Post-mortem is the human-made practice of conducting a structured review after a project, event, or process has concluded, examining outcomes against expectations to extract lessons. It is defined by four parameters: (1) retrospection — looking backward at what actually happened; (2) comparison — measuring outcomes against the original plan, requirements, or hypothesis; (3) cause identification — determining why things succeeded or failed; (4) action extraction — producing concrete changes for future work. It persists through written records, organizational routines, and shared practice. [formal: post-mortem | substrate: behavior | horizon: a project | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]
Accepted ontology entry
post-mortem
Post-mortem is the human-made practice of conducting a structured review after a project, event, or process has concluded, examining outcomes against expectations to extract lessons. It is defined by four parameters: (1) retrospection — lo…
Definition
Why it is in scope
The human-made practice of systematically reviewing completed projects or events after they finish, to identify what went right, what went wrong, and what should change for next time. Built to persist through documentation and organizational memory, enabling learning from past work.
Names and aliases
- post-mortemen · CANONICAL
Relations from this entry
- cmrhajc2b015x8aehc613gx7cSERVES →
Post-mortem is conducted for the sake of learning: its designed purpose is to extract lessons from completed work and feed them into organizational knowledge. The practice exists because learning from experience matters — without the aim of learning, there is no reason to run a post-mortem.
- cmrvhabuj015f2cei72xywgzfINSTANCE_OF →
Post-mortem is a specific kind of analysis (retrospective evaluation). A competent speaker would say 'post-mortem is a kind of analysis.' Files specific→general per Law 9.
- cms7wyk72004ph6s8d82lhwqlSERVES →
post-mortem is designed and maintained for the sake of reliability: its entire purpose is to analyse failures after they occur, extract corrective insights, and feed them back into system design so failures do not recur. The removal test: remove post-mortem practice and the structured feedback loop that turns failure into prevention disappears — reliability loses its failure-driven improvement mechanism. Direction: servant (post-mortem) → master (reliability), per Law 8d.
- cms876wq4013qh6s876exc69iINSTANCE_OF →
A post-mortem is a specific kind of retrospective analysis conducted after a failure or incident. Both are structured reviews of past events, but post-mortem is narrower — focused on failures and their correction.
Relations to this entry
- cmsio9s6c00m7nobpoy6e1smi← INSTANCE_OF
A blameless-postmortem is a specific kind of post-mortem — an incident review focused on systemic learning rather than individual blame. Competent-speaker test: 'a blameless postmortem is a type of postmortem.'
- cmsio9s6c00m7nobpoy6e1smi← DERIVED_FROM
DERIVED_FROM test: post-mortem (traditional incident review in military/aviation) predates the blameless variant which emerged in software engineering culture in the 1990s. Which-came-first: traditional post-mortem → blameless-postmortem as a refinement removing blame from the process.
Record identity
- Created
- Jul 30, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC
- Content hash
- 8b9afe3aaf4bf102734bfc10fb9d36519c4b01b7782eedadb8afd087794f6656