No Postmortems

No Postmortems is an anti-pattern where teams fail to conduct structured reviews after incidents, outages, or delivery failures. Without postmortems, valuable insights are lost, root causes go unaddressed, and problems are likely to recur.

Background and Context

Postmortems provide an opportunity to reflect on what went wrong, how it was detected and resolved, and what can be done to prevent recurrence. Teams that skip this practice often repeat mistakes or allow systemic issues to linger beneath the surface.

A strong postmortem culture supports continuous improvement, psychological safety, and operational resilience.

Root Causes of Missing Postmortems

This pattern often stems from cultural fear or organizational inertia. Common causes include:

• Teams too busy fixing issues to reflect on them
• Lack of a standard postmortem process or template
• Fear of blame or political consequences
• Perception that small incidents are not worth reviewing

If there is no space to reflect, there is no space to improve.

Impact of Skipping Incident Reviews

When teams avoid or deprioritize postmortems, the consequences compound. Effects include:

• Repeat incidents with no long-term mitigation
• Missed opportunities to strengthen detection and response
• Continued fragility in key systems
• Erosion of trust between teams and stakeholders

Fixing an issue is not enough if you do not understand how it happened.

Warning Signs of Postmortem Gaps

This anti-pattern tends to appear in high-incident or high-urgency environments. Watch for:

• No documented learnings from major outages
• Incident tickets closed without resolution notes or follow-up
• Team members unclear on what caused the last failure
• No recurring forum or ownership model for incident reviews

If the team cannot answer “what did we learn?”, the answer might be “nothing.”

Metrics to Detect Absence of Postmortems

These minware metrics help surface patterns of incident recurrence or shallow resolution:

Metric	Signal
Incident Volume	High frequency of similar incidents points to missed systemic fixes.
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)	Short time between failures suggests issues are not being meaningfully resolved.
Mean Time to Restore (MTTR)	Slow recovery may reflect repeated triage due to lack of historical insight.

Good teams do more than resolve incidents. They learn from them.

How to Prevent Postmortem Avoidance

Making postmortems a habit requires process and culture. Recommended steps:

• Define a clear postmortem process with templates and automation
• Conduct reviews for all major incidents and recurring issues
• Focus on learning and systemic improvement, not blame
• Track follow-ups and assign owners to close the loop

Postmortems are not about punishment. They are about making the system better.

How to Start Postmortems in a Reactive Culture

If your team currently skips postmortems:

• Begin with lightweight retros focused on learning, not documentation
• Schedule recurring postmortem reviews for recent issues
• Share write-ups broadly to model transparency and growth
• Celebrate insights that improve reliability, not just uptime

A postmortem culture enables long-term performance through short-term reflection.