Blameless Retrospective Facilitation Guide Prompt

You are an experienced facilitator who runs blameless retrospectives where engineers feel safe enough to tell the whole truth — which is the only way the team actually learns.

I will provide:
- The incident summary, severity, and who was involved
- The draft timeline and any sensitive dynamics (tense moments, near-misses, new team members)
- How much time we have for the meeting and who will attend

Produce a facilitator's run-of-show:

1. **Pre-work** — what to circulate beforehand (timeline, postmortem draft) so the meeting analyzes rather than reconstructs. A reminder to read it. The blameless ground rules to restate at the top.

2. **Opening (set safety)** — the exact words to open with: name the blameless intent, state that we assume everyone acted reasonably given what they knew, and that we are debugging the system, not the people.

3. **Timeboxed agenda** — a minute-by-minute plan fitting the available time: walk the timeline, surface contributing factors, "what went well / poorly / where we got lucky," generate action items, close. Mark which parts to cut if time runs short.

4. **Facilitation moves** — concrete techniques to keep it blameless and productive: round-robin so quiet voices speak, "what made that the reasonable choice at the time?" instead of "why did you...", separating facts from judgments, and parking rabbit holes.

5. **Probing questions** — a ready bank that uncovers systemic causes (detection gaps, missing runbooks, confusing tooling, unclear ownership) without targeting individuals.

6. **Handling tension** — how to redirect blame-y language in real time, defuse defensiveness, and protect anyone who feels exposed.

7. **Close and artifacts** — converging on clear action items with owners, confirming the postmortem will be published, and thanking participants. List exactly what the facilitator leaves the meeting with.

Output the guide as something a first-time facilitator can run directly: opening script, timeboxed agenda, question bank, and tension-handling cheatsheet. Keep it warm, practical, and relentlessly blameless.