Pretty much every company I've worked for in the last decade has told me, usually in my first week and often on a slide, that it has a blameless culture. I can't think of an incident I've been near that had no blame in it anywhere. Sometimes it's me, sometimes my team, sometimes a provider having a very bad day. And when nobody can find a culprit, the report calls it an act of god (which, coming from a confirmed atheist, I find hilarious). The original idea, from John Allspaw's 2012 post, was that it's safe to tell the truth about what you did. That's a long way from nobody having done anything, and somewhere between his post and the induction slide one turned into the other.
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I've written fine-grained root cause write-ups and watched them get softened at every layer on the way to the C-suite, until what reached the top was little more than a shrug. The blame stayed where it was shallowest, with the engineers. I'd keep the safety, drop the word, and write the causes down where they are rather than where they're comfortable. #Postmortems #SRE #DevOps #EngineeringCulture phpboyscout.uk/blameless-doesn…
