Let's be honest. Most RCA postmortems are a joke.
They get written because someone said "we should write one." So the team copies a Confluence template, fills in a few bullet points, drops in a vague timeline, and maybe slaps on a shallow "5 Whys" if someone remembers how it works. A week later, it's forgotten. A month later, the same thing breaks again.
Nobody reads these docs. Nobody learns from them. They rot in your wiki while your systems keep bleeding.
That's not root cause analysis. That's paperwork.
Real RCA is not about filling out forms after the fact. It's about building feedback loops. It's about surfacing patterns across incidents. It's about making sure the same fire doesn't burn you twice.
Postmortems should be part of a living learning system. One that gets smarter with every outage. One that connects the dots across teams, services, and time. One that drives actual change.
If your RCA process ends with a Google Doc, you're doing it wrong.
Templates were the industry's first attempt to fix this mess. But templates don't enforce depth. They don't highlight recurring patterns. They don't tell you when the "root cause" you typed is just a surface symptom.
AI changes the game.
We finally have tools that can observe incident conversations across Slack and Zoom. Tools that can extract what happened, when it happened, and why it keeps happening. Tools that can learn from your past incidents, not just document them.
Now RCA can become continuous. Now postmortems don't have to be written to be valuable. Now the learning can start even before someone files a ticket.
COEhub is not another form to fill out.
It's a post-incident intelligence agent that lives inside your operational stack. It listens in on Slack, watches your alerts, parses your runbooks, and pulls together what happened automatically.
It builds a real-time Learning Center. It finds recurring issues. It maps out contributing factors. It flags lessons your teams aren't learning. And when you really do need a formal postmortem, COEhub guides your team through the 5 Whys, the right way, and delivers export-ready summaries for execs, audits, and engineering leadership.
No more tribal knowledge. No more forgotten outages. No more dead docs.
If you treat postmortems like a checkbox, your teams will too.
But if you treat them like fuel for operational maturity, a way to drive learning, improvement, and engineering excellence; then they become a strategic advantage.
Start treating RCA like the learning system it's meant to be.
And stop letting your past failures collect dust.
Check out COEhub and turn your incidents into something useful.