Imagine you're playing a game with your friends, and something unexpected happens that stops the game. Everyone decides to sit down afterward to talk about what went wrong, how it happened, and how you can all prevent it from happening again. This discussion is like what organizations call an "incident post-mortem."
After something goes wrong, like a computer attack at a company, the people involved get together to figure out what happened. They write down their thoughts or talk about it in a meeting. This is done to learn from the mistake and make sure it doesn't happen again. They call this process different names, like a learning review, after-action review, or incident report, but it all means the same thing.
A really important rule during this process is that no one is blamed. It's not about finding out who made the mistake but understanding the mistake itself. This way, everyone can talk openly without being scared of getting in trouble. This is crucial because, during the actual problem, the team is too busy fixing things to think deeply about why it happened. The post-mortem happens after everything is fixed, so they have time to think and learn.
Without this process, the team wouldn't know what they're doing right or wrong. They might keep making the same mistakes or miss the chance to keep doing things that work well. That's why it's important to have these discussions after every big problem, while everyone still remembers what happened.
There's usually one person in charge of organizing this whole process, called the post-mortem coordinator. This person was probably a leader during the problem or helped a lot in fixing it. They choose who else should be involved, like managers or customer support, and make sure everyone works together to talk about what happened and write a report. This helps the team learn and get ready for the future, making sure they handle any new problems even better.