Post-Mortems

A post-mortem is the disciplined practice of asking “what went wrong?” — which, as Kyle’s research note What’s In a Post-Mortem argues, first requires acknowledging that something went wrong. The concept migrated from autopsies in medicine into manufacturing, software engineering (SRE culture), project management, and startup investing. The real blocker isn’t method but willingness — a Spirit of Humility that lets you ask “what am I wrong about?” Paired with its sibling the Pre-Mortem (“dream the nightmare”), the discipline lets you learn as much from success as from failure, so long as you measure, record, and ask the right questions.

The building blocks are questions — Bezos’ “five whys,” Ed Catmull’s “five things.” Kyle flags Blameless post-mortems (Etsy’s “Code as Craft”) as the way to avoid the politics that cloud the exercise: focus on “what went wrong?” not “who did something wrong?” Charlie Munger — The Psychology of Human Misjudgment points to the same instinct as an institutional antidote — at Johnson & Johnson, “the rules make everybody revisit old acquisitions, comparing predictions with outcomes,” whereas most corporations quietly forget their failed acquisitions because nobody wants to be associated with the bad outcome. The Psychology of Money supplies the cognitive obstacle: we tend to see only finished products, not the losses behind tail successes, which is part of why learning from outcomes isn’t intuitive.

Context: “Post-mortem” (Latin, “after death”) originated as the medical examination of a body to determine cause of death; in business and engineering it now denotes a structured retrospective conducted after a project, incident, or deal concludes.

Where this appears

• The Psychology of Money — we see finished products, not the losses behind tail successes, which obscures the lessons of outcomes.
• What’s In a Post-Mortem (research) — the central essay note: the discipline of asking “what went wrong?”, blameless post-mortems, pre-mortems, and the humility that precedes them.
• Charlie Munger — The Psychology of Human Misjudgment — Johnson & Johnson’s “autopsy equivalents,” revisiting old acquisitions to compare predictions with outcomes.
• Networked Conviction — Roam + Investing (research) — an investment-decision note that tags “why it’s a good/bad decision,” sets a review date, and sometimes runs a post-mortem.