Shadow Postmortems: When the Real Incident Report Lives in a DM

This episode introduces the concept of a "shadow postmortem," where critical incident details and candid admissions are exchanged in private channels rather than official reports. It delves into the reasons for this phenomenon, primarily a perceived lack of psychological safety that prevents engineers from sharing the "unvarnished truth" about underlying human factors and organizational pressures in formal settings. Listeners will understand the significant disconnect between official narratives and the true etiology of incidents, and the implications this has for effective organizational learning and preventing future outages.