the.com/blamelessness
The art of surviving the postmortem without becoming the autopsy.
means The state of being free from fault or responsibility for something going wrong — innocence with the paperwork to prove it.
from From 'blameless,' built from 'blame' (via Old French 'blasmer,' from Latin 'blasphemare' — yes, the same root as 'blaspheme,' both tracing back to Greek 'blasphemein,' to speak profanely or revile) plus the negating suffix '-less.' So to be blameless is, etymologically, to be free of the thing people once associated with cursing someone's name — the '-ness' just tacks on to make the quality abstract and official-sounding, fit for a corporate incident report.
- origin
- Popularized by aviation and healthcare safety culture
- not innocence
- You can be blameless and still caused the outage
- real goal
- Trades punishment for actually fixing the system
- dark side
- Easily faked to dodge real accountability