> I have learned that "I told you so." is absolutely, 1000% worthless.
This is proof of bad company culture.
Doing post-mortems is important to learn what went wrong in the decision process and how to prevent it.
This is proof of bad company culture.
Doing post-mortems is important to learn what went wrong in the decision process and how to prevent it.
A postmortem is a clinical, reasoned, and scientific review. Everyone is on board, and agrees to abide by the results.
I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time. I made some colossal mistakes, during my tenure, and was told "That was, indeed, a mistake. We expect you to mitigate it, and not repeat it." Often, I would actually get more trust and responsibility, afterwards.
I've had no issues admitting mistakes at my places of work, and vice versa: "This is what happened/I did, which led to this. We fix it this way. What can we do to prevent it/similar things happening in the future?".
Edit:
People do most things with good intentions and for hopefully good reasons. When things go wrong it's usually down to unforeseen interactions or second order effects (or brain farts), and/or a lacking review process.
The person making "the mistake" is usually just the last person crossing a faulty bridge, and if it wasn't them it would've been the next person. It's not a problem identifying the person if everyone realizes we all want a sturdy bridge.
I see it as etiology vs. teleology - rather than thinking "how did we get here?" we think "how do we get out of here?" The two are interrelated, but the second somehow gets things moving, and reduces resentment in toxic workplaces.
I work for a large (not FAANG but spatially close) ecommerce company, and I’ve yet to see substantial changes or learnings after outages or mistakes.
I often find that wishy-washy post-mortems smear responsibility and deflect accountability. This doesn’t incentivize a change in behavior, and when people blindly get more trust, they often seem to simply repeat mistakes.
I think I’ve yet to master post-mortems and transforming “I told you so”s into improvements - I’d appreciate tips and ideas, thanks!
"If I don't make a choice, it's not my fault".
It's much better to establish a culture of "try doing good things, and we're in this together". If you trust your colleagues and are good at recruiting, you'll get a lot more done.
I don't know if I have any specific tips and ideas for post-mortems as it usually... "depends".
Someone mentioned "bad corporate culture." In fact, the OP was really a sort of indictment of dysfunctional culture.
The Japanese are heavily process-oriented (not always a good thing). They have a consensus-based approach, where all stakeholders agree to a common set of rules and remedies before the meeting begins. If a problem is found, then the meeting doesn't end until there is a plan (and responsible person) for a remedy. Assigning tasks (not blame) is a goal. People are assumed to accept personal responsibility for their own mistakes. It's not the job of the meeting to do that (there's a common cultural mythology of responsible managers committing suicide, if they screw up badly enough. I never saw it, so I can't speak to its accuracy).
I worked for Amazon and postmortems were taken seriously and done regularly - but things can be different in other teams.
If people warned about a risk in the past this would be noticed.
If nobody flagged the risk people would start asking why.
I agree. The fact that the parent feels like his warning were ignored and his voice was unheard is a cause for frustration.
Having a postmortem process after each incident would prevent such frustration.
> A postmortem is a clinical, reasoned, and scientific review.
I'm well aware of this.