Our increasingly complex world demands that we continuously learn in order to

survive and thrive. Luckily, it ofers  us endless opportunities to learn from failures

and successes, big and small, at work and at home. This short book is a mirror

that helps us recognize when instead of learning we are too quick to blame,

punish, judge, oversimplify.

This book is grounded in theories of complexity science, resilience engineering,

human factors, cognitive science, and organizational psychology. It is also

based on what the attendees of the Awesome Postmortems workshops (which

Yulia Sheynkman and I created and have been conducting since early 2014) have

taught us about the practice of learning from failure and success.

While the incident in the book is fctional,  it should be all too familiar to anyone

who works with (and in) complex systems. In an instinctive rush toward closure,

we jump to conclusions, and construct simplistic stories of what happened

and who’s to blame (or to praise). Comfortable as these stories might be, they

short-circuit our learning. Only by going beyond blame—and by working

together to overcome bias—can we construct more realistic and helpful narratives

that allow us to learn more fully. Going beyond blame enables us to make

our systems more resilient, and build more just and humane learning

organizations.