Cultural post mortems: an approach to learning and recovering when your people systems fail
summary
A concrete claim: apply systems thinking and a postmortem to people-system failures rather than vague reflection. The team runs a shared postmortem, documents patterns (shortened stand-ups, missed touchpoints), experiments with a tooling workflow for new work and explicitly retros the experiment using a build-measure-learn loop, and restores routines like restored stand-ups and clearer decision notices. Two people spend the weekend questioning whether they want to stay and the recovery work measurably stabilizes morale and reharmonizes decision-making.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:05Complex adaptive systems
- 3:13Bird flocks as CAS
- 6:26Model for startup teams
- 12:29Chaotic week before crisis
- 17:54Processing shock and perspective
- 19:40Cultural postmortem
- 23:13Lessons and next steps
