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Postmortems as a genre, not a chore
A useful test for any postmortem template: would I voluntarily read this back in six months?
If the answer is “no, it’s a tick-box exercise,” the template’s wrong. The good ones read like field notes — short, specific, with the surprising bit surprised on the page. You can almost always cut the boilerplate.
My home incidents — the freezer alarm that didn’t fire, the time the rack lost power because the cleaner unplugged it — are written up in three lines each. Cause. Fix. Follow-up. The follow-up is the only field that matters, and the only one I refer to later.
The same shape works at scale, in my experience. Most postmortem templates fail because they prioritise audit completeness over reader interest. Optimise for the reader, not the auditor.