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I’ve Sat in 20+ Big Tech Postmortems. The Same Three Words Always Kill Honesty.
“We should have.” “Communication failure.” “Training gap.” Three blameful proxies dressed as blameless.
I have been in over 20 Big Tech postmortems across four companies. Every one of them used a “blameless” template. About 60% of them were not, in fact, blameless.
The mechanism of the failure is always the same. Three specific phrases keep getting written into the contributing-factors section. Each one converts a system failure into a person failure while keeping the tone polite. I now ban all three in every postmortem I lead. The team that runs them has gotten dramatically better at producing actually-actionable findings.
The phrases are not what you’d expect.
“We Should Have”
The most common one. “We should have been monitoring X.” “We should have caught this in code review.” “We should have load-tested this scenario.”
The phrase reads as humble and self-critical. Functionally, it’s counterfactual blame. It says: a competent team would have done X, we didn’t, the outcome is on us. It treats the failure as a moral failing — insufficient diligence, insufficient foresight, insufficient care — rather than…
