A postmortem without an owner is a document

The value of a postmortem is entirely in the actions, and an action without a name and a date is a wish.

## Actions

| # | Action | Owner | Due | Status |
|---|--------|-------|-----|--------|
| 1 | Alert on replication lag > 30s | AY | 2021-10-15 | done |
| 2 | Add heartbeat table to staging | MK | 2021-10-22 | done |
| 3 | Review all read-routing call sites | — | — | — |

# item 3 is not an action. it is a feeling.

Reviewing the action list from the previous quarter at the start of each new postmortem is the mechanism that makes the process credible, because it is where you find out whether anything happened. Actions without an owner are the ones that do not get done, reliably, and the honest response is to delete them rather than carry them — a list of forty open actions is indistinguishable from no list. Blamelessness is about people and not about specificity.