---
title: "Learn without blame · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/incidents/blameless-postmortems
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Learn without blame

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

- Level: Required
- Chapter: [Incidents](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/incidents)
- Rule: After every serious incident, such as every SEV1 and SEV2, write a short review without blame, with actions that have owners and dates.
- How: Describe what happened, how it was found, what helped and what made it worse. Ask how the system allowed the mistake, not who made it. Turn each lesson into a check where you can, as the [engineering playbook](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/engineering/rules-as-code/check-every-rule-in-code) asks.
- Check: Every serious incident has a review within five working days. Every action in it has an owner and a due date, and overdue actions are listed in the team review.

Example:

```markdown
## Incident 2026-11-02: checkout errors for 42 minutes
- Impact: 1,180 failed payments, 3% of the day's checkouts
- Detection: fast-burn page at 09:14, 6 minutes after the deploy
- Fix: rolled back at 09:56
- Actions: test card retries in the end-to-end suite (owner: Sam, due 2026-11-09)
```

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers operations playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/incidents/blameless-postmortems`.

- Previous: [Keep evidence in security incidents](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/incidents/security-incidents)
- [Incidents](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/incidents)