Dave Zwieback

Failure is inevitable. Success is unpredictable. Both failure and success are also tremendous learning opportunities. A postmortem, conducted in an skillful way, is one of the best ways to learn from both failures and successes. Postmortems help us identify and address areas of fragility within systems and organizations, making both more resilient.

In this highly-rated, practical, hands-on session, you’ll learn the theory and, most important, get to practice conducting awesome postmortems, including:

• How to set the context, and go beyond blame
• What data to collect before the postmortem and how to present it in the most useful way
• How to facilitate charged conversations during high-stakes postmortems
• Finding the real root cause of any failure or success (yes, there is such a thing!)
• Learning in complex, adaptive systems
• The new view of “human error”
• How to recognize and mitigate the effects of cognitive biases
• Writing up postmortem results (for internal and external audiences)
• Harnessing prospective hindsight to identify risks and reduce the possibility of future failures