AI Governance Engineer
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Blameless post-mortem

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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.

  • 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}
}