AI Governance Engineer
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Blameless post-mortem

By Updated

An incident review that identifies contributing causes without indicting any individual or team, on the premise that people acted reasonably on what they knew and that systems and processes are what can be fixed 1. Its triggers are set in advance.

Developed in
ch. 17, Techniques
Chapters
ch. 17, Incidents
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

One chapter of the Body of Knowledge uses the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

Blameless post-mortem: mentions per chapter1 mention of the term across 1 of the 23 chapters of the Body of Knowledge; the chapters the glossary cross-references are drawn solid.Cross-referenced chapter17 Incidents: 1 mention17 Incidents1No mentions in the other 22 chaptersSource: the Body of Knowledgev0.5.0
Blameless post-mortem: mentions per chapter1 mention of the term across 1 of the 23 chapters of the Body of Knowledge; the chapters the glossary cross-references are drawn solid.Cross-referenced chapter0001020304050607081011121314151617 Incidents: 1 mention117181920212223Source: the Body of Knowledge v0.5.0
Mentions per chapter How often each chapter names the term, with the chapters the glossary cross-references drawn solid. The longest bar is where to read the term in use; bars spread across many chapters mark a term that runs through the discipline.
Mentions as a table
Mentions of Blameless post-mortem per chapter
ChapterMentionsCross-referenced
00 Preface0No
01 Definition0No
02 Why Now0No
03 Values & Principles0No
04 The Stack0No
05 Patterns0No
06 The Role0No
07 Maturity Model0No
08 Regulatory Map0No
10 Reading List0No
11 AI Defined0No
12 Governance Program0No
13 Risk Management0No
14 Development0No
15 Deployment0No
16 Fairness & XAI0No
17 Incidents1Yes
18 EU AI Act0No
19 Privacy & AI0No
20 Existing Law0No
21 AI Laws Worldwide0No
22 Principles & Standards0No
23 AI Agents0No
  • Root-cause analysis (RCA)

    The review that answers why an incident happened and why the controls did not stop it, using techniques such as five whys, fault tree analysis and blameless…

Sources

  1. [1] "Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure" (Site Reliability Engineering, ch. 15). Google. 2016. https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/ (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Blameless post-mortem. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/blameless-post-mortem. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026blamelesspostmortem,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Blameless post-mortem}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/blameless-post-mortem}
}