A blameless culture lives or dies on what leaders do after the first awkward review. Take part, reward good write-ups, never penalise people for frequent postmortems, review every one, and share the lessons widely. Google's SRE book lists each of these explicitly.
Show up
The postmortem chapter says senior management should take part in reviews and show support. Presence tells the team the process matters. Silence from leaders, or a leader who asks who is at fault, undoes months of work.
Reward the behaviours you want
The chapter recommends publicly recognising people who handle incidents well and write effective postmortems, and factoring this into performance management. Make it specific: thank the person who raised a near miss, or whose write-up led to a real fix.
Avoid stigma
Do not penalise people or teams for producing frequent postmortems. A team with many reviews may simply be honest. A team with none may be hiding. Count of reviews is a poor performance measure.
Review every postmortem
An unreviewed postmortem, in the book's words, might as well never have existed. Assign a reviewer and check that action items have owners and dates.
Share widely
Make write-ups easy to find. The chapter suggests regular forums such as a monthly postmortem newsletter or a reading club.
Ideas for a small team
- A monthly thirty minute session to read one write-up together.
- A shared folder with a short index.
- Role play of past incidents, a format the chapter names the Wheel of Misfortune.
- A yearly review of whether actions were completed.
Ask for feedback
The chapter suggests surveying teams to find out whether the process adds too much toil. If writing a postmortem takes days of formatting, shorten the template.
Warning signs of a failing culture
- Action items are never closed.
- Reviews only follow customer visible events.
- People write vague timelines.
- Nobody volunteers to be facilitator.
A first ninety days plan
In the first month, write a short statement of the blameless principle and share it. In the second, run a review of a small recent event with a leader attending silently. In the third, publish the write-up and celebrate the person who raised the issue.
Then check the culture with a short anonymous survey: do people feel safe reporting mistakes, and do they believe actions get done. Use the answers to choose your next change, and repeat the survey after six months.
Quick check
Do we need a postmortem for every alert?
No. Define triggers in advance, such as data loss, on-call intervention, long resolution or monitoring failures, and review those.
Sources
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.
