The Incident Retrospective Ground Rules

A new Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Honeycomb shares insights from their experience with the company's incident retrospective process, highlighting its focus on learning rather than immediate remediation. During a retrospective meeting for a recent ingestion delays incident, ground rules were emphasized to foster a blame-aware environment where participants assume everyone's actions were well-intentioned based on available information. This approach avoids counterfactual questions that can hinder investigation by introducing blame, and instead encourages asking questions to improve understanding of the system's actual workings. The engineer notes that reading these ground rules aloud at every meeting is crucial to maintaining a constructive tone and mindset, creating a safe space for learning and collaboration. Honeycomb's culture of continuous learning in incident reviews is appreciated and aligns with best practices such as those in the Etsy Debriefing Facilitation Guide and the Howie guide by Jeli, marking a shift from focusing on action items to fostering understanding and improvement.