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Writing Blameless Postmortems

Root-curse analysis without pointing at anyone, except in the rare red-warning-rune case.

Morgana StacktraceCEO & Co-Founder · Jul 10, 2026 · 12 min read

Blame the curse, not the caster

A postmortem exists to make the next incident less likely, not to find someone to turn into a newt. When people expect blame, they stop reporting near misses, and the near misses are where the useful lessons are.

Write the timeline first, in plain language and in order: what was seen, what was tried, what worked. Then do the root-curse analysis. Ask what made the mistake easy to make: a missing ward, an unclear runbook, or a rune that looks too much like another rune.

There is one exception. If a caster deliberately ignored a red warning rune, the postmortem says so. Even then, the follow-up is a better rune, not a punishment. Publish the postmortem where the whole team can read it, and track each follow-up until it ships.

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