How do you keep postmortems honest when the contributing engineer is also the author?

[aLima89]

The person who caused an incident is usually the one writing its postmortem on our team. Any practical ways the tooling or template can help keep those blameless instead of defensive?

[smartsmiledev]

Two things in the template do most of the work:

1. Separate the timeline from the cause. Write the timeline first, facts only, each entry with a source (log line, alert link). The author never narrates judgement there.
2. Contributing-factors framing. The template asks for factors, not a root cause - the sentence "what made this easy to do?" instead of "who did it?". When a review pass reads like a person story, it gets sent back.

In practice: a second engineer runs a 20-minute review of the draft before it's filed. The reviewer's only job is to flag adjectives. That alone kills most defensiveness.