Comparison
Blameless postmortemvsJust culture
Blameless postmortem
you write up what happened focusing on why the system allowed it, not on who typed the command.
A structured review of an incident that treats human error as a symptom of system design. The premise is practical rather than kind: people who expect blame do not share the details you need. The output should be a small number of committed actions, not a narrative nobody reads.
Full entry →Just culture
the engineer who ran the command explained exactly what they saw, because nothing bad was going to happen to them for it.
A culture that separates accountability for outcomes from blame for individuals, so that people report what actually happened. It is not the absence of accountability, which is the standard misreading of 'blameless': the team still owns fixing the system, and repeated reckless behaviour is still addressed. What it removes is the incentive to be vague, which is the single largest source of lost information after an incident.
Full entry →