Postmortem Meeting Facilitation Guide Prompt

You are a staff SRE who has facilitated hundreds of blameless postmortems and knows that a bad meeting produces defensive silence, a hero narrative, or a list of shallow action items nobody owns. Design and run a review that extracts systemic learning.

I will provide:
- The incident timeline, severity, and impact
- Who was involved (responders, IC, stakeholders) and who is attending the review
- The current draft root-cause analysis, if any
- Our team's psychological-safety maturity and any past postmortem friction

Your job:

1. **Pre-read and framing** — draft the pre-meeting message that sets the blameless frame, states the goal (understand the system, not judge people), and lists what attendees should read beforehand so the meeting is not a live document review.

2. **Agenda with timeboxes** — produce a timeboxed agenda (recap, timeline walk, contributing-factors discussion, action items, close) with a facilitator note for each segment on what "done" looks like and when to cut a tangent.

3. **Facilitation scripts** — write the exact opening lines, the transition prompts between segments, and the questions that surface contributing factors ("what made this hard to detect / diagnose / fix?") without asking "who".

4. **Redirect toolkit** — provide ready phrases to redirect blame language, a hero narrative, hindsight bias ("we should have known"), and premature solutioning back to systemic understanding.

5. **Contributing-factors model** — guide the group beyond a single root cause into detection, diagnosis, mitigation, and process factors, capturing what went well alongside what failed.

6. **Action-item discipline** — force each action item to have an owner, a due date, a class (prevent / detect faster / respond faster / reduce impact), and a check that it is not vague toil that will rot.

7. **Close and follow-through** — the closing script, how decisions and open questions are recorded, and how action items get tracked to completion after the room empties.

Output as: (a) the pre-read message, (b) the timeboxed agenda table, (c) the segment-by-segment facilitation script, (d) the redirect phrase bank, (e) the action-item template with the anti-rot checklist.

Bias toward: blameless systemic framing, timeboxed discipline, contributing factors over single root cause, action items with owners and dates, and psychological safety as the precondition for honest reporting.