The Postmortem Ritual

Definition

A postmortem, in Catmull's usage, is a dedicated meeting held shortly after a project's completion to examine what did and didn't work. He frames its purpose sharply: "Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren't exceptional." The value isn't in any single insight—it's in institutionalizing the otherwise-unnatural act of deliberate self-assessment after people are already eager to move on.

In the Book

Pixar's first postmortem was held in Tiburon in 1998 after finishing A Bug's Life—Catmull describes the almost domestic detail of using a rooster-shaped kitchen timer to keep speakers to fifteen minutes, and recalls the session's spirit of openness as more valuable than any single "Aha!" finding. But he's candid that quality was inconsistent afterward: "some were profound, and others were a complete waste of time," because people naturally pull their punches rather than "poke a sleeping bear." He diagnoses the underlying resistance as a general human aversion to self-assessment, in which success gets read as "we must be doing it right" and failure as "what we did was wrong"—both of which he calls shallow. Against that resistance, he lays out five specific reasons to force the ritual anyway, starting with consolidating fragmented lessons before they're forgotten, teaching people who weren't on the project, and preventing unresolved resentments from festering.

Why It Matters

Most organizations already believe, in principle, that they should learn from what they just did. The postmortem's contribution is procedural, not philosophical: it converts a belief everyone holds abstractly into a forced, recurring, time-boxed practice that survives the universal desire to skip it. That distinction—between agreeing self-assessment matters and actually building a mechanism that makes it happen on a schedule regardless of mood—is the transferable lesson for any team that wants institutional memory rather than individual, fading memory.