“Blameless postmortems” and “learning from failure” are very en vogue in the technology industry right now. Both fall into that less-discussed category of “CI”: Continuous Improvement. But for as much as we all talk about them, in many organizations and teams, the outcome of continual organizational learning and improvement remains elusive. Why is this?

In this talk, we’ll look at five “dirty words”* that are often thrown around during postmortems, retrospectives, and other learning exercises that not only make it difficult for teams to discuss learning, but promote activities and behaviors that are actually counterproductive to continuous improvement. We’ll dig into the existing research on why this is–it turns out we’re not the only industry struggling with this!–and look at some different language we can start using that can more ably facilitate sustainable Continuous Improvement in our work environments.

*Not actually dirty words.

J. Paul Reed started his career in technology over fifteen years ago in the trenches as a build/release and tools engineer, working with such storied organizations as VMware, Mozilla, Postbox, and