A Decade of Blame Awareness

October 13, 2026

I was introducing a new colleague to “blame awareness” the other day when it dawned on me: Blame Aware had turned a decade old this year.

I coined the term in a post back in March, 2016 titled “Why ‘Blameless’ ‘Postmortems’ Can Feel Wrong.” I had repeatedly experienced the declaration of “This incident retrospective shall be blameless,” followed by participant interactions and body language that made it clear the meeting was anything but.

I began thinking about why we consistently were telling people “Don’t feel your actual feelings” in incident retrospectives. That never works, and at the time, it was coincidence that Brené Brown’s new book spoke to exactly this issue.

In a nutshell, Blame Awareness, is the idea that we should accept that humans have a (psychologically necessary!) tendency to blame, whether it’s projected externally or internally. I argued that acknowledging this, giving voice to it, and empathetically addressing it was a better solution than collectively hallucinating it didn’t exist. I further argued that doing so promoted “actionable retrospectives,” which not only improved outcomes, but also increased learning.

When done well, blame awareness is healthier for teams: a common “blame pattern” was engineers blaming themselves for actions taken in an incident, so acknowledging that and responding with empathy was a path to increasing trust; it also had the benefit of eliciting more about why the engineers involved made the choices they made.

In the past decade, the term continues to worm its way through the LFI and Resilience Engineering circles, so I thought I’d offer some observations of “blame awareness” in practice over the past ten years:

• “Blame awareness is a joke” — I’ve heard this same line over the years about blame aware retrospectives: “Oh... that just means we’re now all aware of exactly who we’re blaming.” I join the laughter when I hear it uttered, but obviously that wasn’t the original intent.

  That said, even in this humorous (if cynical) interpretation, there’s utility in the idea that we’re being explicit about blame. Healthy organizational culture is a journey with a long arc that requires care and feeding; explicitly acknowledging blame allows leaders the opportunity to react to that blame in ways that improve that culture. It also allows an in for folks to give feedback to leaders about the impacts of their reactions on operational outcomes, should they choose a... less-empathetic approach _and_ it opens a window for everyone, at all levels, to be a leader: if an engineer is being blamed for something you once did that didn’t result in an incident, you can head off the tendency to blame with a high degree of credibility.

  (And, for organizations who think blame an effective tool, “blame aware” at least makes it plain to everyone the system in which they’re operating, including the currents in which blame flows; I will always argue that’s better than pretending those currents don’t exist if they clearly do.)

• Discussions of blame[fulness] often gloss over the connection to sanctions — Incident responders can tune out when a facilitator gets on the“blameless” soapbox, especially in a high severity incident that resulted in serious impact. “Blameless” often gets assumed to mean “sanctionless,” but they’re different.

  Rein Henrichs explored this idea in his 2019 REdeploy talk “Beyond Blameless.” That talk has stood the passage of time: a key point Henrichs makes is “blame enforces social norms,” and when there is behavior that is not normative, then blame and sanction can be an appropriate response.

  Blame-awareness opens the door for intentional and thoughtful organizational responses to non-normative social and engineering behavior.

• Implementing “blame aware” varies wildly... and can be surprising — I observed a team who was serious about “blame aware” falling into a natural pattern at the beginning of their retros: instead of starting off with the “blameless boilerplate,” they just kinda blurted out who everyone was blaming and why. This started on Zoom meetings while waiting for everyone to show up, so it was originally done with a light tone and usually with a lot of laughter. Often times, the “self-blamers” would speak up and reply “Yeah, I thought that was stupid of me too; not my best day.”

  Starting the meeting with this banter lightened people up to talk about their mistakes and share richer lived experiences. To be fair, this didn’t always happen... sometimes the banter would be met with reticence or a very clear “I don’t want to talk about this”-reaction. But for a facilitator, knowing where the topical landmines mine are is critical.

  Steve Allen famously said “Comedy is tragedy plus time,” and even the smallest bit of laughter acknowledging blame in a retrospective can work towards defanging it.

As I reflect on the original post, I find it interesting that the end-goal of “actionable retrospectives” got buried by the “a-ha” of “blame aware.”

In any case, here’s to another decade of furthering our blame awareness, which serves not only that goal, but many others.