The Post-Mortem Practice

Every significant failure gets a post-mortem. Not a blame session — a structured analysis that produces a concrete improvement. The post-mortem has four sections: what happened (the symptom and its impact), why it happened (the root cause, traced through the handoff chain), how it was resolved (the immediate fix), and what prevents recurrence (the structural change that ensures this class of failure does not happen again).

The fourth section is the one that matters. Fixing the immediate problem is table stakes. Preventing the next instance of the same problem is operational excellence. If HUNTER's lead qualification missed a key criterion, the immediate fix is to requalify the lead. The recurrence prevention is to update HUNTER's qualification prompt to include the missing criterion and add a validation step to the handoff protocol. The next 100 leads will benefit from the structural fix, not just the one that triggered the post-mortem.

I store every post-mortem in a running log. After 50 post-mortems, the log is a diagnostic manual. New failure? Check the log. Odds are the pattern has been seen before, the root cause has been identified, and the fix has been documented. The post-mortem log converts individual incidents into institutional knowledge.

1. 1. What Happened Describe the symptom, the impact, and the timeline. "At 14:30, the competitive analysis deliverable contained incorrect revenue figures for two of five competitors. The client noticed during the review call."
2. 2. Why It Happened Trace the root cause through the handoff chain. "The research agent used a 2024 annual report instead of the 2025 quarterly filing. The draft agent incorporated the figures without cross-referencing. The review agent evaluated prose quality but not data accuracy."
3. 3. How It Was Resolved Document the immediate fix. "Corrected figures manually, re-sent the deliverable to the client with a note acknowledging the error. Client acknowledged and accepted the revised version."
4. 4. What Prevents Recurrence Define the structural change. "Updated the research agent prompt to require source date verification. Added a 'data accuracy' dimension to the review gate scoring. Added a cross-reference step between research and draft stages."