Why Blameless Postmortems Are Essential for Tribal & Enterprise IT
Written by Robby Jakovljevic, Director of IT, Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians in General Articles
Date: November 10, 2026
On Sunday, October 11, the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Indianapolis Colts, 34 to 22. I watched every minute of it at home in California, more than 2,000 miles from the stadium, with my wife, both of us in the same jersey. When the clock ran out, I said what every fan says.
We won. I didn't throw a pass. I didn't make a tackle. I said "we" as naturally as if I had been on the field.
I'm the Director of IT for the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians in Northern California. I spend my weeks on evidence and root causes, so when I notice a strong habit in myself, I want to understand it. This one, it turns out, says a lot about how teams behave when something breaks.
We won. They lost.
In 1976, the psychologist Robert Cialdini and five colleagues published three field studies of college football fans. In the first, they counted how many students wore clothing with their university's name on the Monday after a game. After a win, more students wore it. After a loss, fewer did.
In the other two, they asked students to describe a recent game. When the team had won, students said "we." After a loss, it became "they." In the third study, students used "we" nearly twice as often to describe a win as a loss.
Cialdini called it basking in reflected glory. The students had done nothing to produce the result. They wanted to stand next to the win and step away from the loss. Every fan knows the feeling. We take the win. We hand back the loss.
The Office Version
I have watched the same study run every week in almost every organization I have known. When the systems work, everyone says "we." We went live. We passed the audit. We moved to the cloud. When something breaks, it becomes "IT." IT is down. IT broke it. Anyone who has worked in IT for long knows the sound of that sentence.
I don't hold it against anyone. It is the same human nature that makes me say "we" on Sunday. But in a tribal organization, it weighs more than it does in a big company, because "IT" isn't a department in another building. In many tribal organizations, IT is a small team supporting government, health, and enterprise at once. Where I work, everybody knows who IT is. "IT broke it" is a sentence about a named person.
And a team that hears that sentence learns something fast.
What Blame Teaches
The best engineering teams have written down what they learned about this. In Google's book on site reliability engineering, the chapter "Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure" describes the blameless postmortem. After an outage, the team writes up what happened, and the review "assumes that everyone involved in an incident had good intentions." It looks for causes, not culprits. The authors explain why. Where finger-pointing and shaming win, "people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment."
In other words, if your team learns that a loss turns "we" into "you," they will hide the next loss from you. And the loss you don't hear about is the one that grows.
My Rule
So I have one rule as a leader, and I have held to it for a long time.
When we win, I give the credit to my team. Not to me. When something breaks, I take the responsibility. Solely.
It is the exact opposite of what Cialdini found in the fans. The fan takes the win and hands back the loss. A leader has to give away the win and take the loss. It doesn't come naturally. Every instinct in that research pulls the other way. That's why you hold to it.
When I take the loss, my team can tell me the truth about what happened. When I give away the win, they know the next win is theirs, too. Over time, that builds a group of people who say "we" even on a bad day.
What The Win Looks Like
Here is a win I am proud of, and it isn't mine.
When we rolled out passkeys, which replace passwords, we sat down with every employee, one at a time, and set them up together. At 250 people, that is a lot of hours. We didn't schedule by rank. We went by who was available. Sometimes the next person was a C-suite member, sometimes a council member, sometimes a regular employee. Everyone got the same sit-down and followed the same rules.
What I want to say about it is who did the sitting. My team spent those hours, person by person, being patient with people who did not want to change how they sign in every morning. When I report a project like that to leadership, I name the people who did the work, in the room, so the people who approve the IT budget know whose hands it was in.
The same goes for the partners who stand with us. One night, our security partner's team found an attacker's tool on one of our servers at 1 a.m., and they had it contained before I was fully awake. That win belongs to the people who were watching at 1 a.m. I just answered the phone.
What The Loss Looks Like
Taking the loss is harder to describe, because it happens in smaller rooms.
When something breaks, I am the one who tells leadership. I say what happened, what it affected, and what we are doing about it, and I say "this is mine," even when I know which change caused it. The person who made the change doesn't get the credit.
Taking responsibility in public is not the same as pretending nothing went wrong in private. The best mentors I had held me to a standard and were honest with me when I missed it. That honesty was almost always private and direct. A mentor who only tells you what you got right is not developing you. They are flattering you.
So the rule has two halves. Outside the team, the loss is mine. Inside the team, we talk about it, we find the cause, and we fix it, without hunting for someone to blame. Accountability and blame are different things. Blame looks for a person. Accountability looks for the cause and owns the fix.
Church, Army, Gang
Why would anyone borrow a win they had nothing to do with? Because people need a "we," and they need it badly.
In the early 1970s, social psychologist Henri Tajfel tried to find the smallest possible reason people form a group. He split strangers into groups over something trivial, such as which of two abstract painters they preferred, and then asked them to share out money. Even in these minimal groups, with no history and nothing at stake, people favored their own side.
If a preference for a painter is enough to create an "us," a lifetime with a team can do much more. And the need that puts me in front of the television on Sunday is the same one that has filled churches and built armies.
In 1912, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim described the charge a community feels when it does the same thing at the same moment. He called it collective effervescence, and used it to explain the roots of religious life. Look at a stadium on Sunday, with its rituals, colors, songs, and weekly return, and you will see everything he described. Football even borrows the army's language: the trenches, the blitz, defending our turf.
At its darkest, the same need builds gangs. In sixth-century Constantinople, chariot-racing fans divided into factions named for their teams' colors, chiefly the Blues and the Greens. Over time, the factions became political forces, and their hardest members acted like street gangs. In January 532, they turned on the emperor together, and the Nika riots burned much of the city. The historian Procopius wrote that more than 30,000 people died when the emperor's soldiers trapped the crowd inside the Hippodrome.
I don't think the need for "we" is silly, and I don't think it is harmless by definition. I grew up in Yugoslavia, a country that came apart in the 1990s, and I lived through what came after. In 1990, members of one club's organized fan group helped found a paramilitary unit that fought in the wars that followed. I know what the need for "we" can become when someone decides to use it. A team is the safest form of belonging people have, because nothing real is at stake. The need itself goes wherever it is led.
At work, something real is at stake, and that is why a leader has to be careful with "we." A leader who says "we" only when things go well teaches the team that "we" is a word for the good days, and that on a bad day they are on their own. So I turn it around. The win is the team's. The loss is mine to answer for. And inside the team, it is still "we" who find the cause and fix it. That is what makes "we" something a team can lean on when it matters most.
The same idea works between tribes. When one tribe shares what an attacker did to it, with its identity protected, so the rest of us can check our own systems that afternoon, that is a blameless postmortem at the scale of Indian Country. It only works because nobody is shamed for sharing the crack in their own wall.
For Leaders Reading This
Four habits carry this rule for me.
- Name your team when you report a win. Out loud, in the room where it counts.
- Say "this is mine" when something breaks, before anyone asks whose it was.
- Run the review on the cause, not the person, and write it down.
- Correct in private, directly and clearly. Responsibility in public is not a reason to skip the hard conversation in private. It is what makes that conversation safe to have.
Anybody will say "we won." The real test of a team is whether your people will still say "we lost."
The last time your team lost, who said "we"? Did you?
On a Sunday this fall, we won. One Sunday, we'll lose. It will still be we.