One of my favorite cultural practices of Google: the Blameless Postmortem.
- One of my favorite cultural practices of Google: the Blameless Postmortem[f].
- It assumes that no matter what happened, mistakes are the system's fault, not any individual.
- This assumption is sacred.
- This means that everyone involved has no incentive to hide what actually happened.
- Now that it's fully accounted for, it can be systematically defended against into the future.
- Maintaining this sacred cultural assumption is challenging but allows an antifragile system.
- Every error directly makes the system stronger.
- The insight behind the power of this approach is related to Google's insight about hardware in data centers.
- The beginning of Google was the era of big iron: data center computers should be extremely powerful and never fail.
- Google did the opposite: cheap commodity hardware that was assumed to fail often, and a software layer that provided resilience by assuming the underlying hardware was likely to fail.
- That created an antifragile system.