4.9 What a post-mortem should be able to answer
Book 1 · Your Next Job TitleChapter 4 · section 9 of 10
When an orchestrated system goes wrong, the post-mortem is not “the model hallucinated,” because that sentence ends inquiry rather than starting it. A useful review can answer five questions:
- What authority was granted? Which permission envelope was active, and was it too wide?
- What evidence existed at decision time? Not what people remember — what the operating record contains.
- What escalation path failed? Did the system lack a path, or did humans override a stop?
- What incentive produced the design? Headcount theater, feature velocity, vendor inevitability, or a named KPI?
- What changes? The envelope, the topology, the evaluation set, the staffing of review, or the decision to turn the capability off.
If those answers cannot be produced, the organization did not have an orchestration failure. It had an ungoverned system that finally became visible.
Contents
- 4.1 Look around
- 4.2 Premature overadoption
- 4.3 Solo Sovereign — and managing the executives who hear “orchestrator” as “headcount”
- 4.4 Cost without purpose
- 4.5 Lack of clarity — the Scope Creep Kraken
- 4.6 Marketing and egotistical nonsense
- 4.7 The Spectrum of Sycophancy
- 4.8 Development fails quietly; operations fails in public
- 4.9 What a post-mortem should be able to answer
- 4.10 Why this chapter belongs before the daily practice chapters