Post-Mortem Analysis Chain

validated business chain v1.0.0 cc-by-sa

Block ID: 179f2ada-6b70-4694-95b7-acff0906804b

Community-contributed block. PromptDNA makes no guarantee of output quality or fitness for purpose. User assumes all responsibility for use.

Template

Conduct a post-mortem on the initiative or failure in {postmortem_context} that actually produces learning rather than blame. (1) Establish the facts before the interpretation: what was expected, what actually happened, and the timeline — because a post-mortem that jumps to "whose fault" skips the understanding that prevents recurrence, and the goal is a better system, not a scapegoat. (2) Adopt the blameless stance deliberately: assume the people involved acted reasonably given what they knew at the time, and ask why the decision made sense to them then, since hindsight makes every bad outcome look obvious and hindsight-driven blame teaches people to hide problems rather than surface them. (3) Trace the causal chain to root causes, distinguishing the proximate trigger from the systemic conditions that allowed it — most failures are systems failures wearing an individual's name, and stopping at "someone made a mistake" misses the process that let the mistake through. (4) Separate the decisions that were wrong given what was knowable from the ones that were reasonable but unlucky, since punishing good decisions with bad outcomes corrupts future decision-making. (5) Identify what would have caught or prevented the failure — the missing check, signal, or guardrail. (6) State the root causes, the systemic fixes (not "be more careful"), and the one change most likely to prevent recurrence — because the value of a post-mortem is the systems it improves and the psychological safety it preserves for the next honest disclosure.

Conduct a post-mortem on the initiative or failure in {postmortem_context} that actually produces learning rather than blame. (1) Establish the facts before the interpretation: what was expected, what actually happened, and the timeline — because a post-mortem that jumps to "whose fault" skips the understanding that prevents recurrence, and the goal is a better system, not a scapegoat. (2) Adopt the blameless stance deliberately: assume the people involved acted reasonably given what they knew at the time, and ask why the decision made sense to them then, since hindsight makes every bad outcome look obvious and hindsight-driven blame teaches people to hide problems rather than surface them. (3) Trace the causal chain to root causes, distinguishing the proximate trigger from the systemic conditions that allowed it — most failures are systems failures wearing an individual's name, and stopping at "someone made a mistake" misses the process that let the mistake through. (4) Separate the decisions that were wrong given what was knowable from the ones that were reasonable but unlucky, since punishing good decisions with bad outcomes corrupts future decision-making. (5) Identify what would have caught or prevented the failure — the missing check, signal, or guardrail. (6) State the root causes, the systemic fixes (not "be more careful"), and the one change most likely to prevent recurrence — because the value of a post-mortem is the systems it improves and the psychological safety it preserves for the next honest disclosure.

Variables

Name	Type	Required	Trust level
postmortem_context		yes

post-mortemretrospectiveorganizational-learningchain-of-thought

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Benchmarks

Not yet self-validated against any benchmark. Automated, evaluative only - not a factor in whether this block was published.

Submitted by James P FounderMod via mcp · 2026-07-18