Practice English vocabulary for facilitating incident postmortems: timeline reconstruction, 5 Whys, blame-free culture, and sharing findings with the organization.
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What does 'the facilitator guides the timeline reconstruction' mean?
Timeline reconstruction is the foundation of a good postmortem. The facilitator collects data from monitoring, logs, chat history, and participant recollections to build a neutral, fact-based sequence of events that everyone agrees on before analysis begins.
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Why do good postmortems 'separate the timeline from the analysis'?
Separating timeline from analysis ensures participants first agree on the facts before debating causes. This prevents confirmation bias (constructing a timeline that supports a predetermined conclusion) and ensures the analysis is evidence-based.
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What is 'the 5 Whys' technique in postmortem facilitation?
The 5 Whys (originally from Toyota's manufacturing system) drills into root causes by asking 'why?' iteratively. 'The service went down' → 'why?' → 'the disk was full' → 'why?' → 'logs were not rotated' → 'why?' → 'rotation was never configured', and so on.
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What does 'the facilitator prevents blame' mean in a postmortem context?
Blameless postmortems (popularized by Google SRE) focus on systems and processes, not individuals. Blame discourages honesty and prevents learning. The facilitator actively redirects blame to 'how did our systems, processes, or tooling allow this to happen?'
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What does 'the postmortem report is shared with the organization' mean?
Wide distribution of postmortem reports (on internal wikis, Slack channels, all-hands presentations) multiplies learning. Other teams can apply the lessons to prevent similar incidents. Transparency also builds trust and reinforces the blameless culture.