# Analysis Questions

Questions to ask to stimulate deep postmortem analysis.

![Analysis](/images/guides/postmortem-best-practices/Postmortems-Questions.webp)

Inspired by Gary Klein’s debriefing questions in Sidney Dekker’s *The Field Guide To Understanding Human Error*, below is a non-exhaustive list to help stimulate deep analysis. Ask “how” and “what” questions, rather than “who” or “why,” to discourage blame and encourage learning.  

[Download as a PDF](https://postmortems.pagerduty.com/assets/pdf/PostmortemAnalysisQuestions.pdf).

<table>
    <tr>
        <td>Cues</td>
        <td>
            <ul>
                <li>What were you focusing on?</li>
                <li>What was not noticed?</li>
                <li>What differed from what was expected?</li>
            </ul>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Previous Knowledge/Experience</td>
        <td>
            <ul>
                <li>Was this an anticipated class of problem or did it uncover a class of issue that was not architecturally anticipated?</li>
                <li>What expectations did participants have about how things were going to develop?</li>
                <li>Were there similar incidents in the past?</li>
            </ul>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Goals</td>
        <td>
            <ul>
                <li>What goals governed your actions at the time?</li>
                <li>How did time pressure or other limitations influence choices?</li>
                <li>Was there work the team chose not to do in the past that could have prevented or mitigated this incident?</li>
            </ul>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Assessment</td>
        <td>
            <ul>
                <li>What mistakes (for example, in interpretation) were likely?</li>
                <li>How did you view the health of the services involved prior to the incident?</li>
                <li>Did this incident teach you something that should change views about this service’s health?</li>
            </ul>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Taking Action</td>
        <td>
            <ul>
                <li>How did you judge you could influence the course of events?</li>
                <li>What options were taken to influence the course of events? How did you determine that these were the best options at the time?</li>
                <li>How did other influences (operational or organizational) help determine how you interpreted the situation and how you acted?</li>
            </ul>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Help</td>
        <td>
            <ul>
                <li>Did you ask anyone for help?</li>
                <li>What signal brought you to ask for support?</li>
                <li>Were you able to contact the people you needed to contact?</li>
            </ul>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Process</td>
        <td>
            <ul>
                <li>Did the way that people collaborate, communicate, and/or review work contribute to the incident?</li>
                <li>What worked well in your incident response process and what did not work well?</li>
            </ul>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>