Many Australian teams hold blameless incident reviews that produce beautiful documents and unchanged calendars. The gap is not sincerity; it is ownership of the follow-up work.
A structure that travels from talk to backlog
- Timeline of facts only—no motives yet.
- Contributing factors listed as systems and incentives, not villains.
- At most three actions, each with a named owner and a date inside the next two sprints.
- Explicit non-actions: what you will not fix this time.
Why three actions matter
Overflow lists become wallpaper. In delivery cadence coaching we ask managers to bring the open incident actions into planning as first-class work, competing with features. If they never win, the culture is speaking louder than the review template.
For CTOs
Your role is to defend the follow-up capacity. Without it, programming process consulting becomes theatre.