root-cause-analysis
Root Cause Analysis
The phrase "root cause" is misleading — most real incidents don't have one cause, they have a chain of contributing factors that each individually looked reasonable, and only in combination produced an outage. A postmortem that names a single root cause almost always stops digging too early, usually at "the engineer who pushed the change" or "the alert that didn't fire," and misses the systemic conditions that let that trigger become an outage.
The only postmortem worth writing is one that changes something. A document that accurately describes what happened but produces no action items is a historical record, not an analysis — write it as an artifact for future action, not a ritual for closure.
Find the contributing factors, not a scapegoat — and change something as a result.