Policy : Post-Incident Learning Culture

Commitment to Continuous Learning and Resilience
Failure is an opportunity to learn, not a reason to blame. We operate in complex, fast-moving environments where incidents are inevitable. Our success is determined not by avoiding failures entirely but by how effectively we learn from them.
We embrace a blameless post-incident learning culture where we analyse, adapt, and improve after every incident. This ensures that we build more resilient systems, enhance operational excellence, and continuously raise the bar for engineering quality.

What This Means
Rather than treating incidents as isolated failures, we see them as valuable learning opportunities. Every incident should leave our organisation wiser, stronger, and better equipped for the future.

Our commitment to post-incident learning is built on:

• Blameless Retrospectives & Post-Mortems – We focus on understanding causes, not assigning fault, ensuring a psychologically safe space for learning.
• Capturing & Sharing Insights – We document and share lessons from incidents across teams to prevent recurrence and strengthen organisational knowledge.
• Continuous Improvement of Systems & Practices – We turn post-mortem findings into concrete actions that enhance system resilience, observability, and recovery capabilities.
• Proactive Incident Readiness – We invest in chaos engineering, game days, and proactive failure testing to prepare for the unexpected.
• Measuring & Tracking Improvements – We ensure that post-incident actions lead to real, measurable enhancements in system reliability and operational excellence.

Why This Matters
A culture of blame stifles innovation and discourages transparency. When teams fear repercussions, issues remain hidden, leading to repeated failures and systemic weaknesses. By embracing a learning culture, we:

• Foster trust, collaboration, and psychological safety.
• Continuously enhance the reliability and resilience of our systems.
• Reduce downtime, customer impact, and operational risk.
• Encourage open knowledge sharing, making the organisation stronger as a whole.

Our Expectation
All teams must actively participate in post-incident reviews, ensuring a culture of learning, accountability, and continuous improvement. Engineering leaders must champion psychological safety, ensuring that learning - not blame - is the focus.

To support this policy, standardised post-mortem frameworks, knowledge-sharing platforms, and continuous learning practices will be provided, enabling teams to extract maximum value from every incident. By treating every failure as an opportunity to improve, we build a resilient, high-performing engineering organisation that delivers Better Value Sooner Safer Happier.

This policy promotes psychological safety, transparency, and continuous improvement, ensuring that teams grow stronger with every incident.