Blameless Retrospective
Noun · Hacker Culture
Definitions
A post-incident review focused on understanding systemic failures rather than assigning blame to individuals. Participants describe what happened, what they knew at the time, and what would prevent recurrence. Pioneered by organizations like Etsy and Google.
In plain English: Reviewing what went wrong after an incident without pointing fingers, so the team can fix the system instead of blaming people.
Example: "In the blameless retro, we realized the outage wasn't caused by the engineer who deployed — it was the lack of automated rollback."