On preventing mistakes

The culture of postmortems makes us overreact on not repeating mistakes. But perhaps, we should be more categorical about preventing new ones.

I often think that a better rule of thumb to postmortems could be:

If it’s the first time a mistake happens, acknowledge it and move on. If it’s the second time, then ensure that it does not happen again.

This would save organizations from a lot of useless policies and initiatives, since most mistakes only happen once.