Building a Blameless Culture

If a person makes an error, it is because a system let the person make the error.

You might often hear the concept of a “blameless postmortem process” where a change has happened, it caused an incident, the incident was responded to and fixed and then a post incident review (or postmortem) is performed to investigate what happened, why it happened and what can be learnt from it.

The goal of a blameless culture is to accept the fallibility of humans as expected and never attribute blame to a person or group of people. Humans will fail — that is one thing we should be certain of. Humans can be tired, stressed, not having a good day — the question we should be asking is how we improve the environment so that we can reduce the chance of a human making an error and if an error is made, celebrate it as a learning opportunity.

A blameless culture can be practiced at all stages of the development cycle. From the point of a developer raising a PR against a repo all the way through to a production incident a few key things should be kept in mind when interacting with other humans.

• Embrace mistakes — consider mistakes as learning opportunities and encourage people to be open and honest about the mistakes they make
• Give proactive positive feedback — for example when reviewing a co-workers code, replace negative language with more positive, knowledge sharing language. Instead of pointing out what might be wrong, focus on what can be improved and provide references to help the contributor
• Be open to feedback — don’t hide your contributions — share your PRs with as many people as possible. This can be daunting especially when you are new to a company or team but demonstrates you are open and willing to hear the feedback of others.
• Automate — Find opportunities to find errors early on. Use linters, alerting and automation jobs to help find issues before they occur and fix them quickly in production. In a postmortum process, whenever human error comes up — try and identify opportunities for automation wherever possible
• Think about your language — avoid language that could be considered blameful and correct yourself if you ever unintentionally attribute blame

If we can build a truly blameless environment, people should feel comfortable putting their hand up and saying “I made a mistake” rather than the opposite where mistakes and incidents are swept under the carpet for fear of blame. Everyone can learn from everyone else’s’ mistakes and we ultimately build a more reliable product and a more resilient workforce.