Incident Retrospectives
Blameless post-mortem facilitation guide
When to use
Use within 48 hours of incident resolution while details are fresh. Send the async template immediately, schedule the meeting for 2-3 days out.
Prompt Template
We had a {severity} incident: {brief_description}. Duration: {duration}. Impact: {impact}. I need to facilitate a blameless post-mortem. Generate:
1. A pre-meeting async template for participants to fill out their timeline independently
2. Facilitation guide with specific questions that drive toward systemic causes (not individual blame)
3. How to redirect if someone starts finger-pointing
4. Action item framework (distinguish: fix the immediate thing, prevent the class of issue, improve detection)
5. Follow-up cadence to make sure action items actually get done
Fill & Run
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Output Format
Async pre-work template + facilitation script + action item tracker template
More in Incident Retrospectives
Identifying incident patterns across multiple post-mortems
Use quarterly when reviewing incident trends. Turns individual incidents into a strategic reliability narrative for leadership.
View prompt →Extracting and spreading learnings from an incident
Use after post-mortem is complete to spread learnings across the org. Most orgs do post-mortems but fail at cross-pollination.
View prompt →Back to PromptsLeadership Prompt