A compounding social technology for an organization: blameless post mortems.

· Bits and Bobs 3/17/26
  • A compounding social technology for an organization: blameless post mortems[bh].
    • The default assumption is it's no individual's fault, it's the system's fault.[bi]
    • This means people have no incentive to hide what really happened.
    • When it's laid bare, it's easy to see how to improve the system to avoid that problem in the future.
    • You add on a systemic fix that compounds in value, because you implement it once and it prevents that class of failure going forward.
    • The one problem with this system: historically the main tool was adding more bureaucracy.
      • In many cases it was too hard to construct specific mechanistic software to do the cognitive labor.
      • If it requires judgment calls, it required humans in the loop… which required bureaucracy.
    • But now, LLMs can do some levels of judgment automatically, with no humans in the loop.
    • So now you can solve discovered problems by distilling new AI automation.
    • This is one of the cores of StrongDM's insight on compounding power of AI automation.

More on this topic

From other episodes