameless Post-Mortems is to learn from incidents and mistakes in order to minimize the risk of them happening again.

Here, it’s assumed that all Developers act with their best intentions based on the level of information they had at the time. So, instead of focusing on who messed up, Blameless Post-Mortems focus on how to avoid it from happening again, without playing the blame game.

Make sure to start the session by outlining the timeline, so everyone is on the same page as to the objective events that occurred before the incident—and, when undergoing the process, remember to be totally blameless. It’s all about learning, growing and building trust, and not about pointing fingers.